50 Years On, a Legacy of 'Plant -Based' Living

 Steven Kurutz, "50 Years On, a Legacy of 'Plant -Based' Living," New York Times, Nov. 21, 2021, p. ST9. 

Ms Lappé was 25 and attending graduate school at the Univesity of California, Berkeley, when she began to quetion her life's purpose.  Like many in her generation, she'd read "The Population Bomb," the 1968 book by Paul Ehrlich that predicted (wrongly, it turned out) a coming amine because of overpopulation, and she was inspired by the ecological movement that led to the first Earth Day. 

Ms Lappé was also being exposed to new and different foods, including bulgur and tofu.  She started auditing courses on soil science and poring over academic reports in the agricultural library at Berkeley, to better understand the food system and global hunger. 

She was ruprised by her findings; notably, that over half of the harvested acreage in the United States at teh time went to feeding livestock, leaving more than enough food to go around if those resources were redirected.  

COMMENT

This research led Lappé to write the bestselling "Diet for a Small Planet" published in 1971.  It is not too much to say that she discovered her life's purpose in the library.  It is remarkable that her insight about the food system was available to anyone, but the agricultural professors and students had failed to see it.