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Vintage Veg
‘Diet for a Small Planet’ Still Has Something to Teach
‘While the world’s experts talked only of scarcity, I had just discovered the incredible waste built into the American meat-centered diet’
Whenever people ask me about how veganism got to where it is today, my well-rehearsed speech begins, “In 1971, Frances Moore Lappé’s Diet for a Small Planet was released…” What became a best-selling book was born as a one-page handout in the late 1960s, not long after Lappé had graduated from college. Her argument, at least in the book’s first two editions — to her later dismay — was boiled down to the idea that using grain to feed livestock animals when it could feed more people as grain itself. Soy emerged a star, leading almost directly to the books of William Shurtleff and Akiko Aoyagi that explained tofu and tempeh to Americans who hadn’t been familiar with these plant-based proteins. More broadly, though, it made the stakes of continued meat consumption clear to millions of readers and paved a road that would be followed by cookbooks and thinkers who could no longer ignore, in good faith, the ecological impact of animal farming.
In the 1982 edition that I have on hand, she writes of the shock she experienced at its success, noting how often regular people might feel…
