• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1397 0

our society rewards wealth by allowing it such disproportionate ability to influence public opinion, we cannot build a genuine democracy in America. But our vision must extend beyond the need to make advertising responsible to society’s well-being. The theme of this book is that we must work toward more democratic decision-making structures governing all aspects of our resource use. Those who process and distribute our food must be accountable, not just to their shareholders but to a broad, representative, elected, and recallable group of Americans whose concerns are wider than expanding sales and increasing profits. Only through such structures can we put into action our choices affecting the health and well-being of our earth and our bodies.

Where Do We Begin?

If this vision of a genuine democracy seems a long way off, we might be tempted to give up. Or we might look around us for signs of change and ask, how can we support them? We might look at ourselves, at our own lives right now. To build a democracy in America, we must redistribute power. We can be part of that redistribution right now by taking greater and greater responsibility for our own lives and the problems right in our own communities. I have met and heard from thousands of people across the country who are realizing that the redistribution of power in America begins with them.

Michelle Kamhi is one. She lives in New York City’s Upper West Side. In 1978 she decided that if the diet in her son’s school lunchroom—Twinkies, white bread, and bologna—was to change, it was up to her. “But how to change things?” she wrote. “Answer: form a committee, however small. Our Nutrition Committee at first consisted of one other concerned parent and myself.” From these two parents grew an innovative program on teacher and parent education. Kindergartners tried making their own whole wheat flour and bread. Third-graders, who were studying “desert people,” experimented with Middle Eastern delicacies, using beans and whole wheat pita bread. So nutrition entered the classroom not as a negative “don’t” but as a positive and tasty “do.”

And nutrition entered the lunchroom, too, according to Michelle.

Raw carrot and celery sticks are displacing mushy canned vegetables. Fruits canned in syrup have been banished in favor of fresh fruits on most days; occasionally, unsweetened canned pineapple or applesauce is substituted. No more white bread; only whole wheat is served. And meats containing nitrates/nitrites have been banned, thanks to a school-wide poll of parents.

Nutrition also entered the regular curriculum:

The day my son came home with a vocabulary list of “glucose, maltose, dextrose, fructose, honey, corn syrup, etc.,” I could see that my efforts had begun to reap benefits close to home. His second-grade class’s assignment was to see how many packaged foods containing hidden sugar he could find at home. This was a perfect example of how teachers were using the information disseminated at the workshops.…42

Learning about food was obviously a powerful first step for Michelle, and her decision to seize the power she had is changing hundreds, maybe thousands of lives.

I have heard from many other people like Michelle. In Part IV, “Lessons for the Long Haul,” I’ve tried to capture what their experiences have to teach us. But first let’s tackle the protein debate, because that was where Diet for a Small Planet—and the vision it embodies—began over ten years ago.

3.

Protein Myths: A New Look

HAVING READ OF the vast resources we squander to produce meat, you might easily conclude that meat must be indispensable to human well-being. But this just isn’t the case. When I first wrote Diet for a Small Planet I was fighting two nutritional myths at once. First was the myth that we need scads of protein, the more the better. The second was that meat contains the best protein. Combined, these two myths have led millions of people to believe that only by eating lots of meat could they get enough protein.

Protein Mythology

Myth No. 1: Meat contains more protein than any