Diet For a Small Planet
50% recommend33% neutral17% critical
Why HN recommends it
Explains how food systems, hunger, and protein complementing work, with data and graphs on food production. Suited to anyone seeking cheap, nutritious eating and a political context for food.
Common criticism: One critic dismisses it as doomer-era writing, alongside The Population Bomb.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
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Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
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…bad, next year there will be more, and it will be in excess of demand. This is a big topic and I can not provide you with a full education on this topic. I'll recommend one book that I like, which is Diet For A Small Planet, by Frances Moore Lappe: https://www.amazon.com/Diet-Small-Planet-20th-Anniversary/dp...
on “Rural suicides among farmers” ↗I highly recommend Frances Moore Lappe's book Diet for a Small Planet to anybody who's interested in eating inexpensive, nutritious food.
on “Calorie per Dollar List – Eat for 21 Dollars a Week” ↗Diet for a Small Planet outlined some of the political issues involved. You could read that. Second, support anything which promotes better education and more independence. A lot of charities worsen the problem by promoting…
on “Ask HN: How can we solve world poverty” ↗If you want to understand it, read Diet for a small planet. It is famous for being a vegetarian cookbook, but that's only the last half of it. The first half is a political piece about how no country at that time was incapable of feeding its own people -- assuming…
on “The childless, aging future” ↗I know that HNers will scoff at the citing of popular literature, but I find the arguments in "Diet for a Small Planet" and "In Defense of Food" quite compelling when it comes to "traditional" foods. Traditional diets are developed to make best use of the ingredients available in a region and are often the healthier than…
on “How To Live (Comfortably) on $36 A Month For Food” ↗…for aid. The harm to identity and self esteem and the bad habits they encourage are likely to cause long-term harm in the form of learned helplessness. A couple of good books with relevant points: Diet for a Small Planet -- One of the points it makes is that foreign aid to prevent starvation often comes in the form of foreign foods which cannot be grown locally and therefore aren't locally sustainable or economically…
on “How Can We Help the World’s Poor?” ↗My personal first "contextualisation" about the food industry was a book called "A Diet for a Small Planet" (the reedition, not the original one). I liked it because it was the first time I saw some data and graphs about how and why (hint: profit) our food production is plain wrong. Now, I try to be as cheap…
on “Ask HN: What should we eat?” ↗…preparations that help preserve the nutrient value. Raw is also good. Learn to eat more fresh produce. As you improve the nutrional value of the non meat items in your diet, meat will matter less to you. Diet for a Small Planet is a good source of info. Protein complementarity can help satisfy your hunger. On the upside, most traditional vegetarian diets already practice that. She eventually concluded it isn't hard as her first…
on “Ask HN: How to become a vegan?” ↗You might enjoy reading Diet for a small planet. It gets remembered as a vegetarian cookbook, but the first half of the book is about international politics and how food aid is part of the problem.
on “Amazon's Bezos Launches $2B Fund to Help the Homeless” ↗Diet for a small planet and the followup book by I believe her sister called Recipes for a small planet for which she wrote the intro. The first half of the first book is about the political causes of hunger in the world and…
on “Ask HN: What book changed your life?” ↗…choosing foods. Actually, it is much easier than I thought. With three important exceptions, there is little danger of protein deficiency in a plant food diet.” —- [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diet_for_a_Small_Planet Edit: adjust description of what Lappé was popularizer of
on “Is algae the new kale?” ↗…that line our colon also manufacture AAs, including EAAs, that we can utilize. > It is a misconception that plants provide "incomplete protein", regardless of what Ms. Lappe advanced in her 1971 book, "Diet For A Small Planet." http://fanaticcook.blogspot.com/2008/04/if-all-you-ate-were-...
on “Tiny Farms Raises Seed Round as Cricket Farming Heats Up” ↗…producer in the USA. I'm almost certain if California were to produce zero food whatsoever, the USA could still easily produce massive agricultural surpluses. Go read Frances Moore Lappé’s infamous "Diet for a Small Planet" which was a very famous bestselling book in 1971. It has been almost 100% debunked as inane wishful thinking. She claimed meat production had a negative environmental impact, was wasteful, and contributed…
on “Most of the world’s grain is not eaten by humans” ↗…course. I suggest you go back and read some of the doomer “non-fiction” (which was actually fiction) from the hippie era such as the "Population Bomb" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb and "Diet for a Small Planet" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diet_for_a_Small_Planet. Those authors were spinning dystopian tales that "shockingly" never came true…. just like the greenhouse effect, er, uh I mean global warming, no,…
on “India’s biggest businesses are tapping green hydrogen as a future fuel” ↗+100 for corporations -1 for consumers According to the book "Diet for a Small Planet" the beef industry gets $50 billion a year of free water from the federal government. Doesn't sound like fair market capitalism to me. It does sound like our elected officials can be easily bribed. The…
on “Bills seek end to farm animal abuse videos” ↗