Diet For a Small Planet argued that plant-centered eating is better for ourselves and our planet. Fifty years later, that idea is still shaping how we eat.
Published in Bon Appétit / By Jonathan Kauffman / March 23, 2021
Illustration By Clay Hickson
Go back in time with us to 1971, the year that changed the way we eat forever.
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.
From 1968 to 1971 young Americans like Lappé had witnessed the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, civil unrest that ripped through dozens of cities, and the violent suppression of activists like the Black Panthers and the Kent State protesters. The futile carnage of the Vietnam War was endless, and their generation were the ones killing and dying.
Yet this generation, weaned on the civil rights movement and President Johnson’s War on Poverty, were caught up too in the intoxicating possibility of change. After graduating college Lappé worked as a community organizer in Philly. Then she moved to California and enrolled in UC Berkeley’s School of Social Welfare but dropped out, convinced it was pointless to try to alleviate poverty and hunger if we couldn’t identify their causes.
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