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* The protein concentrate made from soybeans is an excellent livestock ration, and the oil extracted is used to make margarine, salad oil, etc.

3.

The Meat Mystique

ALL THAT I have said so far might give the impression that the shift toward a meat-centered diet is an American craze. It is not. Throughout the world, more and more grain is being fed to livestock and people are eating more meat—at least, those people who can afford it. When I first wrote Diet for a Small Planet ten years ago, about one-third of the world’s grain went to feed livestock. Today livestock consume close to one-half the world’s grain output; and, by 1985, livestock are expected to eat even more grain than people do.1 The portion of the world’s wheat being fed to livestock has doubled since the late 1960s.2 And increasingly, even basic staple foods of the poor, such as the tuber cassava, are used as livestock feed.

Grain feeding to livestock outside the United States increased more than twice as fast as population in the 1970s. In Brazil, for example, 44 percent of the staple food crops, mainly grains, are now fed to livestock; in Mexico, 32 percent.3 In the Soviet Union, not only does a third of the domestically produced grain go to livestock, but the government has made huge foreign purchases of grain to satisfy the Russian people’s demand for meat. The 18 million tons of grain which the Russians bought from us in the infamous 1972 Russian grain deal went largely to feed livestock.

Meat consumption is rising in countries where diets traditionally centered on rice, fish, and soy foods. Thirty years ago, for example, the Japanese people ate almost no meat, but by 1980 meat contributed 20 percent of the calories in the Japanese diet and meat consumption was continuing to rise.4

Two questions seem worth exploring. First, why do people want more meat? (Just about everybody seems to want more than they have.) Second, how is it possible that more and more grain is used to produce meat when at least a quarter of the world’s people go without even the basic grain they need?

The most obvious answer to the first question is: meat tastes good. And once any food is considered a favorite, other foods, such as vegetables, are neglected. Mushy string beans accompany the chopped steak plate at Denny’s to give it the variety of a classic “home-ec” meal, but don’t expect a taste thrill if you eat them!

Meat, especially beef, is also a status symbol. I remember an ad in a progressive newsmagazine for $7-a-pound mail-order steaks. Buy these “when you want to impress your brother-in-law,” the ad proclaimed. Like drinking Coca-Cola and wearing Levi’s, eating beef is a symbol of the American way of life, imitated from Tegucigalpa to Tokyo. Rising urban middle classes eagerly adopt a meat diet to show how far they have come from the villages where they ate rice, fish, and vegetables.

The Korean diet has historically been based on vegetable protein. But, as Shirley Dorow, a Lutheran missionary who has lived for many years in South Korea, wrote me, “average consumption of beef has risen about 15 pounds a year per person. This means, of course, that some people never eat beef and a few are eating it regularly, for it is a status food.”

And to some, I’m convinced, there is an association between meat eating and masculinity. How many women have I heard sigh with pretended exasperation (but real pride) that their husbands are unyielding “steak and potatoes” men. As I was writing this book one of the more amusing letters I received was from a woman in Maine who told me that her efforts to get a good friend to eat more plant foods and less meat got nowhere. He told her that if he didn’t eat a lot of meat he would not be able to make love to his wife.

Thus, to challenge a meat-centered diet is to challenge a whole set of feelings and associations. For many, realizing that a meat-centered diet does not bring greater well-being but in fact risks to their health has been one step in rethinking their definition of “progress