[Sca-cooks] Diet for a Small Planet, was sauces and humoral theory [OOP]

lilinah at earthlink.net lilinah at earthlink.net
Wed Sep 8 23:38:21 PDT 2010

>It occurs to me that the modern equivalent of this is _Diet for a
>Small Planet_, which was about how to combine various plant proteins
>to get "complete proteins," and was for a while very popular. I
>gather the current view is that there was little or nothing to it.

The point of the book was to expose the enormous waste built into 
U.S. grain-fed meat production and therefore to encourage people to 
eat meat less often, because mass producing meat uses up so many 
resources, many of which might be better utilized for other purposes. 
Factory farming is now far worse for the environment than when 
Frances Moore Lappe' first published "Diet for a Small Planet" in 
1971, what with giant lakes of animal sewage seeping into streams and 
ground water, for example.

There are certain proteins necessary for human life that no one basic 
vegetable/ grain/ pulse/ etc. provides, and meat is the best source 
of that complete protein. So the book showed how to get complete 
protein from vegetable sources.

"Diet For a Small Planet" has been continuously in print since it was 
first published. Lappe' has revised it numerous times over the 
decades to keep up to date with current research. For example, quite 
some time ago she incorporated the information that one does not need 
to eat every source of the proteins humans cannot produce in one 
meal, as alluded to by Antonia.

Lappe' has written 17 other books, many related popular books have 
been written by other authors over the decades, plus Lappe's 
daughter, Anna Lappe' just published a book called "Diet for a Hot 

Humans need to eat those proteins that our bodies cannot produce, but 
few of us really need to ingest animal proteins multiple times daily. 
Lappe' was not focused on some form of "protein combining", but on 
educating people so they would feel comfortable eating less meat, her 
real goal.
Someone sometimes called Urtatim

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