Effects of meat

Are you bullish? Chicken? Or pig-headed?

If you eat lots of beef, milk and dairy foods, you become like a cow. Eating pork everyday makes you like a pig. And chicken and eggs makes you, well, chicken.

I first heard this idea about the effects of meat from my tailor many years ago. While measuring me for a suit, he remarked that that I ate a lot of pork because I was like a pig (even though I was not very fat).

I thought his remark was strange but shrugged it off. It was only many years later, after I studied marcobiotics and the effects of food, particularly the effects of meat, that I understood what my tailor meant. And he wasn't even a student of macrobiotics.

It takes imagination to see the effects of meat.

And it helps to be vegetarian, or almost vegetarian. Because if you are eating plenty of meat, it’s harder to recognize the animal quality in yourself and others.

Effects of meat - beef vs pork vs chicken....

They behave differently too. Beef eaters and milk drinkers tend to be slow, preferring to stay in their position. Those who eat chicken and eggs constantly move about. They cannot keep still.

Macrobiotic teacher Adelbert Nelissen relates how, when he taught in Finland, everyone sat still. Their faces were expressionless and he did not know whether they liked or disliked his lecture.

In Israel, people who would get up midway during the lecture and move to a different seat. They kept changing places. Adelbert did not understand this until he found out that the Jews eat lots of eggs.

Edward Esko, another macrobiotic teacher, notes that it used to be easy to govern America. All the country needed was a charismatic leader, and the population would follow like a herd of cattle.

Today, Americans are eating more chicken than beef. And the nation has become more argumentative, more “pecky”.

Michio Kushi observes that the Japanese travel in large groups like school of fish.

Sceptics and smart alecks who hear this often ask: In that case, shouldn’t we eat humans in order to be more like humans?

Effects of meat - like meat eating animals

No. Because when we eat meat, we also become like those animals that eat meat. We look like them, we behave like them.

Young people today have ears that are smaller, more pointed and higher up the head, like that of the character Dr Spock in Star Trek. This is like the ears of lions and tigers. Older people have bigger, more rounded ears positioned between the eyes and the lips.

Westerners, with their longer history of meat eating, tend to have narrower, more pointed tongues. In the east, people have more rounded tongues.

And there are rare cases of people with canine teeth that are sharper, more pointed than usual. This suggest many generations of heavy meat eating in the family.

Effect of meat on behavior

In terms of behavior, it is well known that heavy meat eaters are more aggressive.

Michio Kushi points out in One Peaceful World that wars were mostly started by meat eaters who set out to conquer vegetarians. For example, the Chinese were often attacked by barbarians from the north. Indians, too, were often attacked by conquerors from Persia and the Middle East.

And most major battles were fought within Europe, which is more of a meat eating region.

Effects of meat - violence

If meat eating leads to aggression and war, then why there isn’t a world war right now, since people everywhere are eating more meat than ever?

In a sense, there is. Violence has become widespread – in small neighborhoods, at the workplace and even within families.There is often violence even in “peace” movements.

As I write this (on 6 November 1995), Israel is preparing for the funeral of its Prime Minister, Yishak Rabin, who was assassinated at a peace rally!

For there to be true, lasting peace in the world, we have to stop behaving like animals.The way to do this is to stop taking on their energy, to stop eating animals.