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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