There is, then, a huge but hidden domestic cost to America’s love affair with meat. But because the planet is smaller, dietary habits in this country cost other countries as well. The grain that we use to feed the animals we eat is more than enough to feed the world’s impoverished and hungry people. The problem of world hunger, argues Lappé, isn’t caused by lack of food so much as by the maldistribution and ill-use of food resources. In many senses, as the old saying goes, I am what I eat. But as Lappé points out, you are also what I eat, because my dietary habits affect the worldwide distribution of food resources. Whenever I eat, my food choices impact the international community.
Through her many books and lectures as well as through the work of the Institute for Food and Development Policy, which she cofounded in 1975, Lappé has been a tireless advocate of nonviolent dietary reform. Her work continues to be inspired by the fundamental conviction that a smaller planet requires an American dietary lifestyle friendly to people, the environment, and animals across the world.
11 February
Muriel Lester
9 December 1885—11 February 1968
Ambassador of Peace
There was little in Muriel Lester’s childhood that suggested what she would make her life’s work. Born into a wealthy British shipbuilding family, she and her two siblings, Doris and Kingsley, were sheltered from the poverty endured by the lower classes in Victorian England. Once, when she was eight years old, Muriel passed through a London ghetto while riding on a train. Astounded at the “gardenless, sordid, unsavory dwelling houses,” she incredulously asked the nanny accompanying her if people actually lived in them. “Oh yes,” the nanny replied. “But they don’t mind it. They’re not like you. They enjoy it.”
Lester never forgot this first experience of poverty, and while still in her teens she became a dedicated socialist. Deciding to forgo a university education in order to work for social justice, she and her sister used an inheritance from their brother, who died young, to open Kingsley Hall, a settlement house in East London. The house offered shelter and meals to the poor and served as a nondenominational chapel. Lester lived there for the next two decades, attending to the needs of London’s least privileged.
Influenced by the pacifist writings of Leo Tolstoy, Lester opposed World War I and joined the newly formed Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) in 1914. During the years of the war, “God Save the King” wasn’t sung in Kingsley Hall. She explained that the fourth line, “Send him victorious,” could only mean “killing, wounding, gassing, starving, lying, spying, drinking, and venereal disease” in peacetime. The victory she wanted was “the conquest of slums, disease, ignorance.”
Although a deeply religious woman who believed that warfare was antithetical to Christianity—it was, she said, a “daily crucifixion of Christ”—Lester grew dissatisfied with the failure of mainline churches to embrace pacifism or to condemn the capitalist system she believed encouraged warfare. “The doctrine of the Cross, self-giving, self-suffering, forgiveness, is the exact opposite of the doctrine of armies and navies,” she wrote. “One must choose between the sword and the Cross.” Institutional Christianity, she feared, had chosen the sword while paying lip service to the Cross.
In 1926 Lester traveled to India to meet Mohandas Gandhi, and the two established a close friendship that lasted until his assassination in 1948. In 1933 she became ambassador at large or “traveling secretary” for the FOR, a post she held for the next thirty years. She traveled around the globe nine times, speaking against war and in favor of nonviolent conflict resolution and reconciliation. By the time she retired in the late 1950s, she had been twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and was internationally recognized as one of her generation’s leading pacifists.
12 February
Dorothy Stang
7 July 1931—12 February 2005
A Sacrosanct Right
She told friends that her age and status as a Roman Catholic nun would protect her, despite the many death threats she had received. But she was wrong. On her way to a community meeting in a town on the edge of the Brazilian rainforest, she was stopped by two men. They asked her if she was carrying weapons. She responded by opening up the Bible she always had with her and reading one of the Beatitudes: “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” As she tried to walk past the men, they shot her and then pumped five more bullets into her as she lay face down in the dirt.
The murder of Sister Dorothy Stang shocked and saddened the thousands of Brazilian peasants whom she had represented for thirty years. Born into a large Catholic family in Dayton, Ohio, Stang joined the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, an order dedicated to aiding poor people, especially women and children, in the world’s “most abandoned places.” In 1966, ten years after taking her final vows, she was sent to Brazil as a missionary.
Stang fell in love with her new home. She became fluent in Portuguese and eventually acquired Brazilian citizenship. Early on she began championing the rural poor among whom she lived. Brazilian peasants, who scratched out a precarious existence on small farms in and around the rainforest, were being driven off their land by ranching and timber conglomerates that slashed and burned their way through the forest. The ranchers wanted cleared land either to graze beef cattle or to grow grain to feed cattle. Leaders in the timber industry wanted the millions of feet of straight and true lumber the rainforests supplied.
In standing against the ranchers and timbermen, Stang found herself defending both the poor who were being dispossessed and the rainforest that was being plundered. (To date, about 20 percent of its 1.6 million square miles has been destroyed.) The farmers, she insisted, “have the sacrosanct right to aspire to a better life on land where they can live and work with dignity while respecting the environment.” And the “death of the forest,” she believed, “is the end of our life,” not just because its devastation means the displacement of farmers, but because the rainforest is one of the world’s natural wonders. Its wanton destruction for commercial gain is an assault on God’s earth and an impoverishment of the human spirit.
Stang’s murder has galvanized resistance to the timber and ranching interests who wish to exploit the Brazilian rainforest. The apprehension and trial of her murderers, both of whom expressed regret at their crime, drew the world’s attention to the plight of both the poor Brazilian farmers and the commercial destruction of the rainforest. In death as in life, Sister Dorothy’s nonviolent campaign for economic and environmental justice continues.
13 February
Emil Fuchs
13 May 1874—13 February 1971
Accepting the Challenge of Peace
In June 1953, East Berlin exploded. A couple of months earlier, Communist Party leader Walter Ulbricht, under pressure from the Kremlin, had announced an acceleration of the “Sovietization” of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Higher taxes would be levied, heavy industry would be promoted at the expense of food and consumer goods, and electricity would be rationed. East Berliners, already stretched to the breaking point by poverty, took to the streets in protest.
Ulbricht’s response was to declare martial law and crack down on dissident groups already under suspicion. One of them was the Young Congregations, a Christian evangelical organization. Clergy members were arrested, churches associated with the group were closed down, and affiliated students were expelled from schools. It was obvious to everyone that Ulbricht, an outspoken atheist, was using the riots as an opportunity to attack religious faith.
One man publicly protested the persecution. Emil Fuchs, a Lutheran pastor turned Quaker, lifelong Christian socialist and pacifist, and loyal (even if sometimes reluctant) supporter of the GDR, bucked the government line by defending the Young Congregations. Even more, he pled—fruitlessly, as it turned out—for a reversal of