Acclaimed US writer, lecturer and composer, Rev. Dr. Will Tuttle is the author of the comprehensive book, “The World Peace Diet: Eating for Spiritual Health and Social Harmony.”

He explains how returning to our inherently compassionate view of life could completely transform our reality here on Earth. For his dedicated efforts to spread the Earth-saving veg trend, Dr. Tuttle was honored with the Shining World Hero Award from Supreme Master Ching Hai. We now present two of Dr. Will Tuttle’s timely and thought-provoking essays, read by the author himself.

The first article is titled “At Our Core,” and was originally published in the September 2008 edition of the leading US-based VegNews Magazine.

“At Our Core” “I have discovered that we are all born into a culture that has a hidden core. The core I’m referring to is a certain mentality that is the unrecognized driving force behind the suffering we cause each other and ourselves, such as environmental devastation, war, inequity, oppression, and mental and physical disease. It is taboo to discuss this hidden core because it is forced on all of us by every institution in our culture, and because of the remorse we naturally feel in looking at it.

This core is invisible and pervasive, and it is ritually injected into all of us through our most intimate, powerful, and routine social bonding experiences: our daily meals. In essence, the concealed core mentality of our culture is an attitude of reductionism. We are all indoctrinated into the ongoing practice of reducing beings to things. We are forcibly taught to see and treat certain beings as mere objects— commodities that are routinely bought, sold, confined, mutilated, stabbed, and eaten. It’s a mentality of exclusion as well.

We practice excluding certain beings from the sphere of our compassion with every meal. It’s also a mentality of hierarchical privilege, and of elitism, because the subtext pervading every meal is that certain beings have no purpose other than to be dominated and used by us inherently superior beings. And it’s a mentality of disconnectedness because we are taught to continually disconnect the reality that is on our plates from the reality required to get it on our plates.

From this, we see that the living core of our culture is a mentality of domination, exploitation, predation, and oppression that we’re all forced to participate in and actually instigate through the meals mandated by all our culture’s institutions: the family, education, religion, medicine, science, government, and the media. The hidden, driving fury behind our inability to fulfill our potential for wisdom, peace, freedom, kindness, and awareness is right under our noses daily at breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

The remorse we feel for being forced from infancy by our culture to be agents of death and torture at every meal makes it easier for us to be controlled while crushing our awareness and spiritual sensitivity. A natural result is that we become numb and fixate on consuming. Our innate wisdom and compassion have been hijacked by our culture’s meals. Contained within the understanding I am articulating is the enormous and benevolent social revolution that we all know our culture longs for— the revolution where peace, justice, sustainability, caring, and abundance are actually possible.

Contained in it is the realization that we are, essentially, free, benevolent, and wise. We have been forced, though, by our culture, through its meals, to participate in rituals of cruelty and exclusion that reduce our intelligence as they reduce animals, the Earth, and ourselves to mere commodities in a heartless, contrived system. When we realize that we’ve all been given the gift of bodies that require no nutrients we cannot get from plant sources, we can become, ourselves, the change we want to see in the world.

This is the heart and soul of the vegan revolution of love, joy, and peace that is beckoning and to which we are all called to contribute. There is no greater act of love and freedom than to question the core of violence and disconnectedness churning unrecognized in the belly of our culture, and to switch to a plant-based diet because of compassion for the countless animals, humans, and future generations to whom we are related.

All life is interconnected, and as we bless others, we are blessed. As we allow others to be free and healthy, we become free and healthy. Each and every one of us makes our world. Question everything this culture says, throw off the chains of harming and stealing from fish, birds, and mammals, and join the vegan celebration! We will love each other and this world so deeply that we will all be transformed.”

Please stay tuned to Supreme Master Television. We will return with another compelling article read by the author Dr. Will Tuttle about the vegan solution for a planet affected by climate change.

Welcome back to Enlightening Entertainment. The following article by Dr. Will Tuttle was originally published in Good Karma Magazine in its October 2009 edition. It is titled “A Convenient Truth.”

“A Convenient Truth” “Victor Hugo is credited with saying that nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come. There is mounting evidence that global climate change may well bring an inconceivable catastrophe to humanity and to the Earth within the next century. Scientists estimate that if the mean temperature of the Earth rises six degrees Celsius, this could mean the probable extinction of most species, including humans.

It turns out that the main driving force behind global climate change is also behind human disease, environmental pollution, massive animal cruelty, and the whole range of dilemmas we are attempting to solve. How convenient! What is this driving force behind so many of our dilemmas? It is the routine confinement and slaughter of millions of animals every day for food. And catastrophic it is.

For example, and predictably, the most powerful and most forcibly ignored cause of global warming is eating meat and dairy products, greater even than all forms of transportation worldwide by car, truck, bus, boat, train, and plane. The science on this is unequivocal, and in addition, eating animals requires massive amounts of fossil fuel inputs, directly pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

In the United States we are transporting over seventy percent of our corn, soybeans, oats, and other grains to animals, pumping water to irrigate these fields, manufacturing millions of pounds of fossil fuel-based fertilizer and pesticides, and housing and slaughtering billions of animals yearly. The end result of all this is that while it takes only two calories of fossil fuel to produce one calorie of protein from soybeans, and three calories for wheat and corn, it takes 54 calories of fossil fuel to produce one calorie of protein from beef!

The primary driving force behind deforestation is cattle grazing and clearing land to grow soybeans and other grains to feed factory-farmed chickens, pigs, and fish. This is a further major contributor to global warming. In addition, sixty percent of our fish are now factory-farmed, causing severe water pollution and genetic damage to wild fish populations. Our limitless demand for fish that are used for feeding factory-farmed fish, birds, and mammals has brought our oceans to the brink of collapse.

Dairy cows, for example, consume huge quantities of fish, added to “enrich” their feed to increase milk and fat output. It takes three to five pounds of caught fish to make one pound of farmed salmon. We have decimated fish, turtle, and sea mammal populations so completely that jellyfish are now taking over the oceans, and fishing vessels have to go out so far that they use unsustainable amounts of diesel fuel.

A recent study published in the prestigious Lancet medical journal concluded that the only way to effectively reduce greenhouse gases is to significantly reduce human consumption of animal foods. This has been increasingly emphasized in recent months, as journalists and experts begin to connect the dots for the public.

Rajendra Pachauri, Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, himself a vegetarian, has been repeatedly recommending that people eat less meat and dairy products, and local governments are beginning to take action, as well. Ghent, Belgium, has designated every Thursday as “Veggie Day,” and Cincinnati has recently encouraged residents to reduce meat consumption as part of its Green Initiative.

Gidon Eshel, a geographer at the University of Chicago concluded based on his 2006 research that, “However close you can be to a vegan diet and further from the mean American diet, the better you are for the planet.”

Recent research has also revealed that buying locally grown meat, eggs, and dairy is not significant in its impact on one’s carbon footprint. In “The Locavore Myth,” James McWilliams explains that since transportation is only 11% of food’s carbon footprint overall, economies of scale and other factors, often outweigh transportation factors.

In addition, research reveals that in many cases, eating “free-range” and “organic” meat, dairy, and eggs does not substantially reduce greenhouse gas emissions, because free- range cattle, for example, are not fattened as quickly as feedlot cattle, so the reductions in carbon dioxide equivalents in foregoing chemical fertilizers and pesticides are nearly offset by these factors.

According to a University of Chicago study, the various energy inputs and livestock emissions involved in meat production for an average American pump an extra 1.5 tons of CO2 into the air over the course of a year, which would be avoided by a vegetarian diet. A vegan diet, without dairy or eggs, reduces the greenhouse gas footprint much further, and 17 vegans eating organic foods have the carbon footprint of one person eating the Standard American Diet.

To their credit, more and more meat-eating journalists are coming forth, encouraging people to reduce meat and dairy consumption to save the Earth from climate breakdown. Let’s amplify their call! The situation is critical. As the Worldwatch Institute has bluntly concluded, “It has become apparent that the human appetite for animal flesh is a driving force behind virtually every major category of environmental damage now threatening the human future.”

Al Gore called global warming an inconvenient truth because it seemed to him that solving it would require painful and economically disastrous cutbacks and changes in our lifestyle. When we look more deeply, we can see that if, instead, we approach the solution by dramatically reducing animal food consumption and production, it is indeed a most convenient truth.

As the U.N. and many others have pointed out, the fundamental driving force behind the devastation of tropical rainforests, and of ocean ecosystems, and of genetic diversity is directly related to eating animal-sourced foods. Add in water and air pollution, soil erosion, and world hunger, as well as the devastating diseases caused by eating animal foods, such as obesity, diabetes, osteoporosis, cancer, heart disease, and kidney disease, and we can see that we stand on the brink of an enormous opportunity.

Going vegan becomes easier as more of us do it, and there is nothing more important that any of us can do to help solve global warming and our other dilemmas. Ultimately, going vegan is the most convenient thing we can do.”

We thank you and Heaven bless you Dr. Will Tuttle for your dedicated work in communicating this most relevant and encouraging message. May we rediscover the compassion in and around us, and with our co-inhabitants thrive on a peaceful planet.

For more information about Dr. Will Tuttle’s workshops and his book, “The World Peace Diet: Eating for Spiritual Health and Social Harmony,” please visit or Dr. Will Tuttle’s “The World Peace Diet” Book and Upcoming Seminars

Gracious viewers, it was a pleasure to have you with us today. Up next is Words of Wisdom, after Noteworthy News, here on Supreme Master Television. May your life be blessed with nobility and harmony.

In my heart, what I want to achieve, what I live to achieve is to make a meaningful contribution to transform the community where I live.

As founder of Helps International, Mr. Genesis Tinshu is wholeheartedly devoted to enhancing the welfare of people in Buea, Cameroon through the organization’s many social and health initiatives.

On behalf of Helps International, I truly want to say that we are very grateful for the fact that Supreme Master Ching Hai has put her eye on what we are doing.

Please join us this Saturday, January 30 for the Shining World Compassion Award series on Enlightening Entertainment for our feature on Mr. Genesis Tinshu and Helps International in Cameroon.