On this day in vegan history · February 10, 1944
Frances Moore Lappé Is Born
A grad-school dropout from a small Oregon town would grow up to hand a generation the arithmetic behind their dinner: 16 pounds of grain in, 1 pound of meat out.
The facts
- Born
- February 10, 1944, in Pendleton, Oregon
- Book
- Diet for a Small Planet, published 1971
- Sales
- More than three million copies
- The core math
- 16 pounds of grain and soy fed to beef cattle for every 1 pound of meat
Frances Moore Lappé was born on February 10, 1944, in Pendleton, Oregon. She graduated from Earlham College in 1966 and began graduate studies in social work at the University of California, Berkeley, before she got pulled into a bigger question: why people go hungry in a world that grows plenty of food. Her answer became Diet for a Small Planet, published in 1971, built around a simple, damning piece of arithmetic about how much grain disappears into livestock before any of it reaches a plate. The book sold more than three million copies and turned a research detour into one of the most widely read food arguments in American publishing.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
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For every 16 pounds of grain and soy fed to beef cattle in the United States we only get 1 pound back in meat on our plates.
Frances Moore Lappé, Diet for a Small Planet (1971), p. 69
Source: Wikiquote -
one of the most influential political tracts of the times
Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, on Diet for a Small Planet
Source: Wikipedia
Why it still matters
Lappé's book reframed hunger as a problem of policy and allocation rather than scarcity, and gave the modern case against grain-fed meat its founding numbers. Nearly fifty years later, a 2019 UN climate report on land use echoed the same thesis.
Sources
This history is still being written.
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