Diet for a Small Planet

"This book was a real game-changer for my generation. When I read that book, I had not thought about any of these things – the fact that we were feeding 20 pounds of useable protein to a steer, to get one pound of useable beef. It absolutely galvanised me and many people like me. It’s a book that was ahead of its time, the kind of thing people are doing now, and thinking about now. But when this book came out in the early 1970s, it was revolutionary. I feel this is a book that hasn’t gotten its due. It was very important for the Berkeley Food Movement – so much of it came out of Frances Moore Lappé, who brought the politics of food to the attention of the anti-war generation. I think it was, in many ways, responsible for much of what happened later. And it’s a cookbook. Exactly, and it’s definitely not vegan. To me it’s really interesting to take stock and look at where we were – this was almost 40 years ago – and how much things have changed. People are much more aware now. Her recipes are very fat-heavy, very dependent on cheese and eggs. Probably if she were doing those recipes today, they would be vegan. Because these days many of the young people who are food activists tend to be vegan . I don’t know this for a fact, but my instinct is that a modern version of the book would be vegan. In fact things have got worse. She was the canary in the mine. We didn’t pay enough attention. The industrialisation of food and the vertical integration of agriculture just galloped forward. She’s not even talking about things like confinement animal facilities. The difference is that the political food movement was a fringe movement in 1970 and now it’s very mainstream. Frances Moore Lappé was sounding a call to battle which was not picked up for three decades. So now you have people like Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser saying, “Wait a minute! It’s time we really started taking a look at this!” And their timing was right. People were ready to hear it. It’s remarkable. This book was written before the obesity crisis, before the diabetes crisis. The American government policy on what we supported and subsidised in agriculture was a social experiment on a whole generation of children. Now we’re paying the price for that. She pointed out we were going to have problems and we do. She says eat a plant-based diet, it’s better for you. Forty years later Michael Pollan writes Food Rules and says essentially the same thing. Good for them! I have to admit I’ve never had a Fruit Loop. Are they really loathesome? I don’t know. If you really taste a doughnut, it’s pretty disgusting. They taste of grease. I bought one a couple weeks ago – I hadn’t had one in a really long time. I thought the only way you can really eat this is if you’re not paying attention. The same goes for Coca-Cola. If you really taste it, if it’s not ice cold, I don’t think anyone could get it down. I think part of what happens is that if you start training yourself to actually taste food, you turn away from a lot of stuff. A lot of the recipes are actually quite nice. There’s one called “Rice con queso” that I haven’t had in years, but I used to love it. Rice and beans and cheese and ricotta. It was pretty heavy – I would probably modify it now – but we used to make it all the time in the 1970s. I can taste it in my mind. Delicious. Oh God no! Are you kidding? I couldn’t live without butter. Butter is probably my single favourite food. No, not at all."