Good Calories, Bad Calories

FRANCIS BACON, Novum Organum, 1620

BY 1977, WHEN THE NOTION THAT dietary fat causes heart disease began its transformation from speculative hypothesis to nutritional dogma, no compelling new scientific evidence had been published. What had changed was the public attitude toward the subject. Belief in saturated fat and cholesterol as killers achieved a kind of critical mass when an anti-fat, anti-meat movement evolved independent of the science.

The roots of this movement can be found in the counterculture of the 1960s, and its moral shift away from the excessive consumption represented by fat-laden foods. The subject of famine in the third world was a constant presence in the news: in China and the Congo in 1960, then Kenya, Brazil, and West Africa—where “Villagers in Dahomey Crawl to Town to Seek Food,” as a New York Times headline read—followed by Somalia, Nepal, South Korea, Java, and India; in 1968, Tanzania, Bechuanaland, and Biafra; then Bangladesh, Ethiopia, and much of sub-Saharan Africa in the early 1970s. Within a decade, the Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich predicted in his 1968 best-seller, The Population Bomb, “hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”

The fundamental problem was an ever-increasing world population, but secondary blame fell to an imbalance between food production and consumption. This, in turn, implicated the eating habits in the richer nations, particularly the United States. The “enormous appetite for animal products has forced the conversion (at a very poor rate) of more and more grain, soybean and even fish meal into feed for cattle, hogs and poultry, thus decreasing the amounts of food directly available for direct consumption by the poor,” explained Harvard nutritionist Jean Mayer in 1974. To improve the world situation, insisted Mayer and others, there should be “a shift in consumption in developed countries toward a ‘simplified’ diet containing less animal products and, in particular, less meat.” By doing so, we would free up grain, the “world’s most essential commodity,” to feed the hungry.

This argument was made most memorably in the 1971 best-seller Diet for a Small Planet, written by a twenty-six-year-old vegetarian named Francis Moore Lappé. The American livestock industry required twenty million tons of soy and vegetable protein to produce two million tons of beef, according to Lappé. The eighteen million tons lost in the process were enough to provide twelve urgently needed grams of protein daily to everyone in the world. This argument transformed meat-eating into a social issue, as well as a moral one. “A shopper’s decision at the meat counter in Gary, Indiana would affect food availability in Bombay, India,” explained the sociologist Warren Belasco in Appetite for Change, his history of the era.

By the early 1970s, this argument had become intertwined with the medical issues of fat and cholesterol in the diet. “How do you get people to understand that millions of Americans have adopted diets that will make them at best fat, or at worst, dead?” as the activist Jennifer Cross wrote in The Nation in 1974. “That the $139 billion food industry has not only encouraged such unwise eating habits in the interest of profit but is so wasteful in many of its operations that we are inadvertently depriving hungry nations of food?” The American Heart Association had taken to recommending that Americans cut back not just on saturated fat but on meat to do so. Saturated fat may have been perceived as the problem, but saturated fat was still considered to be synonymous with animal fat, and much of the fat in the American diet came from animal foods, particularly red meat.

Ironically, by 1968, when Paul Ehrlich had declared in The Population Bomb that “the battle to feed all humanity” had already been lost, agricultural researchers led by Norman Borlaug had created high-yield varieties of dwarf wheat that ended the famines in India and Pakistan and averted the predicted mass starvations. In 1970, when the Nobel Foundation awarded its Peace Prize to Borlaug, it justified the decision on the grounds that, “more than any other single person,” Borlaug had “helped to provide bread for a hungry world.”