Hope's Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet (2 page)

Acknowledgments

In the first edition of this book I included a special acknowledgment to my parents. As I appreciate them even more today than I did ten years ago, I would like to repeat those words: “I wish to thank my parents, John and Ina Moore, who, by having always set the finest example of critical openness to new ideas, made this inquiry possible.”

I am indebted to Nick Allen, of the Institute’s staff, for his support for this project from its inception and for his inspired and very significant editorial contribution.

Mary Sinclair, Cindy Crowner, and Perri Sloane each contributed cooking talent and other skills to improve the recipes in this book and test the many contributions sent in from around the country. For testing and improving recipes I also appreciate the help of Elizabeth Rivers, Julia Rosenbaum, Claire Greensfelder, Myra Levy, Charles Varon, Katie Allen, Vince Bielski, Elinor Blake, Maria Torres McKay, and the Davis, California, Food for All group—especially Laurie Rubin.

Special thanks go to Jennifer Lovejoy and JoNina Abron, who handled many of my Institute responsibilities so that I could be free to work on this book.

Debbie Fox was the loyal and talented typist of most of this manuscript. Her good humor and her willingness to put up with umpteen drafts will never be forgotten.

Research for this book depended on the help of dozens of people. My special thanks go to Sandy Fritz, Jenny Robinson, and John Moore. I also appreciated the help of Mort Hantman, Tracey Helser, Jim Wessel, Erik Schapiro, David Kinley, Vince Bielski, and Fred Brauneck.

This book benefited greatly from the valuable suggestions of friends and colleagues around the country. I am indebted to Michael Jacobson of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, Marty Strange of the Center for Rural Affairs, William Shurtleff of the Soyfoods Center, to Judy Stone, Robert Greenstein, and Steve Daschle of the Project on Food Assistance and Poverty, to Risk Weissbourd, Cheryl Rogers, and Tom Joe of the Center for the Study of Welfare Policy of the University of Chicago, and to Bard Shollenberger of the Community Nutrition Institute. I also appreciate the time and thought given to this book by Joan Gussow, Nevin Scrimshaw, Isabel Contento, Keith Akers, Robin Hur, Alex Hershaft, Georg Borgstrom, Douglas McDonald, Donald R. Davis, Stan Winter, Jim Spearow, and V. James Rhodes.

I would also like to thank those to whom I am indebted for recipe sections in the first two editions of this book. Many of the recipes they contributed or helped to develop remain in this edition. First, Ellen Ewald who back in 1970 helped acquaint me with the unknown world of whole foods. Second, Susan Kanor whose special kitchen touch and hard work made developing the recipes for the second edition a great adventure.

For other recipes that I have retained in this new book, I am grateful to Barbara Peter, Carol Ackerman Albiani, Sandye Carroll, Diane Coleman, Nancy Posselt, Jackie Potts, Paul Prensky, Joy Gardner, Nancy Meister, Robin McFarlane, and Jamie Seymour.

For their ideas and editorial suggestions I also want to thank Joseph Collins, Charles Varon, Regina Fitzgerald, Jess Randall, and my parents, John and Ina Moore.

And I appreciate all those at the Institute who put up with me during the period of stress to meet this deadline: Gretta Goldenman, JoNina Abron, Joseph Collins, David Kinley, Jim Wessel, Nick Allen, Jess Randall, Annie Newman, and Diana Dillaway.

Finally, I am grateful to my agent, Joan Raines, for her strong support for my work.

Diet for a Small Planet
Twenty Years
Later—An Extraordinary Time to Be Alive

I
BEGIN THIS
introduction to the 20th anniversary edition of
Diet for a Small Planet
with a sense of awe, awe at the rapidity of change. In 1971, I—an intense 26-year-old in search of herself—sat long hours in the U.C. Berkeley library uncovering facts about the global food supply that turned my world upside down. At home in my dining room, working at my manual typewriter, I made seemingly endless protein calculations with a slide rule. And here I am twenty years later, tapping away on my Toshiba “lap top” preparing to FAX this chapter to my editor!

Yes, the pace of technological change has been breathtaking, but our change of consciousness has been yet more dramatic. We who were born in this century are the first generations to experience a perceptible quickening of historical time. The change you or I witness in a lifetime now exceeds what in previous centuries transpired over many, many generations. And we who were born after World II are the first to know that our choices count: They count on a global scale. They matter in evolutionary time. In our species’ fantastic rush toward “modernization” we obliterate millions of other species, transfigure the earth’s surface, and create climate-changing disruption of the upper atmosphere, all powerfully altering the path of evolution.

More personally, I feel the quickening of time in realizing that what was heresy, what was “fringe,” when I wrote
Diet for a Small Planet
just twenty years ago is now common knowledge.

Then, the notion that human beings could do well without meat was heretical. Today, the medical establishment acknowledges the numerous benefits of eating low on the food chain.

Then, anyone who questioned the American diet’s reliance on beef—since cattle are the most wasteful converters of grain to meat—was perceived as challenging the American way of life (especially, when that someone came from Fort Worth, Texas—“Cowtown, USA”). Today, the expanding herds of cattle worldwide are not only recognized as poor plant-to-meat converters but are documented contributors to global climate change. They’re responsible for releasing enormous quantities of methane into the atmosphere, contributing to global warming. Moreover, commercial invasion of the South and Central American rainforests now implicates cattle ranching in the one-and-one-half acre
per second
destruction of the remaining rainforests worldwide.

Then, anyone who questioned industrial agriculture—fossil fuel and chemically dependent—was seen as a naive “back to the lander.” To challenge industrial agriculture was to question efficiency itself and to wish us all back into the fields at hard labor. Today, the National Academy of Sciences acknowledges the threat of agricultural chemicals
¹
and even the U.S. Department of Agriculture reports that the small family farm is at least as efficient as the superfarms undermining America’s rural communities.
²

Peeling the Proverbial Onion

What an extraordinary time to be alive! More pointedly, in my case, what an extraordinary time to be middle-aged—to perceive, because I have lived most of half a century, the quickening of time.

And with this awareness of humanity’s power to remake, to unmake, our living environment, has come a radical awakening across many disciplines. We thus live in an era of conscious searching, of profound rethinking. It is, I’m convinced, a time of opportunity that may come only once in many centuries. And so, while fear may grip me often, I also feel incredibly privileged to be alive
now:
a time of exploring fundamental questions about who we are and what the role of our species is to be on this lovely planet.

In
Part I
, you will read “my journey,” the path that took me from being the struggling 26-year-old in the U.C. library to being the co-founder of the Institute for Food and Development Policy. In 1981, when I wrote that chapter, my mission was clear. I knew what I had to do. But as the 1980s progressed, I became less sure, and that uncertainty pushed me forward.

Not surprisingly perhaps, I’ve been thinking in food metaphors all my life—the most persistent being that of the humble onion. I feel I’ve spent twenty years peeling away at it! Let me now explain by taking you with me through its several layers.

In one sense, what motivated me to write
Diet for a Small Planet
was simple outrage. We feed almost half the world’s grain to livestock, returning only a fraction in meat—while millions starve. It confounds all logic. Yet the pattern has intensified. Vast resources move at an accelerating rate toward the production of exports from lands on which people go hungry. Since the 1970s, the rates of growth in food production have been lower in the basic grains and tubers eaten by poor, hungry people than in fruits, vegetables, oil seeds, and feedgrains for meat, eaten largely by the planet’s already well-fed minority.

My mission was to awaken people to this simple fact: Hunger is human made. I sought to liberate people from the myth that nature’s to blame for the massive deprivation hundreds of millions of people now experience. In writing
Food First
and establishing the Institute for Food and Development Policy in the mid-seventies, however, my mission became more ambitious.

I sought, with my colleagues, to explain
how
human-made institutions create needless suffering. In books like
Aid as Obstacle, World Hunger: Twelve Myths, Betraying the National Interest
, and
Taking Population Seriously
we described the growing concentration of decision making—from the village level, to the national level, to the level of international commerce and finance. Fewer and fewer people make decisions that have life-and-death consequences for the rest of us. The problem is not scarcity of land or food, I became fond of saying: it is a
scarcity of democracy
.

But, for this phrase to make any sense, I had to probe to the heart and soul of democracy. Surely to have any meaning at all, democracy must be more than a set of formal rules and procedures. After all, many countries—the Philippines, India, and many of the Central American countries—have all the trappings of democracy. Yet their people live in misery. Democracy had to be more—is it less a set of rules, I wondered, than a very human process? A process grounded in several principles that can only be realized by people themselves? First is, perhaps, the
accountability of leadership
to those who have to live with the consequences of their decisions. Second, the related principle of
shared power
, perhaps never equally shared but at least shared to the degree that no one is left powerless, unable to protect themselves and those they love.

In so defining democracy, it became clear to me that wherever there is hunger, democracy has not been fulfilled.

But the better I got at describing the problem, the more intense my frustration. What were the solutions? I could describe the need for greater democracy, making possible, for example, the reforms necessary for the rural poor in the third world to achieve food security and reduce the size of their families. I could describe policy shifts that could do away with homelessness here. But without a practical path for getting there, all my descriptions and prescriptions left me profoundly unsatisfied. I had always enjoyed giving public talks but my enjoyment began to wane. I realized my audiences wanted more from me. And I did not feel able to give it.

I had to go deeper. In the early 1980s, I started reading widely again in political theory and social change. I traveled to countries I thought might have something important to teach. I visited Europe to study the movement for worker participation there. I went to Sweden to examine the much-debated proposal to democratize and decentralize ownership of large industry. In Yugoslavia I studied the troubled path toward worker self-management. I ventured to China to look at its dramatic restructuring of agriculture.

By the mid-eighties my sense of possibilities had been greatly expanded, but I had also come more firmly than ever to believe that no program—no matter how “correct”—could address the problems of our communities and our planet unless many, many more people believed themselves capable of participating in the changes it suggested.

So I was forced to peel away another layer, to go still deeper, again asking why? What blocks us from believing in the possibility of such change—change in the direction of more genuine democracy—and engaging ourselves in the process of bringing it about?

What could possibly be powerful enough to allow us to tolerate and condone as a society what as individuals we abhor? Few of us would allow a child to suffer deprivation in our midst. Yet as a society we do just that. In the United States, we allow one quarter of our children to be born into poverty, which results in twice the chance of their being physically stunted compared to middle-class children. And what could be powerful enough to allow us to destroy majestic redwoods, to dredge breathtaking coastlines, to drain rich wetlands—to obliterate that which has inspired feelings of security, thanksgiving, and awe in human beings over eons of time?

Perhaps, I thought, it’s that as individuals we have come to believe we have neither the capacity nor responsibility to do otherwise, to do other than acquiesce to forces beyond our control.

We are in large measure who we believe ourselves to be
. I had always believed in the power of ideas to shape our reality, but this concept took on new meaning for me as the 1980s progressed. I came to see that what we believe ourselves to be reflects assumptions so taken for granted that they’ve become like an invisible ether. We live unconscious of their power. I became convinced that as we approach the 21st century, we remain captured in a set of ideas about ourselves which is a legacy of at least three centuries. This may sound strange, especially from someone arguing the quickening of change. But striking also is continuity, continuity in our ideas of ourselves that we now must consciously examine.

The Power of Ideas

To make myself clearer, let me take you the next step in my own quest, peeling away another layer in my “onion” of discovery.

I wanted to bring to the surface the “big ideas”—the assumptions about who we are and the nature of our ties to one another—that lie behind our acceptance of the social structures in which we live. I had become convinced that there was only one thing strong enough to explain our behavior—behavior that was needlessly destroying millions of lives each year from hunger and disease, and undermining the integrity of our fragile planet as well. It is the power of ideas.
But how do we get at those ideas?

My answer in part became: “through talk.” We must talk in order to surface underlying assumptions, to nudge ourselves and each other to reflect upon the reasons
why
we think and act as we do. We must talk in order to discover whether our ideas have simply become unexamined habits of mind, habits which thwart instead of aid effective living.

So I decided to stop writing tracts about just what I believe. I wanted to engage those who had never and would never pick up one of my existing books—books they might dismiss because they challenge the status quo.

I wanted to write a dialogue in order to provoke dialogue—to get people talking. So I set out to write in two voices. One voice would speak from the inherited assumptions that make up the dominant, modern worldview; the assumptions that limit the very questions we’re allowed to ask. The other voice would be my own, struggling to articulate an emerging alternative. These voices in print became
Rediscovering America’s Values
, published in 1989.

In the years of research required to write
Rediscovering
, I became ever surer that indeed we all do carry unexamined mental baggage, now centuries in the making. This metaphorical baggage we now need to put through the “security check.” We must open up this baggage, examining it in light of its consequences and for its security threat to our future.

In considering my case, please excuse my audacity in capturing a few centuries in a few sentences.

In the 17th century, René Descartes located the human soul in its mechanical vehicle, the human body. And Isaac Newton offered an exciting metaphor for understanding the interaction of those mechanical vehicles. He discovered laws of motion governing the physical universe. Having just given up on the ever-so-comforting notion of an interventionist God—one able to put the human house aright—we were left with a frightening void. “Ah ha!” we thought, “there must be parallel laws governing the social world governing our interaction with one another.”

And what became known as the “mechanistic world view” began to take shape, developed by Western thinkers from the 17th century onward. Dazzling, uninterrupted breakthroughs in technological innovation—from the spinning ginny to steel mills, from bull dozers to dishwashers—permeated ever more aspects of our lives: the ubiquitous presence of machines confirming our sense that indeed the world can best be understood in mechanical terms.

Once absorbing this mechanistic world view, it was easy to assume that parallel laws governed economic life. Our challenge was to identify them, let them freely function and,
voilá
, an economic order would fall neatly into place! Human beings are handily off the hook. No moral reasoning required; the job would be done for us.

Critically important, in the mechanistic world view, everything can best
be
understood by examining its parts. Human beings become distinct “atoms”—insular beings trapped inside our separate egos. Our radical individualism thus does not result from any moral failing; it derives from
our atomistic nature
. We’re constitutionally unable to put ourselves in each others’ shoes. We can identify only our own distinct interests. But that’s not really so bad after all—for private interests serve, conveniently, to drive the giant social machine. No one put it better than Helvetius in the 18th century: