When Frances Moore Lappé called cattle “a protein factory in reverse” in her 1971 book, 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,From 1968 to 1971 young Americans like Lappé had witnessed the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr.
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.
She was convinced everyone would want to hear such good news, so she wrote up a one-page flyer and distributed it around Berkeley. That turned into a booklet and then, after someone forwarded it to Ballantine Books, into the first edition of. When Betty Ballantine bought the book, the publisher told Lappé she shouldn’t just tell people about hunger. She had to show them how to feed themselves.
Lappé was not without her critics, who zeroed in on one of her first edition’s core concepts: the now disputed idea that in order to replicate the perfect balance of amino acids in meat and eggs, we had to pair “complementary proteins” in, for example, grains and beans. But’s message is just as trenchant now as it was 50 years ago, especially as climate change and soil degradation threaten our food supply. Today the book’s echoes infuse Impossible Burger press releases and UN reports alike.
“Choosing a plant-centered diet doesn’t change the world, but it changes me,” Lappé says. “Change is not based on individual acts alone, but without those acts, how can we believe that it’s possible?”
Undoubtedly eating vegetables, fruits, legumes, nuts and herbs help to have a better digestion and to improve your health lowing rates of obesity, diabetes and heart disease.
DanaMcCauley 50th Anniversary? The good old hippie days are comin' back! Great book and more relevant than ever. Peace, love and tie-dye, baby :)
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