Each of the world wars which afflicted mankind was the inevitable self-earned effect of causes previously set going. The unerring law of karma brings whatever good or evil recompense is deserved. The debit account of wrong done is allowed to run on until the end of the page and then it has to be totalled and the balance entered to adjust the total. The great famines, like the great wars, which afflicted and still afflict mankind, constitute part of this adjustment, part of the payment which mankind is forced to make by the higher governing law of karma. Their causes are as plural as the causes of the wars, although on the deepest level there is only the same single cause of human ignorance leading to human wrong-doing. One of them is the refusal of mankind to utilize the earth's grain harvests for its own direct use, diverting them instead to the use of animals deliberately bred for slaughter and then eating the grain indirectly in the form of those animals' corpses. Such a way of supporting life is both utterly unnecessary and utterly cruel. The life of innocent creatures cannot be taken upon such baseless grounds with impunity. Retribution has hit mankind again and again in the past, with the weapons of hunger, disease, and war, and it is hitting them again in the present. No reorganization of agricultural methods on more efficient and more productive lines, no re-arrangement of trading relations, no governmental subsidies in cash, tractors, seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, or equipment will save mankind from suffering famines and enduring starvation if it does not face the real challenge and meet it. A radical change of life is demanded from it, a repentant change of heart is the only way to win back Nature's smile. It must stop this unjustified murder of helpless living beings, murdered merely because they are lower in the scale of evolution. It must accept the perfectly sufficient diet of grains, cereals, vegetables, pulses, fruits, nuts, and dairy produce which will enable it to live with less suffering and more health, less punishment and more conscience, than a meat diet permits.
-- Notebooks Category 11: The Negatives > Chapter 3 : Their Presence in The World > # 162
