Hope's Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet (7 page)

We Are the Realists

Some call such views unrealistic, visionary, or idealistic. I respond that it is we who are awakening to the crisis of our planet—and to our own power to make critical changes—who are the realists. Those who believe that our system of waste and destruction should continue are the dreamers. Yes,
we
are the realists. We want to face up to the terrible problems confronting the human race and learn what each of us can do right now. At the same time, we are also visionaries, because we have a vision of the direction in which we want our society to move. In
Part IV
you will meet some of the people I include in the “we” I’ve just used, people who are aligning more and more of their life choices in that direction. The lessons their lives embody inspire me. I hope that their insights and the resource guide I’ve included will be tools to help you take the next step in your own life.

My understanding has changed enormously since the 1975 edition of this book. Some say I realized my book’s thesis was “naïve.” Some claim that since the first edition of
Diet for a Small Planet
I have become more “political.” Others say I have shifted my emphasis away from what the individual should do toward a call for group action. All of these judgments contain some truth, but they are not the way
I
see it.

To explain how I do see it, I’ve written the next chapter—about my personal journey from desperate social worker to co-founder of an international food action center investigating the causes of hunger in a world of plenty. If I believe so much must change, I must be willing to change myself.

^*
Others in search of my book have told me that bookstore clerks pointed them toward the science-fiction department!

^†
Coauthor Joseph Collins, with Cary Fowler (Ballantine Books, 1979).

2.
My Journey

“H
OW
DID YOU
get interested in food? How did you come to write
Diet for a Small Planet
?” Countless times I have been asked these questions. Invariably I am frustrated with my answers. I never really get to explain. So, here it is. This is my chance.

I am a classic child of the 1960s. I graduated from a small Quaker college in 1966, a year of extreme anguish for many, and certainly for me: the war in Vietnam, the civil rights movement, the War on Poverty. That year was the turning point.

While I had supported the U.S. position on the Vietnam war for years, finally I became too uncomfortable merely accepting the government’s word. I set out to discover the facts for myself. Why were we fighting? I read everything I could find on U.S. government policy in Vietnam. Within a few weeks, my world began to turn upside down. I was in shock. I functioned, but in a daze. I had grown up believing my government represented me—my basic ideals. Now I was learning that “my” government was not mine at all.

From that state of shock grew feelings of extreme desperation. Our country seemed in such a terrible state that something had to be done,
now
, today, or all hope seemed lost. I wanted to work with those who were suffering the most, so I did what people like Tom Hayden suggested. For two years, 1967 and 1968, I worked as a community organizer in Philadelphia with a national nonprofit organization of welfare recipients—the Welfare Rights Organization. Our goal was to ensure that welfare recipients got what they were entitled to by law.

Most evenings I came home in tears. Perhaps I had helped someone get her full welfare payment, or forced a landlord to make a critical repair. But I realized that even if I succeeded each day in my immediate goal, I was in no way addressing the root causes of the suffering that was so evident to me. The woman I worked most closely with died of a heart attack at the age of forty-five. I was convinced she died of the stress of poverty.

During these years I became
more
desperate, not less. But I just kept on doing what I was doing, because I did not know what else to do.

In 1968 I ended up in graduate school, studying community organizing at the School of Social Work at the University of California at Berkeley. As part of my training, I worked on fair housing policies in Oakland. But this work did nothing to resolve my questions. I was becoming more miserable, more confused.

The Most Important Decision

Then, in the spring of 1969, I made the most important decision of my life (next to the decision to have children, that is): I vowed not to do
anything
to try to “change the world” until I understood why I had chosen one path instead of another, until I understood
how
my actions could attack the roots of needless suffering.

My first step was to drop out of graduate school. This decision was so agonizing it made me physically ill. I was petrified that people would ask me, “What do you do?” and I would have no answer. My identity had been “social worker.” Now I would have no identity.

Friends now tease me when I tell this story. They say, “People in the late 1960s in Berkeley would never have asked you what you ‘did.’ At most, people might have asked, ‘What are you into?’ ” But the truth was, I didn’t have an answer to that either.

So there I was, twenty-five years old and adrift. What would I do? In sixteen years of “learning” I had never known whether I had real interests of my own. Yes, I had pleased my teachers and professors. Yes, I had shed my southern accent in my first six months of college, to prove that I wasn’t an empty-headed southern female. But all that had been to prove something to others. If I wasn’t trying to please a teacher anymore, was there anything left? Any motivation? Any direction? I was skeptical—and afraid.

What gave me the courage to discover my own path? Two things. I knew I couldn’t go on as I was; I was just too miserable. At the same time, I was married to a person who gave me absolute emotional support. I was sure Marc would love me even if I never saved the world.

I started studying modern dance and reading political economy—books that attempted to explain the causes of poverty and underdevelopment. Very soon, after only a few months, I began to hone in on food.

Why food? In part I was influenced by the emerging ecology movement and the “limits to growth” consciousness. The first Earth Day was in 1970. Paul Ehrlich’s book
The Population Bomb
exploded during this same period, and books like
Famine 1975
appeared. Newspaper headlines were telling us (as they still are) that we had reached the limits of the earth’s ability to feed us all.

But part of the reason I chose to focus on food was more personal. I became aware of people around me in Berkeley eating differently from the way I did. Some of the foods I had never heard of—bulgur, soy grits, mung beans, tofu, buckwheat groats. What were all these strange things? I was attracted by the incredible variety of colors, aromas, textures. I remember devouring my first “natural foods” cookbook as if it were a novel. Barley, mushrooms, and dill together? Cheddar cheese, walnuts, and rice? How odd. What would that taste like?

Beyond the Food Battle

As I started experimenting, I found my entire attitude toward food changing. Food and I had always been in battle and had reached a stalemate at about ten pounds more than I really wanted to weigh. To hold that line I had to count calories and feel guilty about what I shouldn’t eat. But when I started to learn about food, appreciating the incredible variety I hadn’t known before and eating more unprocessed foods, I stopped battling. My appetite began to change. I stopped counting calories. I stopped feeling guilty. I had just one rule: if I was hungry, I would eat; if I wasn’t hungry, I would say no. I no longer made the decision about whether to eat based on something external to me, only on how I felt inside.

Dancing also helped me make this change. If food and I had been battling, so had my body and I. In the culture I grew up in, the messages were so powerful that my girlfriends and I were wearing girdles to school by the time we were in junior high. When I began to dance, the old battle—me versus my body—was transformed. Instead of being just a problem to reshape and control, my body became a source of satisfaction and pleasure.

My diet was changing. My feelings about myself were changing. At the same time, I was learning about “world food problems.” Soon I was reading everything I could find on food and hunger. Something told me that because food is so basic to all of us, if we could just grasp the causes of hunger we would clear a path to understanding the complexities of politics and economics that overwhelm and paralyze so many.

Following My Nose

I read, took notes. I audited courses from soil science to tropical agriculture. And I found an ideal little study niche in the agricultural library at Berkeley. In the quiet basement corridors no one bothered me. No one asked me what I was studying for. The librarians were friendly and helpful.

There I learned to “follow my nose”—a research technique that has served me well for the last twelve years. For me, this meant not having a grand scheme, not knowing exactly where I was going. Instead, I responded to the information I was learning, letting it lead me to the next question.

Overall, I wanted to find out for myself just how close we were to the earth’s limits. I wanted to find out for myself the causes of hunger. I wanted to find out what were the important questions to ask.

Then, in late 1969, in my library-basement hideaway, I came across certain facts about U.S. agriculture that changed my life. They changed how I was formulating the important questions.

First, as I recounted in
Chapter 1
, I learned that in the United States over half of the harvested acreage goes to feed livestock and only a tiny fraction of it gets returned to us in meat on our plate. I learned that most Americans consume about twice the protein their bodies can use. Finally, I learned that by combining plant foods one can create a protein of equal “quality” to animal protein.

When I put this all together, I felt like the little boy in the fairy tale who cries out, “The emperor has no clothes!” I could barely believe what I was learning, because it flew so totally in the face of the conventional wisdom. Most important, I saw that the questions being asked by the experts to whom I had turned for guidance were the
wrong questions
.

Newspaper headlines and textbooks were all telling me that we had reached the limits of the earth’s ability to feed people. Famine is inevitable, we were (and are still) told. Yet my own modest research had shown me that in my own country the food system was well designed to get rid of a tremendous abundance of grain created by a relentless push to increase production. Because hungry people throughout the world could not afford to buy that grain, it was fed to livestock to provide more meat to the already well-fed.

Suddenly I understood that questions about the roots of needless hunger had to focus not on the simple physical limits of the earth, but on the economic and political forces that determine what is planted and who eats. I began to realize that the experts’ single-minded focus on greater production as the solution to world hunger was wrongheaded. You could have more food and still more hunger.

This realization, besides being the motive for what became
Diet for a Small Planet
, was my first step in demystifying the experts—those credential-laden officials and academics who have the answers
for
us. I thought that if I could write up the facts about how land and grain are wasted through a fixation on meat production, and could demonstrate that there are delicious alternatives, I could get people to question the economic ground rules that create such irrational patterns of resource use.

From a One-Page Handout

So I wrote a one-page handout. I planned to give it to friends and post it where sympathetic souls might read it. But I hesitated. “Oh no, you really should know more about this first,” I said to myself. So my message became a five-page handout. Then a seventy-page booklet, which I decided to publish myself. I had it all typed up and had bought the paper to print it on when, out of the blue, a friend told me he was on his way to New York to meet with some publishers, including Betty Ballantine of Ballantine Books. He wanted to show her my booklet. What? He couldn’t be serious! In my opinion, it might appeal to 500 people in the greater Berkeley community. But he insisted, and finally I agreed.

I was certain that no New York publisher would be interested in my modest effort, but the idea did make me think that some Berkeley-based publisher might be. So I nervously approached one on my own. Theirs was certainly no New York publishing house, they assured me. This firm considered itself part of the “movement,” working to revolutionize publishing to “serve the people.” I was impressed. Certainly I wanted my book to reach and serve the people.

Suddenly I was being courted by both the “counterculture” publisher and by Ballantine. At first the choice seemed clear. How could I compromise my principles with a New York publisher? Wouldn’t they operate like any other big business—looking only at the profit margin, not the value of my book?

But when Mrs. Ballantine telephoned, I couldn’t refuse to see her, could I? It wouldn’t hurt just to talk with her.

At the same time, the Berkeley outfit was wining and dining me. They took me to a fine French restaurant to “share” with me what they were sure I would want to know about Ballantine. First, did I know it was controlled by the Mafia? “No, really?” Second, did I know what Ballantine did with leftover books? Well,
they
would tell me. It shredded them and polluted San Francisco Bay with them! For a dutiful child of the ecology movement, this was just too much. I broke down in tears.

A few days later, Mrs. Ballantine arrived in Berkeley. I picked her up at the Durant Hotel, expecting to meet a tough businesswoman—maybe not gloves and hat, but certainly someone who could adequately represent a fat-cat New York firm. Out the door came a middle-aged woman in flowered cotton pants and tennis shoes. Her face was warm and natural. No makeup. Her hair was soft and gray. No coloring. But wait! This couldn’t be Betty Ballantine!

Betty Ballantine and I spent the day together. I served her a
Diet for a Small Planet
meal—Mediterranean Lemon Soup and Middle Eastern Tacos. She loved it. I told her my concerns about who should publish the book and how I wanted it to be published. Never did she try to convince me to publish with Ballantine. As she left that evening she said, “Whoever publishes the book, I’ll buy it.”

What was I to do? All my stereotypes had been smashed. If I couldn’t make a decision based on my stereotypes, I had to make one based on which choice would ensure that my book got read by the most people. I knew that Ballantine Books reached into grocery stores, bus stations, and airports. The choice became clear. I chose Ballantine and have never regretted it, although the Ballantines later sold the company to Random House, owned by the multinational conglomerate RCA, which in 1980 sold it to the Newhouse Brothers.

Betty Ballantine kept her word. She did everything I had hoped for. She didn’t change a word I had written. She took great care in choosing the graphics.

The Julia Child of the Soybean Circuit

Nineteen seventy-one was a year of tremendous change. My first child, Anthony, was born in June. I moved to Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, in August.
Diet for a Small Planet
was published in September.

Looking back, I realize I still felt like the little boy who says, “The emperor has no clothes.” I was terrified when the book first appeared. My message seemed so obvious it couldn’t be correct, I thought.

As the author of
Diet for a Small Planet
, I began a new period of my life. But it was not quite what I had bargained for. Ovenight I became the Julia Child of the soybean circuit. I was asked to go on TV talk shows—as long as I brought along my own beans and rice! I was asked to stir them on camera, explaining how to combine protein. As my future colleague Joe Collins later said, “They wanted you to tell people how to lose weight and save money in the coming world food crisis.” Such was the intellectual and humanitarian depth of most of these shows.