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10 February 1944—

Dietitian for a Small Planet

It’s a truism to observe that the planet is shrinking. Cyber-technology, supersonic transport, and growing economic interdependence now bind together what to earlier generations seemed to be remote regions of the world. The communities in which we now live are as global as they are local, and this shift calls for a reconsideration of familiar ways of living in the world.

One of the things that needs to be reexamined is the standard American diet. Per capita, we Americans consume nearly three hundred pounds of meat per year. For several generations now, our national dietary assumption has been that meat should be the centerpiece of every meal; the well-fed American family is a meat-eating family. Moreover, meat—beef, poultry, and pork—is affordable to families in nearly all income brackets. A food that not so terribly long ago was considered the prerogative of the wealthy is now enjoyed by the majority of people in America. Meat is the great democratizer.

But our meat-centered dietary culture was called into question in 1971 with the publication of Frances Moore Lappé’s Diet for a Small Planet. In her book, Lappé pointed out the enormous waste and extravagant cost of eating meat. Factory farming—the intensive cultivation of food-animals necessary to cater to the demand for meat—befouls land, water, and atmosphere. Farm land that otherwise could be used to grow food crops is instead used to cultivate the tens of thousands of tons of grain needed to feed factory-farmed livestock. Moreover, the return on the grain investment is poor: it takes up to sixteen pounds of grain to produce a single pound of meat.

There is, then, a huge but hidden domestic cost to America’s love affair with meat. But because the planet is smaller, dietary habits in this country cost other countries as well. The grain that we use to feed the animals we eat is more than enough to feed the world’s impoverished and hungry people. The problem of world hunger, argues Lappé, isn’t caused by lack of food so much as by the maldistribution and ill-use of food resources. In many senses, as the old saying goes, I am what I eat. But as Lappé points out, you are also what I eat, because my dietary habits affect the worldwide distribution of food resources. Whenever I eat, my food choices impact the international community.

Through her many books and lectures as well as through the work of the Institute for Food and Development Policy, which she cofounded in 1975, Lappé has been a tireless advocate of nonviolent dietary reform. Her work continues to be inspired by the fundamental conviction that a smaller planet requires an American dietary lifestyle friendly to people, the environment, and animals across the world.