Hopes Edge

Finally made it to the Booksmith on Haight for a book, I had been craving to read. Hope's Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet by Frances Moore Lappe and Anna Lappe. Hopes Edge takes up the dialogue from Frances Moore Lappes' 1987 book, Diet for a Small Planet.

I first heard about Diet for a Small Planet on a school trip to Washington, DC. The vegetarians from Eugene, Oregon used it as a reference for a debate on world hunger. The debate was about policy and quickly shifted to food, armed with their paperback copy for reference they toppled all the arguments: I related to the way they framed their arguments. They argued for sustainability, and questioned hunger as anything but the lack of enough food production.

We never really kept in touch, save a handwritten letter or two, but the evenings spent debating U.S. policy on hunger never really left.

That summer on the weekly trip to the Northridge Library my mom insisted on, I came across a copy of the famed book. By the time I read it, I had already given up meat for lent, read Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, and practically failed AP Biology for refusing to dissect a cat (that part has less to do with Lappes' theory, but I think it is telling for me.) However, it was Lappe's theory that finally provided me with the sound argument I sought for becoming a vegetarian.

It will be 17 years this August since I decided to leave the lobster, the carnitas, and the chicken milanesa all behind. The only thing I occasionally crave is lobster, but that might just be for the garlic butter- I don't know though because I haven't gone back for any yet.

What I do know is that what Lappe wrote, I read and based a decision on 17 years before. Finally her insights are emerging and becoming almost pedestrian. What made sense so many years before- finally resounds to everyone else.

For every human being on the planet, the world produces two pounds of grain per day-roughly 3,000 calories, and that's without even counting all the beans, potatoes, nuts, fruits, and vegetables we eat, too. This is clearly enough for all of us to thrive; yet nearly one in six of us still goes hungry.

Worldwide, we're feeding more and more of this grain, now almost half, to livestock, but animals return to us in meat only a tiny fraction of the nutrients we feed them.

To get just one calorie of food energy from a steak, we burn 54 irreplaceable fossil-fuel calories, so producing one pound of steak- providing less than 1,000 calories-uses up 45,000 fossil fuel calories.

To produce just one pound of beef takes thousands of gallons of water, as much as the average American uses for all purposes in several months-and this in a world in which two-thirds of all people are expected to face water shortages in less than a generation. Frances Moore Lappe and Anna Lappe, 2003.