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Frances Moore Lappé (born February 10, 1944) is the author of 18 books including Diet for a Small Planet (1971) that The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History describes as “one of the most influential political tracts of the times." She is the co-founder of three national organizations that explore the roots of hunger, poverty and environmental crises, as well as solutions now emerging worldwide through what she calls Living Democracy.
- Even the fear of death is nothing compared to the fear of not having lived authentically and fully.
- O Magazine, May 2004
- I've grown certain that the root of all fear is that we've been forced to deny who we are.
- O Magazine, May 2004
Diet for a Small Planet
- Our production system takes abundant grain, which hungry people can't afford, and shrinks it into meat, which better-off people will pay for. But … our production system not only reduces abundance but actually mines the very resources on which our future food security rests.
- p. 65
- Yet many Americans who have reluctantly given up their gas-guzzling cars would never think of questioning the resource costs of their grain-fed-meat diet. So let me try to give you some sense of the enormity of the resources flowing into livestock production in the United States. The consequences of a grain-fed-meat diet may be as severe as those of a nation of Cadillac drivers.
- p. 66
- For every 16 pounds of grain and soy fed to beef cattle in the United States we only get 1 pound back in meat on our plates. The other 15 pounds are inaccessible to us, either used by the animal to produce energy or to make some part of its own body that we do not eat (like hair or bones) or excreted.
- p. 69
- We got hooked on grain-fed meat just as we got hooked on gas-guzzling automobiles. Big cars “made sense” only when oil was cheap; grain-fed meat “makes sense” only because the true costs of producing it are not counted.
- p. 73
- In exporting the Great American Steak Religion we are exporting a desire for the impossible. The earth could never provide the majority of its people with the grain-fed-meat-centered diet that Americans take for granted.
- pp. 94-95
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- Frances Moore Lappé argues rightly that we should all work to eliminate hunger and protect the environment and that one important step we can each take is to become a vegetarian. … Frances Moore Lappé helped me to make the connection between justice, solidarity, and the life of nonviolence, and I quickly became a vegetarian.
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