Organic Consumers Association

Campaigning for health, justice, sustainability, peace, and democracy
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Delicious Food Is Not an Indulgence-It's a Way to Solve Our Ecological Crises


I grew up in Cow Town. Or make that Fort Worth, Texas. It was the '50s and supper was canned spinach with either meat loaf or with what my brother and I called "loose meat"-ground beef and canned mushroom soup. Iceberg lettuce and Jell-O rounded it out.

Food was not a big deal.

But when I ended up in Berkeley in the '60s, food was a big deal. The food scene buzzed with experimentation. We rejected white-bread culture, and eating brown rice became a political statement. With stirfried veggies, what could be better? At the same time, food became my teacher: I spent long hours in the university agriculture library trying to figure out why there was so much hunger in the world. Were we really running out of food? Well, no, there was more than enough for all. I was more startled to discover that we humans are actually creating scarcity.

The global marketplace is driven by underlying economic rules that concentrate wealth and generate extreme inequality. Millions of people are too poor to pay market price for food. So grain that could feed the hungry instead becomes a raw material for a luxury product: grain-fed meat.

How illogical, how destructive! I don't have to be part of that, I realized. It dawned on me that eating low on the food chain-a plant-centered diet-was best for others, my body, and the Earth. The ultimate win-win.   

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