Small Planet

Diet for a Small Planet (Frances Moore Lappé)
Recipes for a Small Planet (Ellen Buchman Ewald)
The Book of Whole Grains (Marlene Anne Bumgarner)
The Limits to Growth (Meadows, Meadows, Randers, Behrens)

It seems that we have entered an age of revolution. Across Africa and the Middle East, regimes that have been stable for decades are tottering. Others may follow, including some of the democracies of Europe.

In the case of Egypt, the spark for revolution was not primarily ideological. Alongside the lack of decent employment, it was the lack of affordable food, especially grains, brought on by poor harvests in places thousands of miles away. Egypt, one of the cradles of agricultural civilization, cannot feed itself. Mr. Mubarak’s regime is gone now, but that is not going to change the underlying problem of food scarcity. What will happen when people find that the new government cannot feed them any better than the old? History gives many examples of newborn governments that begin in freedom and end with a Napoleon or Hitler.

And that brings me to a trio of cookbooks. I read Diet for a Small Planet and its companion Recipes for a Small Planet back in the 1970’s, and they convinced me that I should stop eating meat. Nothing in the thirty-plus years since has changed this conviction. These books introduced me to the idea of protein complimentarity which makes a vegetarian diet feasible -- indeed, healthier than a diet based on large quantities of meat. But the vegetarian diet is not primarily about health; it is about food for hungry people. After writing Diet, Ms. Lappé wrote other books, such as Food First, and has become increasingly involved in the politics of food. Why does a steer destined for McDonald’s Happy Meals rate higher in the world’s values than a hungry child on the streets of a third-world city?

Eating meat is not in itself evil. Meat is part of the natural human diet, and a gift from God. Animal husbandry is an essential part of a balanced farmstead. Cattle, goats, sheep, pigs, chickens -- they all have their place. If one has a brush-covered steep hillside, the best thing to do with it is probably to put goats on it. And if you want to establish a garden on an unpromising and weed-choked plot, there is nothing better than to put some pigs on it for a year or two. They will “till” the ground, dig up and eat every weed, and lavishly manure it for you. In the meantime, these animals are turning plant matter that humans cannot eat into high-quality protein-rich food.

The problem is that this is not how modern industrial agriculture raises meat animals. Instead of getting their food from sources unusable by humans, they are kept in confinement and fed grain, lots of it. In Diet, Ms. Lappé asks her readers to pretend that they are seated in a restaurant, eating an eight-ounce steak -- and “appreciat[ing] that the grain used to produce the steak could have filled the empty bowls of forty people in the room.” The steak is expensive not only in the eight pounds of grain and soy feed that went into the half-pound of steak, but in the fossil fuel that is the lifeblood of agribusiness. “Each calorie of protein we get from feedlot-produced beef costs seventy-eight calories of fossil fuel” in the form of ammonia-based fertilizers, processing, and transportation costs. By comparison, one calorie of protein from soybeans costs two calories of fossil fuel.

So, why is that third-world child hungry? In the poorer parts of the world, the agricultural land is mostly owned by a handful of people. For them, the most lucrative use of the land is often to grow feed grains, which are fed to cattle for the tables of the well-to-do in their own country, or in Europe, North America, and (increasingly) China. If not feed grains, then it is luxury vegetables or flowers to be shipped to the Northern Hemisphere where they are out of season. I have spoken with people who have visited the small African country of Swaziland, a desperately poor country. There are fields surrounded by high fences with razor wire on top, their production destined for tables in Europe (either directly or in the form of meat) while the bulk of the local population goes hungry. They cannot afford to buy what is grown in those fields. Such scenes are increasingly common in Central and Latin America and across Africa.

Lacking the means and land for even subsistence farming, people flock to the cities. In the cities of the Third World, they often find themselves without work, dependent on subsidized food -- like the bread that is the staple in Cairo, for many years available in the bread shops at a fixed price, kept that way by government subsidies and price controls.

But as population grows and food becomes more expensive (driven in part by the price of fossil fuel), it becomes harder for the governments to maintain the food subsidies. They might try raising the prices, as was done in Egypt, and eventually, a breaking point is reached.

I am not strict in my rejection of meat. In part, this is because it makes little difference in these matters that I eat tofu instead of hamburger. Others will more than make up for my economy with their wastefulness. Nonetheless, as little as this gesture is, it is a step in a better direction.


Diet for a Small Planet outlines Ms. Lappé’s journey to a vegetarian diet, the nutritional background that makes it possible, and the way to change one’s own diet in a more sustainable direction. It includes some recipes, but she admits that this was not her strength. Instead, it was her friend Ellen Ewald who interpreted protein complimentarity into tasty recipes which began a whole tradition of what some called “hippie food,” rich in lentils and legumes and whole grains and fresh vegetables and a far cry from “meat and potatoes.” There are many cookbooks that have gone far beyond Ms. Ewald, but she was a pioneer and her book retains a place of honor in our kitchen.

From Frances Lappé’s preface to Recipes for a Small Planet:

In my head I knew which plants were protein-rich and which combinations of non-meat foods create the highest quality protein. But was this alternative practical in the kitchen? Luckily for me, I knew Ellen Ewald.

She not only proved that the possibilities were practically infinite, but that they ... represented in fact a practical means of living daily in closer harmony with the earth’s capacities to provide for the entire human family. (page ix)

One of the successors to the “Small Planet” books of the early 1970’s is The Book of Whole Grains (Marlene Anne Bumgarner, 1976). It is a book I return to regularly for its recipes, and for its window into the world of natural food. It is primarily a recipe book, organized by grains: wheat, oats, rye, triticale, buckwheat, barley, corn, rice, millet, sorghum. It includes as well chapters on nuts and seeds, dried peas and beans, for they are essential to the vegetarian diet. For each grain or legume, she includes an outline of its history as a food source, its strengths and weaknesses, and its cultivation – including how to grow it yourself in your garden, store it, and prepare it. There is an appendix describing the equipment that is useful in a vegetarian whole-foods kitchen, with tables of amino acid composition and nutritional values. And the recipes are terrific.

I enjoy these three books, but I must include one more that I have not enjoyed at all: The Limits to Growth (Meadows, Meadows, Randers, Behrens, as a project of the “Club of Rome,” 1972). Ridiculed from the day it appeared, it presented the idea that the exponential growth upon which our economy is based cannot continue for ever. It is worth quoting their conclusions at length:

1. If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years. The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.
2. It is possible to alter these growth trends and to establish a condition of ecological and economic stability that is sustainable far into the future. The state of global equilibrium could be designed so that the basic material needs of each person on earth are satisfied and each person has an equal opportunity to realize his individual human potential.
3. If the world’s people decide to strive for this second outcome rather than the first, the sooner they begin working to attain it, the greater will be their chance of success. (p. 29)

That was 1972. Almost forty years have passed, and the implications of their third conclusion loom larger each year: “the sooner they begin working to attain it, the greater will be their chance of success.” It seems to me that the “condition of ecological and economic stability” is no longer attainable. Even if it were, the political consensus to make the hard decisions that would be needed is lacking.

Most of the ridicule aimed at this book focused on the authors' computer models, which attempted to predict likely outcomes given a variety of scenarios. The baseline scenario of continuing as we were in 1970 leads to a collapse in the mid-twenty-first century. They ran other models in which variables were changed – for example, what if the resource base were doubled through new discoveries? What if population magically stabilized at its 1970 level?

Criticisms of these models and the book's conclusions tend to fall into these categories:

“Technology will find a way.” Petroleum exploration and extraction, for example, are continually improving in their efficiency, if environmental costs are overlooked. We will always be able to find all the petroleum we need (so the argument goes). If it becomes scarce, the higher market demand will lead to technological improvements until the scarcity is relieved, or a substitute is developed. This seems to me a misplaced “faith-based” reliance on the false god, Progress. The universe does not have to provide us with a fix just because we want it.

“If we run out of (x), we will use (y).” If (continuing with the example of petroleum) we really run out, we will drive electric cars. Or fusion-powered cars. Or something. The thought of not driving at all does not enter the American mind. But (y) will have costs of its own, and will likely be less efficient and more expensive than (x). For example, we could all drive electric cars -- if the vast infrastructure of the internal combustion engine were replaced by an equally vast infrastructure to generate and distribute the electricity that would be needed, including “powering” stations in every place where we now have gas stations. At that scale, such electricity would have to come primarily from coal and nuclear sources, which present problems of their own and likewise depend on non-renewable resources.

“Environmentalists will have to make way for the realities of life.” In this argument, we need not worry about the environmental costs of resource extraction to maintain our standard of living (e.g., the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, mountaintop removal strip mining, ecological costs of shale-gas extraction, global warming, extinction of species). Such things are unfortunate, but they are the price we must pay. The authors of Limits argued that the environmental costs would, in such a scenario, catch up with us eventually, primarily through the food chain. If the environment is sufficiently degraded, the agricultural lands of the world could reach a point where they would no longer produce enough food, and widespread starvation would result. This would most likely happen in a sudden, non-linear way rather than gradually over many years. The world’s system of food production and distribution is more fragile than most of us would like to think.

“I’ve got mine and I don’t care about anyone else. We’ve earned the right to what we have, and we have the guns to protect it.” Or, as a leader of the previous administration said, “The American way of life is not negotiable.” The developed world may be able to maintain its hold on the majority of the world’s resources for a while, perhaps for decades. It will require increasing levels of violence to do so, and is unlikely, in the end, to be successful. And it fits right into the predictions of this book: nothing brings on a “sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity” like a good, protracted war.

“God will take care of us. Jesus will come back before we run out of everything, snap His fingers, and make everything all right.” If one is using religious arguments, one must consider our stewardship responsibilities, and the One before whom we shall stand at the Day of Doom. That thought alone should be enough to press us toward a more responsible way of life. As for God sparing us from catastrophe brought on by our own actions, that does not fit with the revelation of Scripture. “It is written: thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.”

The most important argument of Limits is not about the individual problems, such as resource scarcity, overpopulation, or environmental degradation. Rather, it is the likelihood that all of these bitter fruits will ripen at the same time, and their combination will make it impossible to work around any of them.

If I were to find fault with Limits, I believe that they underestimated the importance of petroleum and natural gas to our situation. To a larger degree than was apparent in 1972, our prosperity since the Industrial Revolution has been the result of easily available energy. It appears likely that a combination of the increasing difficulty of fueling our machines and the environmental consequences of doing so will be our undoing. Further, the authors were overly optimistic that the peoples of the earth, especially their political leaders, would act rationally and with foresight. The past forty years have not been encouraging in this regard.


While we must not use the argument I just described (“God will bail us out”) as an excuse to do nothing, neither can we forget that God is capable of anything. It may be that the God who spared Ninevah might spare us.

Or it may be that most of the world’s population will die horribly in the next fifty years from war, famine, and disease, and that those few who survive will face lives that are “nasty, brutish, and short,” with little left on this planet to sustain them. I grieve at this prospect, most of all for the children in the choir I direct and other children like them around the world, who will likely be the generation that bears the brunt of the collapse.

But, no matter how dark it gets, they will find that God is still with them. The record of Scripture, and the broader record of history and the testimony of the saints, bears this out.

Prayer would be in order, along with amendment of life. The kitchen and the grocery store are places to start.

We humbly beseech thee, O Father, mercifully to look upon our infirmities; and, for the glory of thy Name, turn from us all those evils that we most justly have deserved; and grant that in all our troubles we may put our whole trust and confidence in thy mercy, and evermore serve thee in holiness and pureness of living, to thy honor and glory; through our only Mediator and Advocate, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. (BCP p. 154)