My friend Moby just co-wrote a book called “Gristle” about from factory farms to food safety, about the impact of raising animals and what it does to our environment, not to mention what it does to our own bodies. And it just shows that, that it’s better and more efficient and more productive to have a vegetarian or vegan diet. Vegan essentially.

“Gristle: from Factory Farms to Food Safety (Thinking Twice About the Meat We Eat)” was released in March of 2010. When the book’s co-editors, Moby with Miyun Park, first went on tour to promote its release, Supreme Master Television was present on their first stop in Los Angeles, California, USA in support of the book’s message. To our pleasant surprise, we were met by some of our mutual friends:

What brings you here tonight?

To support Moby and Miyun’s new book “Gristle,” of course.

I’m here because I’m a friend of Moby’s and I’m a very passionate vegan and animal lover and I want to support anybody who is fighting to reduce the suffering for animals.

What brings you here tonight?

Oh my goodness! Moby and his new book. He’s such a huge inspiration. And his new book looks really wonderful “Gristle.”

Today and next week, on Vegetarian Elite, we will present to you some of our insightful talks with the multiplatinum musician Moby on the Golden Rule and veganism, and the goal he and Miyun hope to accomplish with “Gristle.” And of course, we will take a glimpse into this factually bound and eye-opening book that’s creating quite a buzz with readers, book reviewers, and even big corporations.

The only way to have a good life is to spend your life being an advocate for causes that you believe in and in whatever capacity you can, trying to make the world a better place.

Richard Melville Hall, known globally in the music world as Moby, is renowned for his chart-topping music, as well as his social activism. Although he has been making music since age 9 and started out in classical music, Moby made a name for himself in the early 1990s with the release of his progressive house single “Go.”

Since then, he has performed in more than 3,000 concerts, sold over 20 million records worldwide, released eight Top 40 music singles with much acclaim, and garnered several Grammy Award nominations in effect. He has created scores for films like Heat and James Bond: Tomorrow Never Dies, and his extraordinary collaborations include legendary musicians like Lou Reed, David Bowie, and Bono.

Perhaps equally impressive to Moby’s musical career is his social activism, animal welfare advocacy, and charitable works. He has devoted countless hours and huge amounts of funding to organizations like The Humane Society and Institute for Music and Neurologic Function.

In fact, all proceeds from the sale of “Gristle” will go to benefit animal welfare organizations. At the “Gristle” book signing event, many attendees were introduced to another of Moby’s collaborators – Miyun Park, who served as the book’s co-editor alongside Moby.

Miyun Park is the Executive Director of Global Animal Partnership, which is an international non-profit dedicated to improving the lives of animals in agriculture through collaborative multi stakeholder efforts. She’s a board member of Farm Forward and serves on the editorial board of the Gateway to Farm Animal Welfare, a web portal created by the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations. And before joining the Global Animal Partnership, she served as the Vice President of Farm Animal Welfare of the Humane Society of the United States and Humane Society International.

Miyun spoke about the first time Moby had contacted her to work together on reducing the suffering of animals raised for food, to the progression of their friendship to the present day. Their like-minded concerns led to the creation of “Gristle.”

We had evolved as advocates, not only for environmental concerns or other social justice issues but you know, most specifically for us, for non-human animals, that the issue isn’t promoting veganism, the reason is all about reducing suffering. And that’s what’s so important, I think, about this book, that it gives you all of this information on how easy it is to reduce the suffering of individual beings whose lives matter to them.

When we return after this brief message, we will learn about how the Golden Rule led Moby on the path of veganism.

So I became a vegetarian for the simple reason that I liked animals and it seemed inconsistent to both like animals and eat them. And then that same criteria that led me to be a vegetarian, led me to be a vegan.

Welcome back to Vegetarian Elite on Supreme Master Television. Today’s episode features the multiplatinum recording artist Moby and the newly released book he helped to co-edit: “Gristle: from Factory Farms to Food Safety (Thinking Twice About the Meat We Eat).” Turning a couple of “Gristle’s” first pages, readers will find Moby’s introduction. He writes:

I’m a vegan and animal protection advocate… My agenda as regards animals and animal welfare is also simple: to end animal suffering. My agenda had its nascence when I was quite young and I first heard the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you’d have them do unto you.” That’s the Golden Rule, right? When I was young, this made a lot of sense to me in an uncluttered and beautifully self-evident way. But it then begged a follow-up question: who are these “others” referred to in the Golden Rule?

The 22-year vegan shared with us how applying this Golden Rule can open up one’s heart and increase our love and respect for all beings.

Well, one of the reasons I became vegan is the Golden Rule, you know the idea of “Doing unto others as you would have them do unto you.” And I talk about this in the intro, is the idea, “It’s easy to apply that to our friends and to our family.” (Right.)

And then you apply that to all human beings, and say like, “Well, okay these human beings, they all have two eyes, they all have a central nervous systems, so clearly if I don’t want to suffer, I can assume that other people don’t want to suffer.” And then you apply that to animals, you apply it to fish, you apply it to birds, you apply it…

For me, there’s no harm in applying a circle of compassion as far and as wide as it can go. And everyone benefits. I can only speak for myself, but the best way for me to be unhappy and anxious and depressed, is to be selfish and focused on myself. The best way to increase my happiness and also hopefully increase the happiness of others, is to actually be concerned for the wellbeing of other people and other animals. So that’s a big part of my veganism as well.

For some people it’s purely health reasons. For some people it’s ethnical reasons because they care about animals. For some people it’s because of deforestation, because of water pollution, because of air pollution, because of climate change there are myriad different reasons why someone might choose to be vegetarian or vegan. I think they’re all valid. For me, I’m vegan for all of those reasons and also for spiritual reasons as well. I don’t like the idea of creating suffering when I don’t have to. It’s one of my goals in life, is to just diminish the amount of suffering on the planet.

Moby’s written introduction in “Gristle” continues:
Later I was able to expand upon my Golden Rule extension, and I came up with a happy little logical-sounding catchphrase to justify my veganism and animal protection advocacy: Death is unavoidable, but suffering is avoidable. Just as I hope to avoid unnecessary suffering in my life, I can assume that all beings capable of suffering also hope to avoid it; therefore, we should do our best to prevent suffering.

I’m really proud of this book. I think it’s a great resource. And it reminds me… One of the things that sort of solidified my veganism and my interest in animal rights was the book “Diet for a New America” by John Robbins. And because, I think I was sort of like a nascent vegan and I read that, and that just made me realize that as much as I like yogurt, as much as I like some animal products, I care about animal suffering too much to not be a vegan.

My hope is that this would somehow accomplish a similar thing for someone that “Diet for a New America” accomplished for me. I think this is a remarkable book and I hope that people buy it and give it away because it has the potential to actually change the way that people think about food production, and in hopefully a very factual non-didactic way. That’s the goal.

On next week’s Vegetarian Elite, we will take a look into the “information-packed, lively, and informative” guide “Gristle,” and introduce the 15 esteemed contributors of its 10 chapters.

They range from chief executive officer and co-founder of FEED projects Lauren Bush, human rights activists and granddaughters of Cesar Chavez – Christine Chavez and Julie Chavez Rodriguez, Ultramarathon champion Brendan Brazier, bestselling authors and sustainable food advocates Frances Moore Lappé and Anne Lappé, World Watch researcher Danielle Nierenberg, chief executive officer of Whole Foods John Mackey, to the president and chief executive officer of The Humane Society of the United States Wayne Pacelle. United, they deliver a strong message that touches on topics like the environment, taxpayers, children’s health, zoonotic diseases, and global hunger.

There are so many impacts on industrial animal agriculture, on all of these different sectors and that's why, as Moby was saying, having all of these different contributors. I mean we have the CEO of the country's largest Animal Advocacy Organization standing side by side with the CEO of one of, in my opinion you know, most important retail stores in the country, in terms of advocating for the reduction of suffering, standing next to a pig farmer, the manager of “Niman Ranch Pork.”

And the fact that we have all of these people standing shoulder to shoulder and just saying, “Industrial animal agriculture is not okay, and we can all do something about it every single time that we eat.”

Respected viewers, we appreciated your company today on Vegetarian Elite. We’ll see you again next week for the second half of our special feature on “Gristle” and the multifaceted Moby. Up next on Supreme Master Television is Between Master and Disciples. Blessed be your compassionate hearts.

Find out more about Moby and “Gristle” at Moby.com and Gristle-Book.com