Hope's Edge_ The Next Diet for a Small Planet - Frances Moore Lappe [65]
3. The concepts of economic and political democracy are inseparable. As the eminent jurist Louis Brandeis said, “We can have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth in a few hands, but we can’t have both.” Thus, democracy must go beyond the ballot box. It must include the wide dispersion of wealth and control over resources. It must entail the development of accountable, flexible planning structures for resource use from the community to the national level. And the concept of democracy must not stop when we go to work each morning; it must involve the opportunity for self-management in the workplace.
Political and economic democracy are inseparable concepts because where wealth is in the hands of relatively few, laws regulating control over society’s basic resources are made in their interest. What’s more, this minority’s economic might allows it to defy laws not in its interest. (In the United States such monopolies as American Telephone and Telegraph defy antitrust laws; likewise, in California a handful of corporate farming giants have for decades flouted federal law prohibiting their profiting from tax-funded irrigation.)
4. Democracy is not a static model to be achieved once and for all. “Democracy,” said William Hastie, “can easily be lost, but is never finally won. Its essence is eternal struggle.” Thus, every society is in a process of change and must be judged by the direction in which it is moving—toward a more just distribution of power or toward more and more tightly held power. Sadly, I believe my own society is moving away from democracy, toward greater and greater concentration of economic and political power.
5. Within every society, “capitalist” or “socialist,” those who have power tend to increase their power. The only way to move in the opposite direction is for those who have less power—that means us—not only to resist this tendency but to actively take part in the redistribution of power. That means taking on greater and greater responsibility ourselves. In other words, movement toward genuine democracy can happen only when ordinary people realize that they have both the right and capacity to help make the important political and economic decisions in their society.
With these five grounding principles, the critical question becomes, how can we take part in the redistribution of power? I hope that Part IV will help you answer this question yourself.
* This drop in beef consumption was made up for by 10 pounds per person more of both pork and poultry.1
Part III
Diet for a
Small Planet
Revisited
1.
America’s Experimental Diet
TO EAT THE typical American diet is to participate in the biggest experiment in human nutrition ever conducted. And the guinea pigs aren’t faring so well! With a higher percent of our GNP spent on medical care than in any other industrial country and after remarkable advances in the understanding and cure of disease, the life expectancy of a forty-year-old American male in 1980 was only about six years longer than that of his counterpart of 1900.
Why haven’t our wealth and scientific advances done more for our health? Medical authorities now believe that a big part of the answer lies in the new American diet—an untested diet of high fat, high sugar, low fiber, which is now linked to six of the ten leading causes of death. (See Figure 4.)
The first two editions of this book are full of nonmeat recipes, just as this one is. But in my discussion of nutrition I stuck to the protein debate because I wanted to demonstrate that we didn’t need a lot of meat (or any, for that matter) to get the protein our bodies need. Now I think I