Hope's Edge_ The Next Diet for a Small Planet - Frances Moore Lappe [2]
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 chemicals1 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