Eating used to be a simple act, often involving food grown locally or purchased from nearby farms. However, the modern food system has become increasingly complex, raising concerns about environmental impact, food distribution, and personal health. "Diet for a Small Planet," a groundbreaking book by Frances Moore Lappé, addresses these issues and provides a framework for making more sustainable and ethical food choices.
The Core Message: Challenging Conventional Wisdom
Published in 1971, "Diet for a Small Planet" challenged prevailing beliefs about food and nutrition. Lappé argued that world hunger was not due to a lack of food production, but rather to ineffective food policies and unequal distribution. The book questioned the efficiency of meat production and promoted the potential of plant-based diets as a solution to global food challenges.
The Protein Myth and the Power of Plant-Based Diets
One of the book's most influential contributions was its debunking of the "protein myth." Lappé challenged the notion that meat was the only source of high-quality protein, introducing the concept of protein combining. While she initially stressed the importance of combining plant-based foods to create a complete protein profile, she later acknowledged that eating a variety of plant foods throughout the day provides all the necessary amino acids.
The book emphasizes the environmental impact of meat consumption, explaining how meat production is more resource-intensive than growing plants. It contributes to deforestation, water scarcity, and climate change. The majority of grain grown worldwide is used to feed livestock rather than people.
Environmental Impact of Food Choices
Choosing how much meat to eat, and the way it was produced, is one of the most environmentally significant choices we make. The UN reports that the meat production sector is responsible for about 15 percent of greenhouse gas emissions.
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Producing food requires about 40 percent of the world's surface area. In the USA, about 40 percent of the food produced is wasted, along with all the water, soil, fossil fuels, chemical fertilizers and pesticides, packaging, human labor, and habitat that went into it. Landfills receive more food waste than any other single material - over one-fifth of US trash by volume, according to the EPA.
Climate change is impacting food production in the USA, but for now, our wealth gives us other options. Around the world, our neighbors are not so fortunate.
Practical Steps Towards a Sustainable Diet
"Diet for a Small Planet" offers practical advice for adopting a more sustainable diet, including:
- Reducing meat and dairy consumption: Reevaluating your meat and dairy consumption (going vegan - or heading in that direction - can reduce greenhouse gases by 75%).
- Avoiding palm oil: Be on the lookout for - and avoid - palm oil. They're cutting down rainforest to grow it, and it's in half the stuff at the grocery store.
- Reducing food waste: Know what’s in your fridge, freezer and pantry.
The Importance of Pollinators
Insects pollinate up to one-third of our food crops. Yet, up to 80 percent of non-pest insects have disappeared from the ecosystem over the past several decades. One of the main culprits for habitat loss is our penchant for lawns. These closely cropped expanses of monoculture grass occupy 40 million acres in the USA, requiring 9 billion gallons of irrigation water per day, and creating about 10 pounds of CO2 per hour to mow. So one remedy for the disappearance of insects is to turn our lawns into habitat, saving time, money, carbon-and bugs!
Diet for a Small Planet: A Call to Action
"Diet for a Small Planet" is a call to action for individuals, communities, and policymakers to rethink our food choices. It challenges us to recognize the impact of our diets on the world and to make more environmentally and socially responsible choices. It provides a compelling argument for the benefits of a plant-based diet, both for our own health and the health of the planet.
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Legacy and Continued Relevance
Fifty years after its publication, "Diet for a Small Planet" remains relevant and up-to-date. The book's message continues to resonate in discussions about sustainable diets, climate change, and food security.
The book uncovers the seriousness of the predicament in which we are finding ourselves today, and describes how our food choices have contributed to it. Moore Lappé states that to partake in a diet so high in processed foods-especially in overly-processed, poorly raised meats-as is found in the typical the American diet, is to partake in one of the biggest experiments in human nutrition. The typical American eats twice the amount of daily recommended protein. Our meat-heavy diet experiment, as she calls it, not only seems to be hurting humans but is also hurting the planet.
Yet the book does not leave the reader without hope. Instead, the author points to a new way ahead-a way to pioneer into the future decades to preserve the health of humans and the planet for future generations. She provides practical answers to these pressing issues and points to a “certain kind of hope,” which she describes in detail.
The crowning truth of the book rings clear: it doesn’t have to be this way. Fixing our plates alone won’t necessarily provide all the changes we need, but it is the best road we have to a better life for ourselves and future generations.
The Inefficiency of Meat Production
When Frances Moore Lappé called cattle “a protein factory in reverse” in her 1971 book Diet for a Small Planet, she wasn’t just arguing that meat was an inefficient way to feed humans, though it is. Nor did she set out to turn millions of Americans vegetarian and help the natural foods movement find its political voice, though she did. For the 26-year-old researcher, Diet was an act of radical hope.
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Lappé calculated that hunger wasn’t caused by a scarcity of food. It was a problem of food distribution. If we grew crops for humans instead of for livestock, ethanol, or high-fructose corn syrup, the United States alone could feed every famine-afflicted person on earth.
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 average only 1 pound back in meat… 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… 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.
Land usage
A low-fat vegetarian diet is very efficient in terms of how much land is needed to support it. This deduction stems from the findings of their new study, which concludes that if everyone in New York state followed a low-fat vegetarian diet, the state could directly support almost 50 percent more people, or about 32 percent of its population, agriculturally.
"A person following a low-fat vegetarian diet, for example, will need less than half (0.44) an acre per person per year to produce their food," said Christian Peters, M.S. '02, Ph.D. '07, a Cornell postdoctoral associate in crop and soil sciences and lead author of the research. The reason is that fruits, vegetables and grains must be grown on high-quality cropland, he explained. Meat and dairy products from ruminant animals are supported by lower quality, but more widely available, land that can support pasture and hay.
"The key to conserving land and other resources with our diets is to limit the amount of meat we eat and for farmers to rely more on grazing and forages to feed their livestock," said Jennifer Wilkins, senior extension associate in nutritional sciences who specializes in the connection between local food systems and health and co-authored the study with Gary Fick, Cornell professor of crop and soil sciences.