Adams conceptualizes human stages of eating as fourfold: The first is characterized by reliance on plant foods in societies where the first tools enabled women to collect plant proteins to bring back to children community. The second stage was predominantly vegetarian with some reliance on hunting, typified by Native Americans. Third stage eating used domesticated animals together with plant protein and centered on dairy production (The racism of imposing dairy dependency on various people of color who can't tolerate milk products as happened in North America should be obvious. Continents such as Africa and North America before both were taken over by Europeans used no dairy products and lactose intolerance is more widespread than is realized. Humans are the only animal to use milk after infancy.) Finally it is only since World War II that we have entered the fourth stage eating--with animals institutionalized in factory farms. (For those who need information on the nature and growth of this "farming" see Animal Factories by Jim Mason and Peter Singer.) Besides the reality of this unspeakable cruelty to non human animals, it is important to recognize that fourth stage eating cannot support itself. The quantity of "animalized" protein assumed necessary for most typical USA diets oppresses and exploits the rest of the world. Note that 7% of the world's population (USA) consumes 30% of the worlds animalized protein. Since it takes 17 - 20 lbs of grain or soy beans to produce one pound of edible beef, we are greedy consumers indeed.

Feminist vegetarians reading mythographers like Joseph Campbell, can see that meat-eating cultures idealize ferocity, the territorial imperative, vitality and virility---what Carol Adams calls the "Blood Culture". Plant based societies on the other hand, celebrate a model of the wonder of life-- cycle of growth and decay, blossom and seed, wherein death and life appear as transformations of a single superordinated indestructible force. In other words, harvest rather than violence, harmony with slow change of seasons rather than territoriality.

Myths/beliefs of the 80's are extremely health oriented. Almost every magazine cover promotes the current model of muscular anorexia. In the past eight years Bloodroot customer concern has passed from issues such as why isn't all our flour whole wheat to why we don't have wheatless bread. The Political Palate was criticized for our use of cream and eggs, not because this use exploits animals, but because it is considered unhealthy to eat such fattening foods. At first sugar was evil, now all sweetening is. A few years ago an extraordinary number of customers worried about mucous-producing foods and suffered from hypoglycemia. More recently wheat, corn and fermentation allergies are surprisingly widespread. The newest "diseases" are eating disorders and ads offering help for these almost overshadow recent ones for stress management. Focus on stress itself by an affluent and privileged community is shocking. Stress has been said to "cause" or ( in conjunction with drugs, pollution, junk food, sedentary life style, etc.) is "related to" cancer and other mysterious diseases. As a result health oriented Americans have become obsessed with medication, jogging and stringent diets. No one seems to ask about stress suffered by poverty and starvation, by rape, by torture, by twelve hours a day working on computer chips. "Stress Management" is a luxury of the privileged.

We remember when troubles were taken to priests, ministers and rabbis. Then troubles were taken to doctors and psychotherapists. These days nutritionists are thought to have the answers. To gain perspective on the latest fads in health reread For Her Own Good (Ehrenreich and English) the appropriate chapter on therapy in Mary Daly's Gyn/Ecology (especially pages 282-285) and Jan Raymond's reflections in The Transsexual Empire. While we want to be generous-hearted toward those with particular allergies, we are suspicious when there is an air of moral righteousness connected to the new diets. For ourselves, we assume that foods people have eaten for many centuries are likely to continue to be nutritious and that foods lower on the food chain are less likely to contain concentrations of pollutants. The history of the use of grains, fermented foods and oils is very ancient. What is new is our exceptional dependence on animalized proteins and fats.

Our vegetarianism stems from a broader base of reasoning than that of personal health. It comes from a foundation of thought based on feminist ethics: a consciousness of our connection with other species and with the survival of the Earth. Of course we know that a diet based on grains and legumes, vegetables and fruit is personally healthy. But regardless of how much is learned about food combining vitamins, basic food group needs or about problems with pollution or chemical additions to meat, the fact remains that dependence on meat and poultry is cruel and destructive to creatures more like ourselves than we are willing to admit--whether we mean turkeys and cows or the humans starved by land wasted for animal farming for the privileged few. This is underscored by Martha M., in a letter to Lesbian Contradiction Issues #6 Spring 1984:

Even meat eaters who believe any atrocity is justified if the victim is non-human and the beneficiary is human may want to consider the effects that their dietary choices have on other humans and on themselves. We are all dependent, after all on the rain forests of Central and South America ("the lungs of the world") for the maintenance of the world's ecological balance. And as Catherine Caufield tells us "since 1960 more than three quarters of all Central American forests have been destroyed to produce beef most of which (more than 90%) is exported to the United States. Moreover the people who suffer most directly from the conversion of forest to pasture are the Indians who have lived in the forest for hundreds of years." And within a very few years of making the Indians land uninhabitable and forcing them to move elsewhere, the ranchers themselves will be forced to move on because their cattle have exhausted the land. The same thing is happening in the Philippines. As Joan Gusscow has written, "It must be emphasized here that we are no longer discussing a justice issue. We have gone beyond the question of whether it is fair for (the food I choose to eat) to be produced at the expense of some poor farmer's survival. It is my survival that is at stake. For what we are discussing here is the continued functioning on a world wide scale of the system that provides the world with its food. Short of Atomic War...there is probably no more serious problem that confronts us than the destruction produced by the business as usual assaults on the biosystem which sustains us all. The point is, the devastating effects factory farming has on this Earth are not mere coincidence, not simply by-products of a basically OK system. The devastation is a direct and inevitable result of our own attitudes and our own choices. As long as we treat the Earth and its creatures as non-spiritual 'resources" we will continue to tear the world down around us.

Unless we can learn that the value system inherent in our meat eating patterns is one of brutality to human, food animals and wild animals whose habitats are being destroyed, nothing we do for personal health reasons is truly healthy in the end. "For once stripped of their fundamental underpinnings, health issues may become reduced to narcissistic obsessions." (Carol Adams, Chap.5 Thinking With Our Hearts) Meanwhile there is a new category of disease called eating disorders. While psychotherapists and nutritionists claim to treat them, as feminists we require a political and sociological analysis of their proliferation. First it is important to recognize that the mania with weight reduction and anorexia/bulimia are different points on the same continuum of hatred for women's bodies. Mary Daly writes, under the heading "The Shrinking of Female Being" in Gyn/Ecology:

...So also is a woman preoccupied who obsessively examines herself in a mirror, seeing herself as a parcel of protuberances. She is looking through male lens. Filled with inspired fixations she checks to see if hair, eyebrows, lips, skin, breasts, buttocks, stomach, hips, legs, feet are "satisfactory". Gynecological/therapeutic/cosmetic preoccupation conceals the patients emptiness from herself. It drives the splintered self further into the state of fixation upon the parts that have become symbols of of her lost and prepossessed Self. Reduced to the state of an empty vessel, the victim focuses desperately upon physical symptoms, therapeutically misinterpreted memories and "appearance" frantically consuming medication, counsel, cosmetics, and clothing to cloak and fill her expanding emptiness, transcendence is consumed and she consumes herself."

As Kim Chernin points out in The Obsession: Reflections in the Tyranny of Slenderness, appropriate weight is a matter of the decade in which you live. She believes feminism has been accompanied first in the twenties and then in the seventies, with a backlash of hatred for women of size: Marilyn Monroe would be today's fat woman. "The reason, I say, that 98% of women gain back the weight they have lost in (diet programs) is simple--the weight belongs to us by nature" It would seem to follow that if we accept variation in height, skin color, ableism, we should be able to recognize fatness as one of many forms of femaleness. Shadow on a Tightrope, a superb collection of writings by fat women, demonstrates that we do not. Edited by Lisa Schoenfielder and Barb Weiser, this book is must reading for those who wish to pursue the connections between anorexia, dieting and the oppression of fat women and therefore to appreciate why we need fat politics to understand eating disorders. "Consider that control over our bodies is the bottom line of the women's movement" (by Marjory Nelson). "Fat and Old, Old and Fat"And "Dieting is Starvation it is self abuse it is self hate" (by Kelly, "Medical crimes") Other articles in the book which explore political aspects of negative attitudes on weight include "The Goddess is Fat", "Conversation with Nancy", Some Thoughts on fat", and the excellent forward.

The more we explore old cookbooks, recipes from other cultures or ruminate on what folks ate 50 or 100 years ago, the more apparent it becomes that grains have been the food base of most peoples: rice, wheat, corn, millet, rye, barley, etc. Grains were the staple harvested from the wild or from planted crops. Earliest women gathered grains and devised ways to carry them back for sharing or storing. Fruits and vegetables supplemented the grains. Fish were and are eaten by peoples near water and meat has been used as an occasional condiment. It is only in the post war years that meat has become an obsession in this country: a three meal a day obsession that we are exporting as a value system to other countries, spreading starvation as a result. Grains have been associated with the earth's abundance or what patronizing writers call goddesses. Grains are our mothers. Demeter and wheat and the corn mother are but two examples. Our sustenance and life blood comes from grains. All over the Earth, the oldest images of both mother and food are personified in Goddesses of grains. Chicomecoatl the Aztec Goddess of food symbolized by a double ear of corn: Ceres/Demeter whose recurrent image is wheat or barley: Dewi Sri the Japanese rice Goddess. Ever since the precepts of psychotherapy have acquired general influence, women have been told our problems are because of our mothers. In the fifties we were told we were neurotic because of them. Now the latest wrinkle is allergies to wheat, corn and fermentation, continuing the tradition. We prefer to remember the value of grains legumes ("that which is gathered") fruits, whether fresh or fermented, yeasted, brewed in all stages from seed to decay. These are what sustain us.