chapter ten THE DILEMMA OF WORK

“I am increasingly convinced that one of humankind’s most grievous sins is our anthropocentrism. By cutting ourselves off from the rest of creation, we are left bereft of awe and wonder and therefore of reverence and gratitude. We violate our very beings, and we have nothing but trivia to teach our young.”1 - Matthew Fox

“I think the person who takes a job in order to live.that is to say, for the money.has turned himself into a slave.” - Joseph Campbell

“When a human kills an animal for food, he is neglecting his own hunger for justice. Man prays for mercy, but is unwilling to extend it to others.” - Isaac Bashevis Singer

Doing the Dirty Work

It is not only animals who suffer in factory farms and slaughterhouses. The people who must do the awful work of confining, mutilating, and killing farmed animals also suffer, as do their families. When we buy or order animal foods we directly instigate human violence, though it may be shielded from our physical view. As Emerson wryly pointed out, “You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.”2 Instigating and eating violence, we sow the seeds of further violence, both in our actions and speech toward others and in others’ actions and speech toward us. Perhaps “bad things happen to good people” because the good people are blindly complicit and have done bad things to others to which they are unfortunately indoctrinated to be oblivious.

Not a lot is written about the closed, cruel world of slaughterhouse life and of factory farm workers, but the research and writing that has been done is both disturbing and horrifying. Slaughterhouse: The Shocking Story of Greed, Neglect, and Inhumane Treatment Inside the U.S. Meat Industry, the result of Gail Eisnitz’s interviews with slaughterhouse workers, is an excellent resource, as is All Heaven in a Rage, edited by Laura Moretti. Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser and The Food Revolution by John Robbins also discuss the subject. Video documentaries such as Auction Block, Hope for the Hopeless, Meet Your Meat, Seven Minutes of Reality, A Day in the Life of a Massachusetts Slaughterhouse, A Cow at My Table, North Carolina Pig Farm Investigation, Victims of Indulgence, Peaceable Kingdom, Mad Cowboy, and others listed in the resources section provide powerful glimpses into some of the worst ongoing nightmares on this planet.

According to Laura Moretti, it’s not possible for us to grasp with our imagination the realities of slaughterhouse carnage:

I realize it is incredibly easy to imagine the inside of a slaughterhouse and not be so affected by it.for the human grasp is limited. It can’t hear the sound of a large animal pushed against its will into a kill chute, its frantic struggles, the reverberating pop of the captive-bolt pistol, the heavy thump to the floor, the kicking against metal, the groaning of the dying, the screech of pulleys and chains, the hydraulic release hiss, the splashing blood, like water from a garden hose hitting cement. It can’t smell the stench of manure and sweat, blood and putrefying flesh and organs. It can’t feel the absolute fear, panic, terror. It can’t know the absolute will of each and every life to desperately, frantically, vainly hold on.

The human mind can’t imagine the inside of a slaughterhouse; it is something one can only experience.and it is utterly shocking.3

It is well documented that slaughterhouse and factory farm work is ugly and terribly stressful, emotionally, mentally, and physically. Slaughterhouse workers, perhaps the lowest caste in the U.S., have the highest rate of work-related injuries and one of the highest turnover rates.4 Statistics aside, the mind-bending and heart-hardening actions that these brothers and sisters must do so that we can satisfy our desire for animal foods are excruciating to contemplate. With our dollars we communicate our desires to a vast and impersonal system that will fulfill those desires as cheaply as possible. This means high-speed production and a perverse philosophy of mechanization toward the animals who are imprisoned, “harvested,” and disassembled. They are no longer sentient creatures but are categorized with fruits, machines, and other nonsentient things as unfeeling commodities, summed up by this advice to pork producers in a hog-farming journal, “Forget the pig is an animal. Treat him just like a machine in a factory.”5 Over and over, in the literature of animal “agriculture” and slaughterhouses, feedlots, stockyards, and transport operations, one hears workers and management repeating this, like a mantra: Don’t think of it as an animal. Forget it has any feelings. And the workers use every type of denigrating language and categorization possible, referring to the chickens, pigs, turkeys, cows, and other animals they kill and mutilate as stupid, stubborn, ornery, or quite simply as “motherfuckers.”6

What is the effect of all this upon the health and sensibilities of these workers? And upon their wives, husbands, and children? Violence, cruelty, and insensitivity breed more of the same; they are vibrations that affect consciousness, and it is not just the workers, but their families, friends, and ultimately all of us who are affected by what we force them to do by our market demand. As one former pig sticker (a slaughterhouse worker who stabbed pigs in the neck to bleed them to death) said, “You get just as sadistic as the company itself. When I was sticking down there, I was a sadistic person.”7 Though slaughterhouse workers are not literally forced to take these jobs, they are often desperate for the money and cannot find other work; hence they keep the flesh, blood, and body parts of enslaved animals flowing through the money channels into the millions of deadening centers throughout our society.

We should never imagine that animals go peacefully to their deaths. They know what is coming, and can smell, hear, and often even see others being killed before them. They are filled with terror, and very often with intense and overwhelming pain as they are boiled, skinned, or dismembered while still conscious. Since the workers at the Iowa Beef Processing cattle slaughtering plant in Pasco, Washington, took undercover videos in 2001 of cows still fully conscious, blinking, kicking, looking around, and having their skin torn off by workers forced to keep the line moving, it is finally somewhat more generally known - beyond the workers and management at these operations, who have always known - that animal suffering is vast, intense, and systematically ignored for the benefit of profits and efficiency. This interview with a livestock trucker from A Cow at My Table is instructive.

Like this bull I had last year . . . he was just trying his hardest to get off the trailer. He had been prodded to death by three or four drivers . . . I just said, “Why don’t you shoot the damn thing? What’s going on? What about this Code of Ethics?” This one guy said, “I never shoot. Why would I shoot a cow that can come off and there’s still good meat there?” When I first started, I talked to another trucker about downers. He said, “You may as well not get upset. It’s been going on for many years. . . . You’ll get kind of bitter like I did. You just don’t think about the animals. You just think that they aren’t feeling or whatever.”8

The vast majority of us who eat animal foods have never lifted the curtain and taken a good, deep look at the horrendous brutality that animals must endure for our tables, nor do we wish to do so. We are rightly afraid that if we do, we won’t be able to eat our usual meals with a clear conscience, and knowing that, the industry keeps the conditions on slaughterhouses, factory farms, and fishing operations well hidden, lobbying for laws to make it a crime for anyone to take pictures or video footage of the conditions in these places. Seeing the ugly truth behind the curtain helps to rid us of the illusion that our culture is based on kindness or caring. We see clearly the hidden dark side of our society, the vicious and unrelenting cruelty that permeates the foundations of our culture, and we begin to understand. It is our ongoing refusal to look behind the curtain that keeps the cultural chains and illusions firmly in place.

To meet the enormous demand for animal flesh, the huge transnational corporations that now dominate the meat, dairy, and egg industries, like Cargill, ConAgra, Tyson, Perdue, Swift, and Smithfield, construct ever larger animal prisons and slaughterhouses. At the slaughterhouses, some of which run twenty-four hours a day, living animals are forced into a line and disassembled, and the various parts of their bodies come out at the other end, all shipped for profit to a diversity of destinations: flesh and organs for human food; skin for clothing, jewelry, furniture, and accessories; blood for fertilizer; bones and connective tissue for beauty creams, soaps, glue, and gelatin; some organs for the pharmaceutical industry; offal and scraps for the renderer to be cooked and made into livestock feed, pet food, and other products. The faster the disassembly lines run, the more profit is made in a given time. Workers are constantly pushed to work much more rapidly than they should, and this causes improper stunning of the animals and increased cruelty and danger because many animals are skinned, scalded, and disemboweled while still conscious and struggling.

Most people do not realize that, as discussed earlier, the animals are not actually killed before their throats are cut. Their hearts must be pumping when the large arteries in their necks are cut, so that the blood is actively pumped out of their bodies; otherwise the flesh is soggy with too much blood. Therefore, they are simply stunned, not killed, prior to being bled. If they are properly stunned, the animals bleed to death. How long does it take to bleed to death? From twenty seconds to several minutes, which could feel like an awfully long time, especially if an animal is not properly stunned, which occurs all too often.

The stunning methods used today are crude and extremely cruel, because they frequently do not work. Cows are typically stunned with a captive bolt pistol that slams a rod of steel through their foreheads and into their brains as they enter the line. There is only one stun man, and if the cow suddenly moves, the bolt may miss its mark, sometimes hitting the animal in the eye. There is often no time to fire a second bolt, because to slow down the line or to hire a second stun man as a backup would cost money. So some cows, still conscious, move down the line where other workers have to bleed, skin, and dismember them. These workers cannot send the cows back to get stunned, so their job is made even more horrifying, and extremely dangerous as well, by the conscious animals’ pain and fear. Many worker injuries are caused by desperately kicking animals on the line. Though it was quickly hushed up, when workers at the cattle-slaughtering operation in Washington took their own undercover videos, The Washington Post investigated.

It takes twenty-five minutes to turn a live steer into steak at the modern slaughterhouse where Roman Moreno works. For twenty years, his post was “second-legger,” a job that entails cutting hocks off carcasses as they whirl past at a rate of 309 an hour.

The cattle were supposed to be dead before they got to Moreno. But too often they weren’t.

“They blink. They make noises,” he said softly. “The head moves, the eyes are wide and looking around.”

Still Moreno would cut. On bad days, he says, dozens of animals reached his station clearly alive and conscious. Some would survive as far as the tail cutter, the belly ripper, the hide puller. “They die,” said Moreno, “piece by piece.”9

Pigs are stunned either by a bolt to the brain or by electric shocks on their backs. Again, there is only one stunner. When shocking is the chosen method, management often keeps the voltage lower than it should be for proper stunning, since more flesh (“meat”) may be damaged if higher voltages are used. Thus, the “stickers” who cut the throats of stunned pigs find themselves every day or every night facing live, desperate animals. Sooner or later many of the workers get severely cut by the long, razor-sharp knives they use against the struggling animals.

Slaughterhouse workers must shackle chickens and turkeys by the ankles and hang them upside down on a conveyor line that passes their heads through a “bath” of electrically charged brine. The shock, which is extremely painful, immobilizes the birds but does not stun them, so they are fully conscious when they hit the next station on the conveyor: the knives, wielded by workers or by a machine, that cut their throat arteries. Often the birds manage to pull away from the water and may then, in their panicked flailing, miss the knives, so they are still conscious when they hit the next station on the fast-moving disassembly line: the huge vat of filthy water where their bodies are boiled, dead or alive.

Due to slaughter industry deregulation over the last fifteen years, there is virtually no government oversight to protect animals used for food. The consequent climate of speed and inhumane treatment harms workers as well, making “meat packing . . . the most dangerous factory job in America.”10 According to worker affidavits, for example, workers are not allowed to leave the line for many hours and therefore are sometimes forced to urinate or defecate on the slaughter plant floor or in their clothes.11 Eisnitz writes,

Over the course of my investigation I’d heard about workers being crushed by cattle; burned by chemicals; stabbed; breaking bones; and suffering miscarriages and fainting from the heat, fast pace, and fumes. . . . As line speeds have as much as tripled in the last fifteen years, cumulative trauma disorders have increased nearly 1,000 percent.12

Workers are our human brothers and sisters who administer corporate cruelty around the clock. Profits are prioritized rather than “humane killing”.if such a thing exists. The Humane Slaughter Act, for example, which carries no penalties and has proven to be completely inadequate to protect farmed animals, doesn’t even include chickens, turkeys, fish, and other non-mammalian animals. It does nothing to prohibit the many cruelties at slaughter plants, such as dragging non-ambulatory pigs and cows by the legs or necks, cutting and tearing animals who arrive frozen to the sides of the livestock trucks, and hanging conscious and panicked animals on the line to endure being skinned and boiled alive. Since it’s very conservatively estimated that at least five to ten percent of the land animals slaughtered are not stunned properly, a staggering 500 million to one billion mammals and birds per year are skinned, dismembered, or boiled while still conscious.in the United States alone.13 This is a terrible load for workers to bear emotionally, on top of the already grisly work they do. It’s a load not just for the workers, however. We are all responsible. (In fact, in courts of law, the one who wills the death of another and pays an assassin is more heavily accountable than the assassin.)

Of course, it’s not just at slaughter plants that animals suffer at our hands. The workers on the factory farms where animals are imprisoned for their eggs, flesh, and milk enforce an almost unbelievably cruel system. In fact, if we took our most celebrated scientists and asked them to devise a system, simply as a scientific experiment, that maximized terror, pain, cruelty, and misery, it seems they would be hard pressed to devise anything more effective than the one that has evolved through corporate domination of the lucrative business of supplying the body parts of hapless animals to millions of people who have been indoctrinated to eat them.

On factory farms, workers have to imprison animals in unimaginably toxic and restrictive environments, and mutilate them as well, without anesthesia. The Animal Welfare Act, which protects dogs, cats, parakeets, and other animals from abuse by humans, specifically omits all animals who are raised for food from its provisions. Any practice, no matter how cruel, that is considered standard in the industry is allowed, so chopping off the beaks and bills of chickens and ducks, for example, or starving chickens to force a molt, or mutilating, shocking, confining, and crowding animals is permitted by the government because these have become accepted industry practices. Baby pigs scream loudly with the torment of having their ears “notched” for identification, patterns of flesh cut away, and their tails “docked” (cut off) and teeth painfully clipped, so that under the stress of overcrowding they cannot bite each other’s tails or damage each other. It is also common practice to break the pigs’ noses, according to the logic that this makes overcrowded boars less likely to fight! Calves endure the agony of being branded with hot irons and of having their young horns either cut off, which often causes profuse bleeding, or burned off with acid or hot irons. Sheep undergo the excruciating process of mulesing.having the flesh around their rumps cut away to reduce fly infestation.and the shearing itself is often a brutal process, resulting in painful cuts and rough handling that sometimes kills the sheep. They are, of course, sent to slaughter anyway when their wool production declines. Young male sheep, pigs, and cows are virtually always castrated as well, and anesthesia is never used as they are cut and their testicles ripped out.

Geese and ducks are debilled as chickens are debeaked, and are force-fed to produce foie gras, an expensive delicacy that is the product of an unnaturally enlarged and traumatized liver. It is often called the cruelest food in the world, and for this reason its production has been outlawed in South Africa, Israel, and seven European countries.14 The bird’s liver is forcibly enlarged by inserting a metal pipe down the throat and pressure-driving much larger quantities of corn into his or her stomach than it can manage. This often causes “blowout” or rupture of the animal’s internal organs. When the duck or goose’s liver is inflated to ten times its natural size, he or she is killed so the diseased liver can be eaten.

It is hard for us to imagine the trauma factory farm workers inflict, and on an enormous scale, with billions of creatures involved. Most of us have had the experience of receiving pain at the hands of doctors or dentists, yet the hands that administer the pain are, we feel, ultimately well-intentioned. The fact that they are doing these painful things for our own good makes the infliction of pain tolerable and gives it a meaningful context. To imagine those same hands performing painful procedures on our bodies with the sense that these hands do not care at all about our good, but are causing us pain simply because it profits them or they enjoy doing so, is horrifying in the extreme, particularly if we are powerless in their hands. When we put animals in this position by purchasing their flesh, fluids and eggs, we must bear responsibility not only for their suffering but for the hardening of the human hands and hearts that inflict this suffering.

Factory farms, like slaughterhouses, are brutal places, concentration camps for animals, in which all manner of atrocities are inflicted on the defenseless inmates. The conditions in these places bring out the worst in people. Undercover video footage shows that workers routinely terrorize animals with kicks, shocks, shouts, stabs, clubbings, and draggings. They have been documented playing sadistic games like forcing dry ice into the rectums of live chickens to make the birds explode, drop-kicking them like footballs, blowing them up with firecrackers, or squeezing birds with such force they spray feces over other birds.15 People who are not naturally sadistic may become that way, and people who have been abused as children and perversely enjoy causing pain to others may well be attracted to working in slaughterhouses and factory farms, where there is an unending flow of defenseless victims they can torture, beat, and abuse. For example, some slaughterhouse and stockyard workers use extremely painful electric prods to keep disabled or downed cows, pigs, and sheep moving into the disassembly line. Being touched by an electric prod is not like getting a mildly disturbing shock. The animals experience thousands of powerful volts of pure pain, more comparable to being stabbed with a knife. Workers have been seen and even videotaped sticking these prods into animals’ mouths and anuses, and stabbing animals with knives in their anuses and eyes. On pig factory farms, it is standard practice to weed out pigs whose size and weight are below the standards that make it profitable to continue feeding them. Workers kill these animals on the spot using a method known in the industry as “PACing.” PAC stands for “Pound Against Concrete”; the workers grab the pigs by their hind feet and slam them on the floor.

In Slaughterhouse, Gail Eisnitz relates dozens of recorded conversations with signed affidavits from slaughterhouse workers describing the routine cruelties they perform when forced by high line speeds to “process” animals still conscious and active after they’ve passed the stunner. According to one sticker,

Down in the blood pit they say that the smell of blood makes you aggressive. And it does. You get an attitude that if that hog kicks at me, I’m going to get even. You’re already going to kill the hog, but that’s not enough. It has to suffer. When you get a live one you think, Oh good, I’m going to beat this sucker.

Another thing that happens is that you don’t care about people’s pain anymore. I used to be very sensitive about people’s problems - willing to listen. After a while, you become desensitized. . . .

It’s the same thing with an animal who pisses you off, except it is in the stick pit, you are going to kill it. Only you don’t just kill it, you go in hard, push hard, blow the windpipe, make it drown in its own blood. Split its nose. A live hog would be running around the pit. It would just be looking up at me and I’d be sticking, and I would just take my knife and - eerk.cut its eye out while it was just sitting there. And this hog would just scream.16

This worker, and others, told even more cruel and gruesome stories, but ended by saying, “It’s not anything anyone should be proud of. It happened. It was my way of taking out frustration.”

Another worker describes the psychological hardening that inevitably occurs.

The worst thing, worse than the physical danger, is the emotional toll. If you work in that stick pit for any period of time, you develop an attitude that lets you kill things but doesn’t let you care. You may look a hog in the eye that’s walking around down in the blood pit with you and think, God, that really isn’t a bad-looking animal. You may want to pet it. Pigs down on the kill floor have come up and nuzzled me like a puppy. Two minutes later I had to kill them.beat them to death with a pipe. I can’t care. . . . I was killing things. My attitude was, it’s only an animal. Kill it. Sometimes I’d look at people that way, too. I’ve had ideas of hanging my foreman upside down on the line and sticking him.17

How do people who spend their days PACing animals, electro prodding them, bashing their noses, killing, beating, stabbing, and cutting them, treat their girlfriends, spouses, and children? How do these people cope with the violence they endure around them and administer to weaker and defenseless creatures?

The Living Roots of Our Work

The herding culture into which we’ve all been born forces boys to learn to be tough and to disconnect from their natural feelings of gentleness and compassion. The work of herding that evolved between four thousand and ten thousand years ago is the work of harsh and relentless domination of powerful animals. It requires men capable of performing cruel mutilation, confinement, manipulation, and killing.both of the herd animals, who have become valuable commodities, and of other, potentially predatory animals. Besides this, herders are engaged against other herders for precious land and water for their animals. By owning animals, the old emergent herding cultures, which form the historic foundation and the living core of our culture today, distanced themselves from the natural world and entered into an adversarial relationship with it. These ancient cultures have so much power over us today because we engage in the same core behavior: confining animals and eating foods sourced from these animals.

Although we have perhaps made some progress in our treatment of each other over the centuries, our continuing practice of enslaving, torturing, and killing animals has always worked against our being able to make substantial progress. Though we decry the enslaving, exploiting, torturing, and killing of other people in certain circumstances, on a larger scale we still rationalize and justify it, and it remains undeniably widespread today.

In Eternal Treblinka, historian Charles Patterson shows how the parallels between the ways that the old herding cultures abused both animals and humans have continued into the present day (see Chapter 2). Focusing on the rational, democratic culture that became Nazi Germany, he points out the startling similarities between our domination of other people and our domination of animals for food. Adolf Hitler kept on his office wall a framed picture of Henry Ford, the consummate capitalist and racist supremacist whose assembly lines inspired Hitler’s mass extermination mechanism. Ford, in turn, got his assembly line idea from the disassembly lines in the old Chicago slaughterhouses. In Nazi Germany, Jews, communists, homosexuals, the mentally ill, and other “vermin” were treated as food animals, transported from stockyards on cattle cars to concentration camps like modern factory farms, where they might be vivisected before being sent into the same sort of final tunnel that awaits every animal slaughtered for food. Ironically, the term “holocaust” originally meant “whole burning” and referred to the killing and sacrificing of animals as burnt offerings.

The same underlying dynamic is still in place today. We universally condemn supremacism, elitism, and exclusivism for destroying peace and social justice, yet we unquestioningly and even proudly adopt precisely these attitudes when it comes to animals. The lesson is plain: when we harden ourselves to the suffering we inflict on animals in our own interest, and justify it by proclaiming our superiority or special-ness, it is but a short and unavoidable step to justifying and inflicting the same kind of suffering on other humans in our own interest while likewise proclaiming our supremacy or specialness. The unremitting conflict and oppression of history are inevitable by-products of confining and killing animals for food, as is the male role model of macho toughness that is required of both the professional animal killer (herder) and the soldier. If we desire to eat animal foods, this suffering is the price we must pay.

Work as Joy, Work as Burden

The progressive voices of the left, while often criticizing conventional science and religion, and even questioning our rampant exploitation of nature and domination of the feminine, have so far almost completely failed to see the connection between the core ritual of our herding culture - eating animals - and our destructive values and institutions. Whether we’re of the right, left, or in between, we all agree to ignore this basic causal root of our problems. For example, in his book The Reinvention of Work, progressive theologian and priest Matthew Fox probes deeply into the values and beliefs that underlie our experience of work and our attitudes toward it. Drawing upon a wide range of scriptures including the Bible, the Bhagavad-Gita, and the Tao Te Ching, as well as writings by illumined poets and saints like Kabir, Rumi, Rilke, St. Francis, Hildegard of Bingen, Meister Eckhart and the more modern voices of Thomas Berry, E. F. Schumacher, and Theodore Roszak, he passionately argues that work is fundamentally spiritual. If we look around us, he says, to the cosmos, to our earth, and to nature and animals, we find an infinity of action unfolding continually, with every part playing its assigned and vital role. Every part, every cell, plant, animal, planet, and star, has a function to fulfill in the larger unfolding, and this is its work. Fox argues that to do this work is to participate in the becoming of the infinite universe, and that this is thus both sacred and ecstatic. “[A]ll of creation,” he writes, “exists because of the ‘sheer joy’ of God. The work of creation was a work of joy whose whole purpose was to bring more joy into existence. This not only gives us permission to find joy in work but charges us with a responsibility to do so. Joy is an essential source of motivation in our work.”18

Fox recognizes, however, that there is a big problem with work for us humans, noting that over one billion of us are actually unemployed. If we look about us in nature, we see that every being is working and fulfilling its purpose, and it is only humans who are unemployed, underemployed, overworked, or unable or unwilling to work. We are the only species to enslave other species for food, to drink milk as adults, and to view work as disagreeable and try to avoid it. Why is this? Predictably, Fox blames our dissatisfaction with work on the disconnection from nature and spirituality caused by the scientific and industrial revolutions and urges us to become more creative, more loving, and more joyful in our work, to care more for the earth and each other, and to “reinvent” work as the joy it is meant to be as the expression of our heart’s purpose.

What he does not articulate is that the fundamental and defining work of our herding culture is the brutal confining, mutilating, and killing of sensitive creatures. This is hardly a motivation for joy in working! This is the obvious but unrecognized and unarticulated inconsistency at the root of our dilemmas. Thousands of us starve to death daily, millions of us labor like slaves for pennies a day in toxic factories producing consumerist junk, millions more of us work as soldiers and agents of violence and fear - and it’s rooted in our plates.

The commodifying, confining, and killing of animals is a complete perversion of the word “work” as defined by Fox. Until our defining work is transformed from killing animals for food to protecting and caring for life, we will never “reinvent” work in our culture. We will only make technological progress that gives us the means to exploit animals, nature, and each other more efficiently and cruelly, and to eat more animal flesh, eggs, and dairy products than ever in recorded history.

World peace and harmony require those of us in positions of power and affluence in the global village to stop dominating people, animals, and nature through our craving for animal foods. It’s easy to forget that if we’re reading these words we are actually among the richest and most powerful people on this planet. Because of our relative wealth and power, our example, our voice, and our lifestyle can impact many people, either positively or negatively. We are thus obliged to honor this responsibility to our brothers and sisters.

Resurrecting Work

Because of the fundamentally violent nature of its defining work.herding and killing animals.our culture has a basic distaste for work itself. We all hear that working less is better than working more, and not working at all is best of all. The story we all learned in Genesis, of being cast out of the garden, is significant, for it was then that God punished us with enforced hard labor while we live on this earth. This metaphor, part of the herding mythos, is revealing, for it depicts work as a distasteful burden and attributes it to a divine edict that came with being thrown out of the garden. In the garden, we ate a completely plant-based diet, and there was no concept of work as a separate activity. We lived in harmony with animals, the earth, and each other, not killing them for food or competing with each other. Our work was our life, and it was joy, and all was “very good.” There was no work as separate activity, nor any concept of being saved, for we had not committed the original sin of seeing others as objects to be manipulated, used, and killed.

Many other world mythologies also talk about a lost golden age of innocence and peace. Perhaps these stories, as Eisler and others suggest, are reminiscences of the ancient partnership cultures described by contemporary anthropologists, before the hunting of large animals, herding, and the domination of animals and women. Returning to the garden of abundance, innocence, and natural blessedness has always been seen as the goal of religious yearning in the West, yet to actually accomplish this we must unseat the basic mythos of domination and exclusion that our culture propagates. In its heart of hearts, our culture longs to transcend itself, as we ourselves do, and to return, spiral-like, to a time of connectedness, mercy, and creative joy. The seeds of this yearning are planted in our culture’s heart and in our spiritual essence.

The fall from grace, innocence, freedom, and mercy began when we ate of the fruit of the illusion of dualistic separatism and stopped showing mercy to those at our mercy. The fall came when we began commodifying animals. We can resurrect our work from defiling slavery to joyous participation. The path simply requires that we give the same opportunities to the animals who are at our mercy: release them from slavery and grant them freedom to once again fully participate in the unfolding of their unique purpose and consciousness. What we would wish for ourselves we must first give to others: this is, it seems, an everlasting spiritual principle.

To resurrect work from the depths of the trivialization, dissatisfaction, and exploitation into which it has fallen, we’ll need a cultural shift far more radical than any currently proposed by the left or the right. We’ll need a positive transformation of our relationship to those at our mercy, which means shifting from animal foods to plant foods, and from a mythos of death and domination to a mythos of life and cocreative participation. Anything less is mere irony and hypocrisy.

As individuals, as a culture, and as a human family, we pay a remarkably steep price for work that is demeaning or destructive to others or ourselves. When we work primarily for money, we transgress against our spiritual purpose, and sell our life energy and time, which is unfathomably precious. Spiritual traditions and teachings have all emphasized that each one of us has a unique purpose and mission in this life to unfold and fulfill, and that this is our work. Our work has to do with purifying and awakening our consciousness, contributing creatively to our community, and being the voice and hands that confer blessings on others. As we discover our calling, and live it as fully as we can, we discover joy and meaning, and our life becomes precious and filled with blessings. Evolving and growing as individuals, we can authentically contribute to the evolution of our species, and there is enormous satisfaction in these efforts.

If we fail to spend our time and energy in this activity, we become deeply frustrated and dissatisfied, no matter how wealthy or powerful we may be, and this frustration, pooling, collecting, and fermenting, becomes bombs and bullets, toxic dumps and cancers, roving gangs and terrorists. Work, like birth and meals, is sacred, a sacrament, and by desecrating work with competitiveness, killing, cruelty, and exploitation, our herding culture has sown seeds that can only bear misery for everyone.

In the current modern incarnation of the old viciously dominating herding culture - displaying its values now in amplified, high-tech form as fast food chains, megacities, giant hog farms, floating slaughterhouses, nuclear warheads, and rampant injustice, inequality, and exploitation - the resurrection of work means first and foremost understanding the roots of domination in the commodification of animals for food. The key to reclaiming our birthright and harmony, hidden in the most obvious of places - our plates - requires (as appropriate to mythic wisdom) that for us to be free, we must first free those whom we chain. To reclaim our purpose, we must restore the purposes we have stolen from others. As we remove the violence from our daily meals, we will naturally increase our ability to heal our divisions, nurture our creativity and joy, restore beauty and gentleness, and be role models of sensitivity and compassion for our children. As we look more deeply at our food, the healing of our children can begin, and our work can be resurrected as an instrument for blessing and bringing joy and caring to our world.