 I think there are very few books you can truthfully say, this book changed my life. When I first came across it almost 40 years ago, this one changed mine. It explained clearly to me what it was I needed to know to eat well. In Factors Britain of the early 1980s, eco-vegans were about as welcome everywhere as the R&GB news today. Nutrition, let alone finding a diet to suit your needs ecologically, just wasn't a thing in common discussion. Yes, there were lots of fad exploitative diets, but there was little that took a hard look at the lifestyle consumer culture was telling us to lead. First published 50 years ago in 1971 and revised in fervoriditions, I think this is still the most revolutionary book on food available today, and its message is even more relevant in today's world than when it was written. Today people are talking about the need to eat less meat for the planet, the problems of clearing land to graze cattle, and the impacts of growing grain and soya to feed farmed animals. This book was talking about this 50 years ago. One day at a free festival, around 1984, I was talking with some people about food. I've been trying to go vegan, which is a bit of a chore due to conflicting ideas about organic versus macrobatics versus animal cruelty. Someone went away and came back with a copy of the first edition of Diet for a Small Planet. Just a quick scan, it was revelatory. Later, I think the following year, I got a copy of the revised second edition. The copy I have now is the revised 20th anniversary edition from 1991. It contains a lot more than the first two editions, and is very much wiser in its approach. The core of its message is about how protein has been misrepresented in the human diet, as it says. When I first wrote Diet for a Small Planet, I was fighting two nutritional myths at once. First was the myth that we needed scads of protein the more the better. The second was that meat contains the best protein. Combined, these two myths have led millions of people to believe that anybody eating lots of meat could get enough protein. The greatest idea I took from the book though, was how and what you eat defines you. As in the famous line by Jean-Brias Savara two centuries ago, tell me what you eat and I will tell you who you are. Finding a diet that expresses you as an individual is a truly empowering revolutionary act, or as explained in the book. In 1969, I discovered that half of our harvested acreage went to feed livestock. At the same time, I learned that for every seven pounds of grain and soybeans fed to livestock, we get on average only one pound back in meat. The final blow was discovering that much of what I had grown at believing about a healthy diet was false. Lots of protein is essential to a good diet, I thought. But I learned that, on average, Americans eat twice the protein their bodies can even use. Since our bodies don't store protein, what is not used is wasted. Moreover, I learned that the quality of meat protein better termed its usability. Could be matched simply by combining certain plant foods. Thus the final myth was exploded for me. The heart of this book is not recipes, they are confined to a section at the back. It's about nutrition, and how the modern diet is produced, and why there is a conflict between a good diet, modern farming, and a healthy planet. I'm not even going to attempt to summarise that because it's just not possible. The whole framework of the book, from nutrition to world trade, provides an analysis of why food is innately political, both in who controls it, and who makes the choices in this system, as it says. The first struggle for me and so many of my friends has been to reconcile our vision of the future with the compromises we must make every day just to survive in our society. If we attempt to be totally consistent, issuing all links between ourselves and the exploitative aspects of our culture, we drive ourselves, and those close to us, nuts. If the solution lies in the redistribution of decision-making power, we must become part of that redistribution. That means exercising to the fullest our power to make choices in our daily life. That theme continues throughout the book, containing observations that, reading in the middle of the 1980s, enable me to make a whole lot more sense of the world around me, such as. The disturbing discovery is that there is no single change that could alter the self-destructive path we are on. Many things will have to change, but this does not mean we can wait until they can all happen at once. The first step is uncovering the right questions. As long as we focus single-mindedly on increasing production and then on finding ways to dispose of it, we can neatly avoid asking the most critical social questions. Perhaps the book's greatest influence has been on the way I cook. As I say in my other blog, An Anarchist Cookbook, I do not measure, I do not have strict recipes, I just cook with what I have in the most creative, nutritional way possible. Whether I did this consciously or not, that is the approach stated in the book. Once meat is no longer the centre of the menu, then the whole pattern of habit falls apart. Anything goes, we are free to respond to our own appetites in planning menus. Therefore the majority of recipes in the book are not merely main dish ideas, but really meal dish ideas, meals in themselves. Fifty years after its publication and about to be reissued in a new 50th anniversary edition, diet for a small planet remains completely relevant and up to date because it was so ahead of its time. It's not simply about food or nutrition, it's about how food and nutrition are the core of lifestyle, and to have a good life is to express your values and beliefs through the diet that you eat.