Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
10
Global Hunger
Frances Moore Lappé
In 1971, I was a twenty-seven-year-old heretic. With my irst topic,
Diet for a Small Planet
, the kid from Texas had taken on the cat-
tlemen. I called our grain-fed meat-centered diet the most ineffi-
cient, wasteful, irrational system ever devised by humankind. And
my greatest heresy? That humans actually thrive without meat.
(The cattlemen were so threatened by my radical claim that they
quickly set a team of cooks to work to prove
Diet
's veggie recipes
were inedible.)
My own wake-up came in the late 1960s, when all around me ex-
perts were sounding the alarm: Global famine was just about upon
us, they warned. And its cause? Not enough food! Humanity has
simply overrun Earth's capacity.
Could this be? I wanted to know for myself. Burrowing in at the
University of California at Berkeley library, I began to unearth the
facts and figures only to discover, to my astonishment, that our
planet was actually producing
more
than enough calories to feed
us all—even to make us chubby. Yet hundreds of millions were go-
ing hungry. Today, even more people—now almost a billion—suffer
Frances Moore Lappé is co-founder of Food First, the Institute for Food and
Development Policy, and, with her daughter Anna Lappé, of the Small Planet
Institute and Small Planet Fund.
