A personal note

If  I had to pick a single book that has most influenced the way I think about food, it would have to be Frances Moore Lappe’s Diet for a Small Planet. I remember reading it in the summer of 1972, as I moved with four roommates into one of my first apartments. One point that struck me –at risk of oversimplifying – is that it uses a lot less of the earth’s resources to feed grain to people than to use it to fatten cattle and then feed them to people.

    Our group’s growing motivation to eat vegetables rather than meat fit nicely with another one of our goals: to feed as many friends as possible on as little money as possible. We joined a food co-op with rock-bottom prices and spent one afternoon a month packing up orders at a warehouse to qualify for membership. We switched from bleached flour to unbleached, white rice to brown. We paired the brown rice with our brand of “stir fry,” different vegetables that all ended up tasting like soy sauce.

    We eventually branched out, thanks to cookbooks like The Vegetarian Epicure and The Whole Earth Cookbook, both long out of print but still holding a place of honor on my bookshelf. I learned how to bake bread, all kinds of wheat and sourdough and rye, a habit I enjoyed for years until falling victim to the low-carb craze. It was the seventies – we were trying to solve world hunger and save the earth, just by our decisions in the supermarket.

    Although my good intentions of forsaking meat did not last very long, Lappe’s words have stuck with me for 37 years. I look forward to hearing what she has to say on Wednesday night, Sept. 9.  If you have similar memories, post a comment by clicking on “comment.”
– Belmont reference librarian