(Cook)book review: Diet for a Small Planet 16 March 2007 4:13 pm
Posted by Tracy in : Warren Belasco, books, cooking, eating, environment, eugene, identity, people, politics, reviews, school, sundance, sustainability, vegan, vegetarian, work , trackbackHoly monkey gods, y’all. Even the title of this entry should make it clear that I’m still a bit bewildered by my recent reading of Frances Moore Lappé’s 1971 classic, Diet for a Small Planet
Diet for a Small Planet
I honestly don’t remember when or how I got my slightly battered used bookstore copy of the 1975 “completely revised and updated” edition of Frances Moore Lappé’s 1971 classic, Diet for a Small Planet. What I do know is that I’ve had it for years, but before the book report assignment I had never read more than a few pages of it at a time, let alone finished the darn thing (as much as it’s ever possible to finish any book with recipes in it, that is). Diet is one of those books that I’ve always meant to get around to reading eventually, but every time I tried, it always had sort of a homework feel to it, so it’s appropriate that it took an actual school assignment to motivate me all the way through it. Even before I got my personal copy, my family had one in the house I grew up in — in fact, my dad’s brother, my uncle Thys, was college suitemates with Frances Moore Lappé’s now ex-husband, Marc Lappé, so Diet has always had a sort of “friend of the family” feel to it, which only added to the sense of obligation I felt about reading it. Furthermore, my uncle Thys lives in Ithaca, New York, home of the Moosewood Restaurant, source of some of my very favorite cookbooks of all time, which just happen to be lacto-ovo-pesco-vegetarian — and Diet for a Small Planet argues strongly for “eating less meat (or none!)” (text from the back cover of my copy). While I have no idea if and sort of doubt that Frances Moore Lappé ever had anything to do with the Moosewood Collective (beyond writing books that may well have influenced its members), the two are nonetheless linked in my mind through my uncle. So I had strong, if somewhat confused, feelings about this book from well before I ever started reading it.
One final issue confusing my thoughts about this book even before I started reading it was the issue of vegetarianism, which (as mentioned earlier) Diet for a Small Planet advocates. I am not a vegetarian, but I eat a lot of vegetarian food. I even eat a lot of vegan food, and I have been a professional vegetarian and vegan cook for two years. I am very supportive of people who choose not to eat meat, especially for broader ethical reasons than personal health, because I agree with many criticisms of the meat industry, and the industrial food system of which it is a symptom. However, I personally do not believe that all meat-eating is unethical, and I very much want to support the production of ethically, sustainably raised animal products, including meat. So I consume such products when I can, but build my diet around non-animal sources the vast majority of the time, so much so that people — even close friends — often forget that I eat meat. (A side note on nomenclature: while I was working at Sundance, I learned trick of avoiding dietary identity politics and labels like vegetarian and vegan by asking, “Do you eat meat?” or “Do you eat dairy?” So useful. But I digress.) That said, I realize that my experiences are somewhat atypical: I live in an incredibly vegetarian-friendly environment, in part of my own making, and I believe that Frances Moore Lappé and Diet for a Small Planet played an important role in popularizing vegetarianism in the United States to the point where it is now possible for me to live in such a veg-friendly bubble. I don’t know the specifics of that role, but reading Diet and other vegetarian cookbooks of its time always makes me curious about the broader historical and cultural contexts in which they first appeared, but that’s a topic for much more writing and research (more on that in a bit). But enough of my personal background: on to the book, at last!
A Very Quick Summary
Diet for a Small Planet is actually several short books in one volume, tied together by the unifying theme of protein. It begins with a treatise on the political economy of agriculture, and in particular the production of foods that provide protein. In 1969, Lappé set out to research the causes of world hunger, and was shocked to discover that the problem was not food production, but rather food distribution (a recurring theme in my sustainable class). She found that although enough grains and legumes were being produced to feed the earth’s human population, staple commodity crops like corn and soybeans and so on were more profitably being fed to livestock for meat and dairy production. The first part of Diet for a Small Planet shares these findings and advocates eating less meat (or none) to boycott a food system that rewards what Lappé views as a scandalous level of waste and inefficiency, and suggests further action by providing lists of organizations involved in hunger relief, and suggested further readings, as avenues to broader social change. (In 1975, Lappé went on to found Food First, also known as the Institute for Food and Development Policy, a Bay Area nonprofit organization devoted to addressing the political and economic root causes of hunger. In class, we watched The Greening of Cuba, a Food First-produced documentary about how the whole island basically had to switch to organic agriculture in response to the U.S. embargo and the fall of the Soviet Union. It was pretty cool, but I digress.)
To support her call for vegetarianism, Lappé next examines the role of protein in human diet and nutrition, and the ways in which it can be obtained from non-meat sources (she includes fish as well as eggs and dairy, so vegans and vegetarians against killing animals for food, consider yourselves warned). She provides tables upon tables of nutritional values for various plant and animal foods in the body of the book, and more in appendices, including sample calculations. Finally, the last half or so of Diet for a Small Planet puts the first half’s theories about food to work in a cookbook, with recipes that provide examples of alternatives to meat-eating. The analytical sections are thoroughly researched and endnoted, in many cases from official U.N. or U.S. government publications cited as sources. All of these sections are thoroughly researched and footnoted; in the dedication, Lappé thanks “two professional home economists” who contributed recipes, as well as numerous friends and family members who tested dishes (Lappé xiv-xv). The 1975 Diet is a dense 400-odd pages, and it reads like a labor of love.
Let me point out one more time that I read the 1975 edition/revision of Diet for a Small Planet because that’s what I had at home. I wish I had read either the 1981 (tenth anniversary) edition or the 1991 (20th anniversary) edition instead, as apparently these are more devoted to global food politics and the environment, and less to defending the nutritional validity of vegetarian diets, but alas. In particular, the 1975 edition I read still emphasizes the theory of “protein complimentarity” — the goal, now discredited, of combining foods to match the combination of essential amino acids needed by the body. Over and over again, Lappé points out that while no food is a perfect source of protein, certain combinations of foods come close to matching the body’s amino acid use, and in fact some combinations of plant foods are as good as meat at providing the necessary nutrients, or better. More recent editions of Diet for a Small Planet, starting with the tenth anniversary revision published in 1981, explain that in fact there is little danger of protein deficiency in a plant-based diet that includes a reasonable variety of foods.
Comments
I did my best to read my copy of Diet for a Small Planet as a historical document and a product of its times, but in many cases I was left guessing as to what those times were. Our class and other readings helped me put things in context. For instance, after Prof. Martin suggested Lappé’s 2002 book Hope’s Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet
I wrote… because I had to: What I was learning was too shocking. All around me experts were predicting famine, saying we’d reached the earth’s limits to feed ourselves. More chemicals! Bigger farms! More technology! were the mantras of the day. Yet, in the basement university library where I had gone to pursue my curiosity as to how we might feed this small planet, I discovered that what I was hearing — the experts’ call to arms — was, frankly, wrong. Not only was there enough to feed us all; there was more than enough. Worse than that, the strategies touted to bring us plenty — the chemicals, the large-scale farms, the technology — might actually make the food crisis worse (Hope’s Edge 5-6).
Passages like this one in Hope’s Edge helped me understand the almost obsessive, urgent tone of Diet for a Small Planet. (I have a lot to learn about the history of food and food politics, but as far as I’m concerned that’s a very good thing.) At the time Diet was first written, the Green Revolution was still very much a work in progress, and it was unclear to what degree it would succeed. Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb came out in 1968 and predicted doom almost as loudly as the likes of Norman Borlaug proclaimed that technology could solve the problem of hunger once and for all. Neither of those viewpoints addresses the political economy of food, let alone the idea (recurring in this review and my sustainable agriculture class, including our guest lecture by Laurie Trieger, advocacy/outreach coordinator for Food for Lane County, which we toured on a field trip) that hunger and food insecurity are not a problem of lack of food, but rather a problem of lack of access to food. Diet for a Small Planet recognizes this fact, which is probably why I prefer its message, which boils down to: there’s enough for all of us, but we must learn to share. According to Warren Belasco’s fantastic Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food
As I mentioned before, in trying to read Diet for a Small Planet as a historical document, I often had a hard time trying to wrap my head around the assumptions it was trying to challenge. The book’s great (and to my mind, incredibly defensive-sounding) emphasis on combining complimentary proteins in non-meat foods suggests that Lappé was very concerned that her readers would not believe that a meatless diet could be healthy. Reading her repeated assurances that “no, really, a meal doesn’t have to have meat in it, you’ll be okay, really” and other efforts to separate the concept of protein from meat reminded me once again that I live in a very vegetarian-friendly bubble, and that many people still believe that meat and protein are synonymous. Protein complimentarity seems like a technique for mimicking the nutritional composition of meat, in much the same way that some of my least favorite vegetarian and vegan foods attempt to replicate meat products like hot dogs and hamburgers, or replace all animal ingredients with some form of processed soy. (Suffice it to say that I much prefer to cook like meat is irrelevant to my life, or at the very most an optional component of the occasional meal.) Now that I’ve mentioned it, soy turns up in quite a few of the recipes in Diet, ostensibly for nutritional protein-complimentarity reasons, but I wonder how much its use is also motivated by the fact that so much soy is used as animal fodder.
Which brings me to the subject of the recipes. Holy monkey gods, the recipes. Between the protein complimentarity and the recipes, I wonder if maybe Diet for a Small Planet set vegetarianism back almost as far as it shoved it forward, into the mainstream public eye. If the 1975 Diet for a Small Planet’s defensive tone about the nutritional validity of vegetarianism is bad, the food it proposes as vegetarian alternatives is even worse. Again, I wonder about the context in which these recipes first appeared, because optimistically I want to believe that I would be appalled by more mainstream offerings of the same period. These days I’m more likely to be turned off by mainstream, meat-heavy recipes than by vegetarian ones, so it’s entirely possible that pattern would be true for a sampling of early 1970s recipes as well… but then again, I do like the later Moosewood cookbooks better than their earlier works.
Before I had this book report as an impetus to really read Diet for a Small Planet, I had unsuccessfully attempted to read the introductory, analytical chapters, but even more unsuccessfully browsed through the recipes in the later part of the book in the hopes of finding some culinary inspiration there. Let’s just say that none struck, and leave it at that. Now, after having finally read those earlier chapters, the recipes make a little more sense. They suffer painfully from the author’s best earnest efforts to create dishes that provide optimal combinations of non-meat protein in agreement with protein complimentarity. Unfortunately, the optimum ratio of rice to beans (to provide an example of foods that provide a better mix of amino acids in combination than they do seperately) best-suited to providing protein is not necessarily the one I’d consider most delicious. At one point, Lappé writes about making a walnut-cheddar loaf for a birthday party and notes her relief that none of her guests will be able to compare her offering to Julia Child’s version of the same dish (Lappé 142-143). The passage makes me wince, and I’m hard-pressed to say what’s more painful: the thought of that food, or the author’s description, a weird mix of culinary insecurity and apologetic pride.
Conclusion
One last observation I haven’t mentioned yet is the way my copy of Diet for a Small Planet mentions the possible health benefits of eating less meat (or none) only a few times, in passing, almost as an afterthought — a striking contrast to contemporary vegetarian cookbooks and mainstream food trends in general, which are generally focused on individual choice and benefits rather than larger social or environmental responsibility. In her introduction to the 1975 revised edition, Lappé writes about her concern that readers would obsess about minute nutritional details and lose sight of the big picture — there’s enough food in the world, but a lot of it is used in really wasteful ways, like livestock feed, and our eating habits contribute to the food system, so personal choices matter. My guess is that the big picture is clearer in later editions of Diet for a Small Planet, without the distraction of protein complimentarity. I hope later editions also suffer less from the 1975 version’s painfully defensive tone, which I read as a response to the invisibility and obscurity of vegetarianism at that time. After the recipes, which now make more sense, that defensiveness was probably the single hardest part about reading Diet for a Small Planet — when I read something that assumes I don’t believe it, I start to doubt it, even if it’s something I agree with! Luckily, today, especially in my little bubble in Eugene, vegetarian food isn’t all defensiveness, all the time — it has continued to grow and spread in popularity and deliciousness since 1975, and for that I’m pretty sure everyone who eats it should be grateful to Frankie Lappé and Diet for a Small Planet, flaws and all.
Special TracyFood-only Afterword
For all my snarkiness about its tone and partially out-of-date nutritional information, I completely agree with the core message of Diet for a Small Planet — there’s enough food being grown in the world to feed everyone but a lot of it gets used in ways that are wasteful but profitable, like livestock feed, so eating less meat (or none) is a good thing to do, for reasons of politics, morals, ethics, economics, and health both personal and environmental — in fact, I have agreed with these ideas for a long time. It was honestly a little disconcerting to read a book that was so defensive about something that I’ve pretty much taken for granted for years. I’m still trying to understand the role played by this book in the fact that today I’m able to take for granted the nutritional and social and political significance of eating less meat (or none), and I think I’ll be pondering the cultural history of eating (less) meat (or none) for a while to come. Like I sort of said before, Diet for a Small Planet’s emphasis on the importance of individual food choices in a broader social, political, and economic context is really refreshing compared to most contemporary mainstream food trends, which are generally focused on individual choice and benefits to the exclusion of social, political, economic, or environmental responsibility.
I realize that “eating less meat (or none!)” is still a controversial subject for many people — a quick trip to the Eugene Public Library got me Living among meat eaters: the vegetarian’s survival handbook by Carol J. Adams, the author of The Sexual Politics of Meat. What I’ve read of it so far has made me really defensive; one of its theses seems to be that all meat-eaters are “blocked” vegetarians, and while I don’t think that’s true of me at all, I’m sure the author has a clever answer to that as well. I also picked up The Perfectly Contented Meat-Eater’s Guide to Vegetarianism: A Book for Those Who Really Don’t Want to Be Hassled About Their Diet
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