A math-and-soy-heavy diet for an overworked planet

Today, we're going back to the classics. I've featured plenty of 1970s vegetarian cookbooks, but not yet one of the most iconic: Frances Moore Lappé's Diet for a Small Planet (mine is the revised fourth printing from 1976, so it's not quite the original from 1970).

It was the first major book to call for cutting meat consumption to help save the environment-- thus, the "small planet" of the title. I suspect that its goals were hampered by a couple of factors, though.

One is that the book so often makes eating a vegetarian diet sound like an exacting science-- so difficult that you might just need to make it a full-time preoccupation. I mean, one might think, "How hard could it be? Just pack a peanut butter sandwich instead of bologna, and you're set." Not so fast!

You've got to pack the peanut butter so full of instant nonfat dried milk that it becomes un-spreadably hard, and then thin it out with honey or banana if you insist on trying to use it as a spread. Why? It's way too complicated to get into, but basically, most protein-rich plant foods do not have all nine essential amino acids to make a complete protein, and Lappé thought all the essential amino acids had to be present and balanced in individual meals. The book makes being vegetarian sound like a never-ending math problem, and I'm not sure how many people would be willing to sign up for that. (Now we know that vegetarians will generally be fine if they eat a variety of types of food throughout the day. There's no point in carefully calculating out and balancing the types of proteins in every meal unless you have a very specific math fetish.)

The other factor is, of course, that the meals do not always sound great. I mean, any recipe title that starts with "Crusty Soybean" is not very likely to be a crowd-pleaser-- not even if you put "Crowd-Pleaser" right in the name. 

This doesn't necessarily sound objectively terrible, but it's just one of the many grain-topped-with-soybeans-and-random-veggies recipes in the book that all seem very same-y and likely underseasoned.

Granted, the recipes don't all follow that formula. Some present diners with unexpected combinations.

Can't say as I've seen too many recipes for spaghetti in a buttermilk/ onion/ olive/ cheese/ peanut sauce.

There's no chicken and waffles recipe, obviously, but the book offers pancakes in a mushroom sauce.

I can only imagine hearing "Pancakes for dinner!" as a kid and then being faced with a stack of soy-flour pancakes with chopped veggies mixed right in, topped with a white sauce full of mushrooms. That would have led to a full-on rebellion.

Protein was considered so important that the book even offers protein-heavy desserts, like Peanut Dessert Fondue with Fresh Fruit.

That would have sounded fine to me (I love fruit and peanut butter!) if I hadn't already seen the recipe for Peanut Sauce with Great Possibilities.

I'm sure this peanut sauce with onion, garlic, and soy sauce might be fine in a savory dish, but on apples and bananas as dessert? Maybe Lappé should have made a separate dessert-y peanut sauce recipe instead.

The book did help spark an important conversation, though, so I'll try to end this on a nicer note. The pages are illustrated sporadically with pictures of various fruits, vegetables, nuts, and beans hanging out together. Allow me to present a couple of those, along with brief interpretations.

Here, the pepper, scallions, mushrooms, and garlic commiserate about how often they're consigned to play a role in the background of a tomato-based sauce. They want their own chances to shine, damn it! Tomatoes are such attention hogs.

And finally, the corn, apples, and raisins bitch about how the soy moving into the neighborhood is driving down the property values. (Sweet foods are often quite prejudiced against their earthier compatriots, even if the hippies love them all and just want everybody to get along.)