Hope's Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet (6 page)

Fully understanding democracy as a process rather than a structure of government means accepting that it can never be fully realized. In his 1990 address to the U.S. Congress, Czechoslovakia’s President Vaclav Havel reminded Americans:

One may approach [democracy] as one would the horizon, but it can never be fully attained.… You [Americans] have thousands of problems, as other countries do, but you have one great advantage. You have been approaching democracy uninterrupted for 200 years.

Can we come to believe in democracy as an ever-unfolding dynamic to which there can be no final resting point? Such a vision suggests a fragile
ecology of democracy
—democracy as ever-evolving relationships through which people solve common problems and meet deep human needs.

Midwives to the New

The view I have attempted here would allow us finally to leave behind the worthless debate about whether we should address environmental problems by convincing people to alter individual life choices. Or, instead, should we work for changes in our economic rules and structures?

I’ve held—and believe my intuition confirmed by people’s experience during the last 20 years—that so-called structural changes can come only as we reshape our very understanding of ourselves, gain confidence in our intuitive sense of connectedness, and therefore gain courage. That confidence and courage, as I argue throughout
Diet for a Small Planet
, come through making new choices in every aspect of our lives. Gaining confidence in our capacities and values, we’re able to challenge messages telling us that market exchange is a virtual divine law whose consequences we must live with; and to question economic dogma making giant corporations “private” and therefore outside democratic accountability.

As we begin to let go of the notion that there are economic laws that take us off the hook, the environmental awakening reminds us that there are indeed laws—
ecological
laws—that we cannot escape.

There is no “away.” (Radioactive wastes cannot be stored away because that place doesn’t exist.)

And if that is true, then so is the corollary—everything is connected. We can’t do just one thing.

And, finally, since in a wink of historical time we have spent our “fossil fuel” savings, we have no choice but to live on our solar budget.

Now these are pretty obvious truths. And the environmental scolds will tell us that these truths determine our limited means, to which we must now resign ourselves. But is this bad news, really? What such a negative casting ignores is the deep human need precisely
for
limits—for what are limits but guidelines, a coherent context for human conduct, helping us make choices?

Looked at thusly, a feeling of relief might come over us instead of panic. For it is unboundedness, endless choices that make people crazy. If little kids need rules to know they’re loved and to be happy, perhaps all human beings have that need. Limitlessness means meaninglessness. Nature’s very real, nonarbitrary, and universal laws can offer a sense of boundedness, imbuing our individual acts with meaning and giving us direction in making choices.

As we gain the courage to let go of the human-made laws of economic dogma, in which we have sought relief from choice, perhaps we can discover instead the real laws of the biotic community. In this discovery we can take joy in becoming contributing members, not masters, of that community.

Yes, it
is
an extraordinary time to be alive. Can the 21st century be the era in which human beings finally come home, meeting our deep need for security and meaning not in ignoring or conquering, but in living within the community of nature? Now that the stakes are indisputably ultimate, we can break through the limits of the inherited mechanistic worldview and discover the real meaning of the era of ecology—that our very being is dependent upon healthy relationships. We can find in the focus on relationships—the key insight of ecology—the beginning of what we need to meet the multiple crises affecting us, from homelessness to the environmental crisis itself. We can create an
ecology of democracy
—democracy not as fixed structure but as a rich practice of citizen problem solving, grounded in the democratic arts and equal to the challenges of our time.

Amidst such obvious social decline and environmental devastation—yet with the possibility of rebirth—more than anything we each need to find sources of hope. Hope that we can be part of such an historical awakening. Such honest hope, as opposed to wishful thinking, demands hard work. Cynicism is easy. Honest hope comes only as we experience ourselves changing, and are thus able to believe that “the world” can change. For 20 years, responses to
Diet for a Small Planet
have been for me a primary and continuing source of hope—always reminding me of the words of Chinese writer Lu Hsun I have framed on my bedroom wall:

Hope cannot be said to exist, nor can it be said not to exist.
It is just like the roads across the earth.
For actually there were no roads to begin with,
but when many people pass one way a road is made.

Preface

I
GAVE MY
first speech as the author of
Diet for a Small Planet
at the University of Michigan in early 1972. I recall how hard I worked on that speech—locking myself in the basement of my mother-in-law’s house while upstairs she cared for my baby son. I remember standing at the podium, shaking like crazy but delivering what I thought was a rousing political speech. Then, the question-and-answer period. A young man far back in the auditorium raised his hand. “Ms. Lappé,” he asked, “what is the difference between long grain and short grain brown rice?” In the 1975 edition of this book, I described my reaction:

I wilted. I had wanted to convey the felt-sense of how our diet relates each of us to the broadest questions of food supply for all of humanity. I had wanted to convey the way in which economic factors rather than natural agricultural ones have determined land and food use. Was I doing just the opposite? Was I helping people to close in on themselves, on their own bodies’ needs, instead of using the information to help them relate to global needs?

Five years later, in 1980, before I was to give a lecture at the University of Minnesota, a man approached me. “I have an apology to make to you,” he said. “I’ve been waiting for eight years to make it in person.
I
was that student at the University of Michigan who asked you the difference between long grain and short grain brown rice. I just wanted you to know that, although I am still eating well,
Diet for a Small Planet
also launched me into a broader social commitment. I didn’t get stuck—as you thought I did.”

You can imagine my surprise. We both laughed hard. And then it dawned on me that, yes, the circle was complete. It was time to do the tenth anniversary edition. It was time to chronicle the change that took me from a narrow, personal concern to the courage to face the bigger questions—questions not so easy to define as the differences among rice varieties.

Part I
Recipe for a
Personal Revolution

1.
An Entry Point

N
O ONE HAS
been more astonished than I at the impact of
Diet for a Small Planet
. It was born as a one-page handout in the late 1960s, and became a book in 1971. Since then it has sold close to two million copies in a half dozen languages. What I’ve discovered is that many more people than I could ever have imagined are looking for the same thing I was—a first step.

Mammoth social problems, especially global ones like world hunger and ecological destruction, paralyze us. Their roots seem so deep, their ramifications endless. So we feel powerless. How can
we
do anything? Don’t we just have to leave these problems to the “experts”? We try to block out the bad news and hope against hope that somewhere someone who knows more than we do has some answers.

The tragedy is that this totally understandable feeling—that we must leave the big problems to the “experts”—lies at the very root of our predicament, because the experts are those with the greatest stake in the status quo. Schooled in the institutions of power, they take as given many patterns that must change if we are to find answers. Thus, the solutions can come only from people who are less “locked-in”—ordinary people like you and me. Only when we discover that we have both the capacity and the right to participate in making society’s important decisions will solutions emerge. Of this I am certain.

But how do we make this discovery?

The world’s problems appear so closely interwoven that there is no point of entry. Where do we begin when everything seems to touch everything else? Food, I discovered, was just the tool I needed to crack the seemingly impenetrable facade. With food as my grounding point I could begin to see meaning in what before was a jumble of frightening facts—and over the last ten years I’ve learned that my experience has been shared by thousands of others. Learning about the politics of food “not only changed my view of the world, but spurred me on to act upon my new vision,” Sally Bachman wrote me from New York.

To ask the biggest questions, we can start with the most personal—what do we eat? What we eat is within our control, yet the act ties us to the economic, political, and ecological order of our whole planet. Even an apparently small change—consciously choosing a diet that is good both for our bodies and for the earth—can lead to a series of choices that transform our whole lives. “Food had been a major teacher in my life,” Tina Kimmel of Alamosa, California, wrote me.

The process of change is more profound, I’m convinced, than just letting one thing lead to the next. In the first edition of this book I wrote,

Previously when I went to a supermarket, I felt at the mercy of our advertising culture. My tastes were manipulated. And food, instead of being my most direct link with the nurturing earth, had become mere merchandise by which I fulfilled my role as a “good” consumer.

Feeling victimized, I felt powerless. But gradually I learned that every choice I made that aligned my daily life with an understanding of how I wanted things to be made me feel more powerful. As I became more convincing to myself, I was more convincing to other people. I
was
more powerful.

So while many books about food and hunger appeal to guilt and fear, this book does not. Instead, I want to offer you power. Power, you know, is not a dirty word!

Here’s how it began for me …

In 1969 I discovered that half of our harvested acreage went to feed livestock. At the same time, I learned that for every 7 pounds of grain and soybeans fed to livestock we get on the average only 1 pound back in meat on our plates. Of all the animals we eat, cattle are the poorest converters of grain to meat:
it takes 16 pounds of grain and soybeans to produce just 1 pound of beef in the United States today
.

The final blow was discovering that much of what I had grown up believing about a healthy diet was false. Lots of protein is essential to a good diet, I thought, and the only way to get enough is to eat meat at virtually every meal. But I learned that, on the average, Americans eat twice the protein their bodies can even use. Since our bodies don’t store protein, what’s not used is wasted. Moreover, I learned that the “quality” of meat protein, better termed its “usability,” could be matched simply by combining certain plant foods. Thus, the final myth was exploded for me.

I was shocked. While the world’s experts talked only of scarcity, I had just discovered the incredible waste built into the American meat-centered diet. And nutritionally it was all unnecessary! My world view flipped upside down. Along with many others in the late 1960s, I had started out asking: “How close are we to the limit of the earth’s capacity to provide food for everyone?” Then it began to dawn on me that I was part of a system actively
reducing
that capacity.

Hidden Resources Plowed into Our Steaks

What I failed to appreciate fully ten years ago was that the production system that generates our grain-fed-meat diet not only wastes our resources but helps destroy them, too. Most people think of our food-producing resources, soil and water, as renewable, so how can they be destroyed? The answer is that because our production system encourages farmers to continually increase their output, the natural cycle of renewal is undermined. The evidence for this is presented in
Part II
, but here are a few facts to give you some sense of the threats to our long-term food security:

• Water costs
. Producing just one pound of steak uses 2,500 gallons of water—as much water as my family uses in a month! Livestock production, including water for U.S. crops fed to livestock abroad, accounts for about half of all water consumed in the United States, and increasingly that water is drawn from underground lakes, some of which are not significantly renewed by rainfall. Already irrigation sources in north Texas are running dry, and within decades the underground sources will be drawn down so far that scientists estimate a third of our current irrigation will be economically unfeasible.

• Soil erosion
. Corn and soybeans, the country’s major animal feed crops, are linked to greater topsoil erosion than any other crops. In some areas topsoil losses are greater now than during the Dust Bowl era. At current rates, the loss of topsoil threatens the productivity of vital farmland within our lifetime.

• Energy costs
. To produce a pound of steak, which provides us with 500 calories of food energy, takes 20,000 calories of fossil fuel, expended mainly in producing the crops fed to livestock.

• Import dependency
. Corn alone uses about 40 percent of our major fertilizers. U.S. agriculture has become increasingly dependent on imported fertilizer, which now accounts for 20 percent of our ammonia fertilizer and 65 percent of our potash fertilizer. And even though the United States is the world’s leading producer of phosphates for fertilizer, at current rates of use we will be importing phosphates, too, in just 20 years.

A Symbol and a Symptom

The more I learned, the more I realized that a grain-fed-meat diet is not the cause of this resource waste, destruction, and dependency. The “Great American Steak Religion” is both a symbol and a symptom of the underlying logic of our production system—a logic that makes it self-destructive.

Our farm economy is fueled by a blind production imperative. Because farmers are squeezed between rising production costs and falling prices for their crops, their profits per acre fall steadily—by 1979 hitting one-half of what they had been in 1945 (figures adjusted for inflation). So
just to maintain the same income
farmers must constantly increase production—planting more acres and reaping higher yields, regardless of the ecological consequences. And they must constantly seek new markets to absorb their increasing production. But since hungry people in both the United States and the third world have no money to buy this grain, what can be done with it?

One answer has been to feed about 200 million tons of grain, soybean products, and other feeds to domestic livestock every year. Another, especially in the last ten years, has been to sell it abroad. While most Americans believe our grain exports “feed a hungry world,”
two-thirds
of our agricultural exports actually go to livestock—and the hungry abroad cannot afford meat. The trouble is that, given the system we take for granted, this all appears logical. So perhaps to begin we must stop taking so much for granted and ask, who really benefits from our production system? Who is hurt, now and in the future?

In this book I seek to begin to answer such questions.

Diet for an Abundant Planet

The worst and best thing about my book is its title. It is catchy and easy to remember. (Although one irate customer stomped into my parents’ bookstore to complain that she’d thought she was buying a gardening book,
Diet for a Small Plant
.
^*
) But the title is also misleading. To some it connotes scarcity: because the planet is so “small,” we must cut back our consumption. So when my next book,
Food First
,
^†
came out, with the subtitle
Beyond the Myth of Scarcity
, many people thought I had done an about-face. Yes, my thinking evolved, but for me the message of
Diet for a Small Planet
is abundance, not scarcity. The issue is how we use that abundance. Do we expand the kind of production which degrades the soil and water resources on which all our future food security rests? Do we then dispose of this production by feeding more and more to livestock? The answers lie in the political and economic order we create. The “small planet” image should simply remind us that what we eat helps determine whether our planet is too small or whether its abundance can be sustained and enjoyed by everyone. My book might better be called
Diet for an Abundant Planet
—now and in the future.

The Body-Wise Diet

Another part of the good news in this book is that what’s good for the earth turns out to be good for us, too. Increasingly, health scientists throughout the world recommend a plant-centered diet. They report that six of the ten leading causes of death in America are linked to the high fat/high sugar/low fiber diet embodied in the Great American Steak Religion. (See
Part III
,
Chapter 1
.)

For me, living a diet for a small planet has meant increased physical vitality. And the hundreds of letters I have received testify that my experience is not unique.

The Traditional Diet

Over the years many people have been surprised when meeting the author of
Diet for a Small Planet
. I am not the pray-haired matron they expect. Nor am I a back-to-nature purist. (Sometimes I even wear lipstick!) But mouths really drop open when I explain that I am not a vegetarian. Over the last ten years I’ve hardly ever served or eaten meat, but I try hard to distinguish what I advocate from what people think of as “vegetarianism.”

Most people think of vegetarianism as an ethical stance against the killing of animals, unconventional, and certainly untraditional. But what I advocate is the return to the traditional diet on which our bodies evolved. Traditionally the human diet has centered on plant foods, with animal foods playing a supplementary role. Our digestive and metabolic system evolved over millions of years on such a diet. Only very recently have Americans, and people in some other industrial countries, begun to center their diets on meat. So it is the meat-centered diet—and certainly the grain-fed-meat-centered diet—that is the fad.

I hope that my book will be of value to the growing numbers of people who refuse to eat meat in order to discourage the needless suffering of animals. But I believe that its themes can make sense to just about anyone, whether or not they are prepared to take an ethical stance against the killing of animals for human food.

Many counter the vegetarian’s position against killing animals for human food by pointing out that in many parts of the world livestock play a critical role in sustaining human life: only livestock can convert grasses and waste products into meat. Where good cropland is scarce, this unique ability of grazing animals may be crucial to human survival. Intellectually, I agree. But I say “intellectually” because, although using livestock to convert inedible substances to protein for human beings makes sense to me, I found that once I stopped cooking meat, it no longer appealed to me. If all our lives we handle flesh and blood, maybe we become inured to it. Once I stopped, I never wanted to start again. But this view is a strictly personal one, and it is not the subject of this book.

An Escape or a Challenge?

For many who have come to appreciate the profound political and economic roots of our problems, a change in diet seems like a pretty absurd way to start to change things. Such personal decisions are seen simply as a handy way to diminish guilt feelings, while leaving untouched the structural roots of our problems. Yes, I agree—such steps
could
be exactly this and nothing more.

But taking ever greater responsibility for our individual life choices could be one way to change us—heightening our power and deepening our insight, which is exactly what we need most if we are ever to get to the roots of our society’s problems. Changing the way we eat will not change the world, but it may begin to change us, and then we can be part of changing the world.

Examining any of our consumption habits has value only to the degree that the effort is both liberating and motivating. Learning why our grain-fed-meat diet developed and learning what does constitute a healthy and satisfying diet have been both for me. In one area of my life I began to feel that I could make real choices—choices based on knowledge of their consequences. Second, the more I learned about why the American diet developed to include not only more grain-fed meat but more processed food, the more I began to grasp the basic flaws in the economic ground rules on which our entire production system is based. I learned, for example, that the prices guiding our resource use are make-believe—they in no way tell us the real resource costs of production. Moreover, I came to see how our production system inevitably treats even an essential ingredient of life itself—food—as just another commodity, totally divorcing it from human need. Slowly it became clear that until the production of our basic survival goods is consciously tied to the fulfillment of human need there can be no solution to the tragedy of needless hunger that characterizes our time—even here in the United States.