“They’ll be feeding us, They’ll be feeding on us...”
“We will learn We will love We will work, Change each other....we will spread, we will cover the Earth, like air and water, tomorrow’s blank, we’ll just fill it in, with our own answers, If we’re stopped we’ll just start again, that’s our new offer.”
—Desaparecidos, from Read Music, Speak Spanish
“Eating establishes humankind’s most primordial bonds with the natural world. Because it utilizes the senses, eating, more than any other human experience, brings us to our fullest and most intimate relationship with the environment. In recent generations this intimate relationship has been shattered by a food production system that has profoundly separated us from nature and from those working the land. Under the rubric of “progress” we have bought into being mere consumers, passive cogs in the alienated industrial food system. But now, more and more of us have realized that “progress” is an incomplete concept; we have begun to ask, “Progress toward what?” Once the question is asked, the response is chilling. Industrial “progress” leads us to a future of increased environmental devastation, mass starvation, social disruption, and corporate control of the seeds of the Earth. Clearly, this is not progress.”
— From Fatal Harvest
Life has become domestication. Almost the entire world populace is wrapped up into the forced prescription of a psychotropic and physically addictive linear reality. Welcome to civilization. This, and ever more of This is progress enshrined, cemented over the wild as into our being. Our very cells possess intelligence and memory. This idea has been arrived at by practitioners of many different eastern spiritualities, western sciences, quantum physics and hunter-gatherer bands. A deliberate and ingenious plot to program life at the cellular level and beyondread nano-techis being played out by those in control of the machine-like existence we are conditioned to accept. It is a myth we are enculturated into and mangled by constantly. The computer-generated reality outlined in the movie The Matrix is much closer to the world that has been devised for us than people are willing to wake up to. By teaching, no, forcing us to consume domesticationthe torture, rape, imprisonment and assimilation of plants, animals, insects, soil, habitat and wildness in every formthe heads of state and those wielding power are physically redesigning our minds and bodies. The blueprint with which they work has built within it ten thousand years of knowledge of tyrannical manipulation procedures. Nazi scientists honed, and continue to hone, their knowledge of severe forms of social and individual control to the point of extinguishing the possibility of thinking about freedom. Whoever sits at the throne of civilization knows full well what they are doing. Leftism, reformism, veganism, and all other ideologies make up integral parts of their machine. They keep us dutifully hacking away at the edges of their castle, while we never realize that we are only polishing the walls of our cage.
Their tools of control are deceptive and require of us energy, attention and the knowledge of many years of conditioning to even accept their existence. Cars, roads, farm fields, grocery stores, rocket ships, airplanes, cities, and concrete landscaping for miles and miles and miles are all absurdities. None of these things were familiar or acceptable in any way to North American tribal people when the European machine arrived on the shores. They saw through the domestication for what it was. It’s high time anarchists and anyone else concerned with liberation start questioning what exactly it is we are putting into our bodies and onto the Earth.
We know the ways they mutilate our minds: television, computers, science, western religions, disease, medical technology. Let us now consider how they rape our bodies, our spirit and the living, breathing endangered wildness from which we have not yet been fully estranged. Let us now build a love and gratitude towards all life: plant, animal, insect, fungus, bacteriumrock, river, mountain, desert, forest, prairie and consume only what is necessary for existence. In loving ritual, let us experience the wisdom of the ages that can bring us back to a deep profound connection with wildness. Living beings of this planet are resisting the onslaught of civilization. With the war already in progress, we must consume and become wildness so that wildness may spread and consume us and undo all the destruction our culture has done.
Veganism is a dogmatic and ignorant ideology that keeps us from communing with all life by creating a false dichotomy between the mutilation of plants, insects, and wild areas and the similar mutilation of our animal brothers and sisters. Noble it is to not consume the flesh of beings who have been raised as slaves, but how noble to leave plants out of our conception of living beings? How noble is it to consume “organic” crops, still planted in linear rows, fertilized and nourished by the shit of enslaved creatures? This shit contains antibiotics, and any other poisons injected into the shit’s producer by its proclaimed owner. Nourishment by these means still contains linear conditioning, from the ground up. Healthy diets may or may not contain meat; this is not the question being posed. What to include in one’s diet is a personal, bioregional decision which must always be respectful toward all life and mineral that is to be consumed.
The simplistic radical vegan assertion that “meat is murder” is unarguable within a certain limited ideological framework, but it really only begins to scratch the epidermis or outer layer of how the vibrational essence of all we ingest, breathe, consume and surround ourselves with affects and alters our own vibrational patterns, and hence, our mental and emotional states. Certain dietary theorists argue that schizophrenia (which afflicts more people in the Western World than cancer, diabetes and heart disease combined) is related to a protein toxemia caused by ingesting excessive amounts of tryptophane-laden beef, the chemical and hormone marinated flesh of our dead bovine slaves. Canadian psychologist Abram Hoffer observed that when the human body produces more adrenaline than it can eliminate, it begins to break down into two true hallucinogens, adrenochrome and adrenalutin. These chemicals distort and narrow consciousness, induce paranoia, and reinforce obsessive-compulsive behavior. In short, they cause schizophrenia. Consistent with what militant vegetarians have been saying for years, when animals raised in oppressive, prison-like conditions are callously slaughtered by assembly line workers, the fear and horror of their existence is released biochemically into their bodies, which we consume, and which then become a part of our own lives.
This is only one example of how civilization colonizes our minds, spirits and cellular structure by conditioning our body chemistry itself. Just as civilization and its totally repressive social order train (program) us from birth to accept a fear-ridden, schizophrenic way of “life,” the domestication of our wild natures sinks in past the level of verbal conditioning, to our body chemistry, regimenting our metabolism and nervous systems, trapping us in set patterns of behavior and thought, taming us. To fully control our minds and confine our awareness the system needs to first create mental confusion in its subjects, through both psychic and dietary means. Consuming poisons will poison us, irradiated foods irradiate us, and by consuming domestication and linearity, we become domesticated and linear.
All change is due to the rearrangement or motion of energy patterns relative to each other. The vibration patterns we choose to associate withespecially with regard to domesticated or wild foodcan play an integral role in the de-civilizing process. If we recognized the true power of anything we put into our bodies, then we would choose foods with the type of energy vibrations for the level of consciousness (mental freedom) and physical adventure we would like to experience. We would choose foods that detoxify and strengthen us, and as a result, help snap the ropes of civilized, well-ordered thoughts and habits and loosen the boundaries of accepted, manufactured “reality.” At this point, diet becomes not an issue of morality or “political correctness,” but a part of reclaiming our lives and minds through any available means and strategies.
Wild foods alter our biochemical and molecular makeupas does the poison embalmed dead food that the system successfully sells usand almost alchemically start to reconnect us to the feral path. Wild foods will aid us in the radical act of reuniting with sources of power the system has tried to hide from us and destroy, forces and “realities” that were and are known by all primal peoples, by all of our ancestors. Wild foods help us go wild and develop circular and complete relationships with Earth and her creatures, as contrasted with the separated, linear control patterns that seem to typify western patriarchal thinking.
The ideas we’re discussing here actually have very little to do with veganism, and a lot more to do with discovering who our plant and animal allies are, that is to say, the sources of energy that will give us the strength we will need to destroy this civilization.
Slow down for a moment and put this paper aside. Reflect on your body, your limbs. Think for awhile about the processes that occur in your organs and their cells as you tell your arm to move, as you tell your fingers to turn the pages of this zine. Now, consider what is taking place in your body when taking in cells and air from the environment. There is something that tells these cells to create our physical form. There is some intelligence within our being that organizes cells into what are our organs, our limbs, our eyes, everything we are in the material world. What is this intelligence that makes us up out of a chaotic universe and holds our cells together? We have to live in our bodies, so we might as well start thinking about how they work.
There is a functioning intelligence that makes atoms into molecules, molecules into organelles and cells, cells into organs and flesh and all of this together equals our functioning human body. This intelligence is equivalent to what motivates matter to congeal into plants, trees, animals, insects, mountains, oceans, rivers and everything else we see (some may say, “it is the brain that organizes our cells into our bodies!” To you I pose the question, what intelligence, then, tells our cells to form our brains?) Some kind of energy holds everything together. Through the life and death processes, which all involve the eating of one form by another, all matter and energy in the universe constantly ebbs and flows in and out of every existing piece of matter. Every breath of air we inhale has been shared by every plant, animal and human that has ever existed. Air pollution tells the same tale, as we take in air, full of hydrocarbon chains, smoke and tar from factories and cars, we realize the interconnectedness of all air on the planet. In the same manner with which we share air with every living thing, we also share cells with every creature and “inanimate” objects because we all eat and get eaten by one another as we have since the beginning of life as we know it. The processes of eating, drinking and breathing can all be done consciously or unconsciously. Even though we must exert deliberate energy to eat or drink, we can choose to be much more alert and aware of these many-times-daily events. The immediate reasons we should start paying attention to our bodily functions are quite clear from this perspective: as we become more aware of the universes dancing within our bodies, we can become ever closer to the way the greater universe works and the powers waiting for us within it. Like a tiny Zen garden compared to a large one, the microcosm is the same as the macrocosm.
Think about what must occur when you consume the cells of other once-living beings, plant or animal. How does your body break down and process the cells you eat? What happens to the intelligence built into the cells, DNA if you will, when it is consumed by another being? We literally become what we eat, drink and breathe. If we are constantly eating domestication in any form, drinking sold and processed water and breathing smoke and toxin filled air, then it follows that we become domesticated, processed, sold and filled with smoke and toxins. Anti-authoritarians would be wise to consume liberation, the animals and plants that live wild and free up until the moment of their death, rather than the planned linear existence of farmed plants and animals. Our cells must be liberated if our beings are to be truly free.
Extrapolating from the idea that all cells have a memory and an intelligence, even the foodstuffs we acquire that have their origins in slavery may still be of value. Their value may be enhanced by the ways in which we acquire, process, handle and consume them. If we are consciously grateful for the food we consume, empathetic and aware of what oppression it may have suffered, we can let that cellular intelligence know that we wish to make a different world for all life and hence, be nourished more consciously and directly through communication between our cells and others. This can be approached from another angle. When sexual interactions occur between two or more people, the more genuine and honest the communication between the individuals, the more fulfilling and amazing the connection. When two individuals cross the line into a physical relationship, there are energetic and cellular bonds and exchanges between those individuals. Cells and energy intermingle between our bodies and the food we eat. The more loving and wild the food, the more loving and wild the person. We must learn to show the same gratitude for the food we eat and the environments that sustain us as we wish to show our lovers, families and friends. Patriarchy is evident in our beings down to the way we consume our food. It is said that the same philosophy which oppresses women also oppresses the Earth. Anarchy must encompass a constant empathetic awareness of how everything and everyone around us is being oppressed.
Food, acquired through donation, handled by loving and giving individuals and handed out to those in need, contains much nourishing potential. Virtually all of the food in supermarkets is processed and domesticated. A growing amount of it is irradiated with nuclear contaminants while our water contains a waste product of aluminum production, commonly known as fluoride. Yet, what cellular intelligence remains in this food and water? How much interaction can we have with these tortured, imprisoned cells? When we write letters to prisoners, the arrival of kind words brings a smile to a prisoner’s face and warmth to their day. Although imprisoned, they still feel emotions, still yearn to be free. Could it be possible to communicate to the food we eat that we are liberators, and that we mean to put the energy we gain from them to liberating use? In the way a prisoner smiles and jokes in letters, so may plant and animal cells that have been through industrial hell enjoy our love and kindness and may even show gratitude while becoming part of us. This may be a way to put an end to the cycle of domestication. We may convert domesticated cells into wildness through our eating rituals. A father quits drinking alcohol to raise a new child, breaking a multi-generational pattern of alcoholism in his family. We can break the ten-thousand year cycle of domestication and control by quitting civilization in every way possible. The way we approach life must change radically; inherent in this change will be the liberating potential to shatter every illusion of control and domination enforced upon us.
Is there anyone who would argue that microwave food is better than food prepared by the light of a campfire deep in the woods? Liberated food — that is, food that has been expropriated from its sterile place on the shelves of urbania/suburbia — may experience a rush of sorts that reinvigorates the cells in the food as it’s being rescued from the grips of capitalism. Maybe plants and animals hate commerce and trade as much as some of us humans. There are surely enough reports of animals and plants and climates revolting meaningfully against civilization to convince us that our allies in this war are many. We have just been taught to not consider other life as intelligent as ourselves. It is time to defy the absurd disconnection that civilization illusions over us. Tear off your masks, tear off the headphones, take a walk in the woods, remember that Cherokee warriors would stand in the forest with their backs to large trees to regenerate energy for travel and battle. There is power in this world that is autonomous and liberating. This power lies in the communion of beings beyond our silly language and species barriers. Native peoples did not learn plant identification from books, nor from trial and error. They learned the knowledge of medicine through direct communication with each individual plant. This is not a mystical ability. Truly mystical is the way civilizationthrough economics, time, TV, computer, language, media, agriculturecontrols us down to the fiber of our beings. We must start seeing through the haze and smog to embrace the connections that already exist between us and our plant, animal, insect, fungal, and bacteriological brethren.
In life, as in death, proceed with dignity. Be attentive, locate and spread beauty wherever it may be, taking risks and neither seeking out nor avoiding death. We have nothing but illusions to get rid of. A world of joy and kindness exists under the surface of every bit of concrete. Be inspired by what can be found beneath the iron masks welded to our faces. Civilized armor weighs down our lives. Our eyes have been filled so long by darkness that waking up is like walking out of a theater into a mid-morning summer sun. The first glimpse of freedom is blinding and frightening. From there, the butterflies never leave your stomach and dreams never leave your consciousness. It’s a long wild ride from domestication to liberation. About as long of a ride as it is from where you’re sitting to the nearest wildlands, or if you’re feeling particularly joyous, wildness is always near. It burns brightest where there are riots, revolts, and actions against the state and power structures. There are less obvious reasons why the underground is called underground; Peg Millet of Earth First!; claimed she became a cactus in the desert to avoid capture by helicopters, FBI agents with dogs and other pigs who had surrounded her and her comrades. Our wild brothers and sisters are full of gratitude for our actions to defend them and to cultivate wildness within ourselves and without. Plants, animals, insects, and all other forms of life are fighting to survive and re-grow over the concrete wasteland our civilization has wrought. Now we stand alongside them. Now we learn to communicate in whatever ways possible with these newfound comrades. Their struggles are ours. Be healthy, eat well, live well and love well. The heat of our bodies is akin to the heat of lava, magma from the outer core of the earth, full of burning energy that originates with the beginning of the universe. Let us burn within, comrades. Now we spread the fires of revolt. Bon Appetite!