BOOK EXCERPT
In The Great Healing – Five Compassions That Can Save Our World, activist, author, screenwriter and feature filmmaker Stephen Erickson identifies our Arch-Villain, the main cause of global warming which now threatens to bring about the end of our Anthropocene Epoch — of us and virtually every multicellular life form. He also explores our singular solution.
Five Compassions are our path to that solution.
Another Compassionate Action Is: Advocate
Albert Einstein said, “Our task must be to widen our circle of compassion, to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
When you make others aware of your choices and influence theirs, your impact magnifies. Let your loved ones know, and your extended family. Tell your friends and colleagues. Inform your social networks. Share insights on what to purchase and where to buy it. Share recipes.
Today one hundred people adjust, tomorrow a hundred more, soon it is one thousand, one hundred thousand. One day it is one million, another million — and then shifts happen.
Here is an example of what can happen when just a few people get together and share their concerns. Here is how a few parents became the catalyst for a shift that has improved the lives of hundreds of thousands of children…
What kinds of lunches are served to your children in their school cafeteria? In most schools, the meals, snacks and beverages provided will be consistently sugar rich, calorie rich and nutritionally barren. Most school cafeterias primarily offer the processed foods and sweetened beverages delivered by the fast food national chain suppliers their school district has contracted with. Studies show that this food places our children — these young students with their developing brains and bodies — at risk of obesity, pre-diabetes and a range of related health problems; that eating this food makes them more aggressive, causes them to have more difficulty concentrating, and they don’t perform as well academically.
A few parents in Los Angeles shared their concerns with one another about the nutritional quality of the school lunches served each day to their children. They then enlisted the help of a humane organization, Compassion Over Killing, who began working with the city council to draft a Meatless Mondays Resolution. Councilmember Ed P. Reyes, who became an advocate and co-author of the resolution, said, “When dealing with issues as big as global warming, or even as personal as battling diabetes or obesity, it’s easy to feel helpless, like there’s little we can do to make a difference. But the small changes we make every day can have a tremendous impact. That’s why this Meatless Monday resolution is important. Together we can better our health, the animals and the environment, one plate at a time.” For co-author, Councilmember Jan Perry, “Meatless Monday is about raising awareness… a call for all of us to think about our environment, the food we eat, and how we can be a part of making ourselves healthier.”1
The city council passed their resolution.
The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) then developed an implementation plan and Mondays are now meatless in all cafeterias throughout the second largest school district in the country, which serves 700,000 lunches each school day.
The story gets better. The Humane Society then became involved to make sure the meatless meals were ones the students would find tasty, enjoyable and fun, “Instead of the standard fare of chicken nuggets and pepperoni pizza found on so many school menus, schools that have been through our training are serving Baja Bean Tacos, Amazing Lo Mein, and Protein Packed Two Bean Chili.”2 When Meatless Monday became a reality in the schools, the students embraced the menu changes. Soon, throughout the week healthier menu selections emphasizing fruits, vegetables and vegetarian options were added. Student academic performance measurably improved.
This single program in Los Angeles spares 4.6 million animals each year from factory farms. And the story is only beginning…
The school district, inspired in part by an eighth grader, Lila Copeland, who founded the nonprofit Earth Peace Foundation, began a pilot program offering a vegan school lunch option. It was immediately successful, with 13% of the students, including many non-vegan students, choosing the option. The Food Services Division expanded the vegan option into 35 schools and plans to offer a vegan lunch option at all schools. “We are thrilled with the reaction to the pilot and that most of the kids trying the new lunches were not vegan or vegetarian,” says Copeland. “We think more kids will now choose a healthy lunch option.”3
On April 18, 2017, the LAUSD Board of Education, now attuned to this issue, passed a resolution ending McDonald’s McTeacher’s Nights. Hannah Freedberg of Corporate Accountability describes what a “McTeacher’s Night” is: “McDonald’s has teachers work behind the counter of a local McDonald’s, serving burgers, fries, and soda to their students and students’ families. While McDonald’s gets the kind of marketing money cannot buy, schools are left with a paltry percentage of the proceeds from the night (sometimes as little as 10 percent) — and impressionable children come away with the idea that their trusted teachers endorse McDonald’s food.”4 While the teachers volunteer working behind the counter, McDonalds can cut employee hours saving that coin as well. No longer. Not at L.A. Unified.
And better: In 2018, the California Federation of Teachers, representing over 120,000 education professionals, passed a resolution to “oppose and reject” McTeacher’s Nights.5 McTeacher’s Nights will be history in California. And other school districts around the country are taking note.
And even better: On February 7, 2019, the American Federation of Teachers passed a resolution directing more than 1.7 million educators nationwide to reject junk food fundraisers including McTeacher’s Nights.6 50 teachers unions representing 3 million teachers have now taken a stand against McTeacher’s nights.7
The Los Angeles Unified School District now provides healthy lunch options to 700,000 children — meals that improve their health and their academic performance.
You want that for your child.
The story gets better still. Mercy For Animals has a food policy program, working with schools and other institutions, which is succeeding in switching 26 million meals a year to plant-based.8
For Joel Fuhrman, M.D., “It’s crazy that almost half of all entrees served in elementary schools include processed meats (such as hot dogs, ham, sausage, luncheon meats, corned beef, and canned meats), yet World Health Organization has declared that processed meats are a class 1 carcinogen in humans, placing them in the same category as asbestos and cigarette smoking.”9 Citing numerous research studies, including one that concluded that based on data from 12,000 students in the 5th to 8th grades, students who ate processed and fast-foods performed worse in math, reading and science, Dr. Fuhrman writes, “The junk food diets that our children regularly eat directly affect their academic performance. And yet, fast food is being served to kids at breakfast, lunch, and dinner all around the country. It is high time that this information becomes public knowledge so that we can change these accepted ‘normal’ patterns.”10
Beginning in September 2018, all schools in California’s Santa Barbara Unified School District stopped serving processed meats, including bacon, deli meat, pepperoni and hot dogs. A popular plant-based option is already available at each meal. Of the two million meals the district serves its students each year, half of all meals are now entirely plant based. For Nancy Weiss, the district’s Food Service Director, “It’s the right thing to do to ensure that our students are getting the highest-quality food. There’s no room for carcinogens on the lunch line.”11
On March 11, 2019, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that all New York City public schools will have Meatless Mondays beginning with the 2019-2020 school year.12
An insightful article revealing successful initiatives in school districts nationwide and how important this is for children is, 10 Revolutionary Ways School Lunch in America is Improving (Plus Healthy School Lunch Ideas).13
When people communicate with one another and voice their concern shifts like this happen.
When an outcry against veal in the 1980’s led by the Humane Farming Association’s National Veal Boycott raised public awareness nationwide of exactly what a veal calf is, and how it is raised, the demand for veal plummeted from 3.4 million calves a year to 500,000 in 2017.14 Italian restaurants that cater to an older or traditionally cultured clientele can find themselves trapped. Many of these customers expect, order and enjoy veal dishes on their menus. You can support these businesses while helping them become more compassionate. If you enjoy eating at one of these restaurants continue to do so — just no longer order veal anything.
In making even gradual modest shifts in what you eat, you are now living more compassionately.
By choosing this compassionate path, please celebrate what you’ve achieved.
You, by adding to the demand for healthy, tastier, higher quality organic produce and humanely raised animals and animal products, enable farms like Cottonwood Creek Farms to sell every egg, every animal they raise, and they are at their capacity. You enable farmers like Lou Preston at Preston Vineyards to sit down at the end of a long work day and savor a glass of his wine while reflecting on the demand for all the healthy, exquisitely tasteful products of his land, the eggs, vegetables, his breads and olive oils. This opens the door for new entrepreneurs to engage in this style of farming. Imagine tens of thousands of new vibrant small family farms appearing to meet the rising demand for humanely raised meat and dairy.
When this modern version of traditional farming is scaled, by multiplying the number of farms, not the density of animals, it will grow to meet the substantial but decreasing consumer demand for meat and dairy products.
You are bringing an end to factory farming.
You are helping the return of small farms, of a modern day Grange, of the local foods movement, of food-to-table, and the creation of 500,000+ new farmers and farming jobs over the next decade, all of which will result in the rebirth and revitalization of rural towns and communities.
The Voiceless Animal Cruelty Index ranks the animal welfare performance of the 50 largest livestock producing countries in the world. The United States ranks second highest in animal cruelty.15 We, as a country, should be ashamed of that. You are helping to change that.
As Susan Sontag observed in Regarding the Pain of Others, “Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.”16 Compassionate activism is compassion flourishing. It is compassion realized. Get active. Engage your compassionate activism.
You are now part of what will become one of the essential social justice movements in our nation’s history.
You are now a seminal participant speeding our country’s evolution into a more compassionate nation.
Consumer demand for organic produce has now grown to a 15 billion dollar a year business. Many farmers are adjusting their crops and practices to accommodate this demand. Consumer awareness and preference will shift animal production away from huge factory farming operations, which will not be able to adapt and change. Factory farm operations will become untenable.
Realizing that your reach and influence now extends beyond your community and out into the world can be invigorating. There is new-found power with this as one purpose in your purposeful life.
You are helping to manifest the Great Healing.
Jane Goodall has famously said, “You cannot get through a single day without having an impact on the world around you. What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.”
Cynthia Millburn, in her article How Showing Compassion for Animals Can Improve Your Health,17 writes that, “Compassion can help broaden our perspective and redirect our focus away from ourselves. Compassion might boost our sense of well-being by increasing a feeling of connection to others. Social connection helps us recover from illness more quickly, strengthens our immune system and even increases our lifespan.”
I love bonus benefits and added value. Demonstrating compassion for animals has yet another nice ride-along: We can find ourselves living with even greater compassion toward, patience with, and understanding of, one another.
Here is one more benefit, perhaps the most important of all, and one Joanna Macy describes beautifully in World as Lover, World as Self:
“Not only seers and shamans, but scientists also, have revealed the capacity of the human spirit to know and be informed by its connectedness with other life forms. The will to do this is a gift and saving grace. For human mentality presents a distinctive feature: the capacity for choice. To be human, to win a human birth, brings the option of changing one’s karma. That is why, in Buddhist teachings a human life is considered so rare and priceless a privilege. And that is why Buddhist practice, in venerable traditions, begins with meditation on the precious opportunity that a human experience provides: the opportunity to wake up for the sake of all beings.”18
Compassion for animals is one compassion we need to embrace and live to have a chance of achieving The Great Healing.
There are four more.
Excerpt from The Great Healing – Five Compassions That Can Save Our World by Stephen Erickson. Published by TGH Press, August 2019. Copyright © 2019 by Stephen Erickson. All rights reserved.
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Stephen Erickson is an author and a dedicated environmental and animal activist for 30 years. He is also a screenwriter, feature filmmaker, and former Home Entertainment executive. He lives in Los Angeles and has 3 children. The Great Healing – Five Compassions That Can Save Our World is his first book.
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1 Compassion Over Killing, Compassion Over Killing Meatless Mondays Program, 2013, http://cok.net/camp/meatless-mondays/
2 The Humane Society of the United States: http://www.humanesociety.org/
3 Emily Monaco, Vegan School Lunches Could Become the Norm in Nation’s 2nd Largest School District Next Year, Organic Authority, Dec. 6, 2017 http://www.organicauthority.com/vegan-school-lunches-could-become-the-norm-in-californias-largest-school-district-next-year/
4 Hannah Freedberg, Victory! The Nation’s Second-largest School District Ends McTeacher’s Nights, Corporate Accountability, Apr. 26, 2017 https://www.corporateaccountability.org/blog/victory-the-nations-second-largest-school-district-end-mcteachers-nights/
5 Corporate Accountability, About Our Food Campaign, 2018, https://www.corporateaccountability.org/food/about-our-food-campaign/
6 Julia Gabbert, Victory! National Teachers Union Takes Historic Stand to Reject McTeacher’s Nights, Corporate Accountability Spotlight, 2019 Issue 1, https://www.corporateaccountability.org/food/about-our-food-campaign/
7 Alexa Kaczmarski, No More Predatory Marketing in Our Schools, Corporate Accountability, Oct. 10, 2018, https://www.corporateaccountability.org/blog/no-more-predatory-marketing-in-our-schools/
8 Mercy For Animals, Compassionate Living, Spring, 2018 http://www.mercyforanimals.org/home2
9 Joel Fuhrman, M.D., Fast Food Genocide, New York, New York: Harper Collins, 2017 pg. 39.
10 Joel Fuhrman, M.D., Fast Food Genocide, New York, New York: Harper Collins, 2017 pgs. 60-62.
11 Anna Starostinetskaya, California School District Bans Processed Meat, VegNews, Sep. 25, 2018 https://vegnews.com/2018/9/california-school-district-bans-processed-meat
12 Doug Criss, New York Public Schools to Have ‘Meatless Mondays’ Starting this Fall, CNN, Mar. 12, 2019, https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/12/us/new-york-meatless-mondays-trnd/index.html
13 Food Revolution, 10 Revolutionary Ways School Lunch in America is Improving (Plus Healthy School Lunch Ideas), Food Revolution, Aug. 31, 2018, https://foodrevolution.org/blog/healthy-school-lunch-ideas/
14 The Humane Farming Association, HFS’s National Veal Boycott – Campaign Decimating Sales, 2018, https://www.hfa.org/vealBoycott.html
15 The Voiceless Animal Cruelty Index, Voiceless.org.au, https://vaci.voiceless.org.au/
16 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, New York, New York: Picador, 2003
17 Cynthia Millburn, How Showing Compassion for Animals Can Improve Your Health, One Green Planet, May 6, 2017 http://www.onegreenplanet.org/animalsandnature/how-showing-compassion-for-animals-can-improve-your-health/
18 Reprinted from World As Lover, World As Self (1991, 2007) by Joanna Macy with permission of Parallax Press, Berkeley, California, www.parallax.org pg. 41