I tripped across an essay in the Guardian recently about life-changing books. The author had a list, of course, and it was a nice list but not one I would choose for myself. But it did get me to thinking about books that have literally changed my life.

The first one that came to mind was Diet for a Small Planet by Frances Moore Lappé. It was published in 1971 and I read it somewhere around 1975. (Why yes, I am an elder of my community. Why do you ask?)

In the book, Moore discussed meat production and how raising cattle (especially) was a waste of resources when more protein could be raised by growing plants, particularly soy. She argued that it was wasteful food production methods that caused worldwide hunger, and she was pretty convincing.

At the time, like just about everyone else I knew, I ate beef as well as pork and chicken because my generation was raised in a meat-and-potatoes world. Vegetarianism was for whackos.

But the book really made me think, and I began to deliberately notice how much beef I ate, and how it made me feel. Then I began to experiment with eliminating it from my diet. A couple of years later, I did the same with pork. Chicken and fish stayed but took up less space on my plate.

When I slowed down enough to notice, I discovered that I had a mild reaction whenever I ingested beef. Nothing big, just a mild stomach ache. And then in a conversation with my brother Mark, we found out that both of us experienced stomach distress when we ate beef.

After that, it became easier to plunge into the world of soy.

Now back then, eating soy in America was a new concept. Today, it’s easy to find tofu or tempe and other soy products in the grocery store. Believe me, it was (quite literally) a tough and tasteless path in the 1980s when every type of “meat substitute” tasted like something you could use for packaging material.

But I persisted, and I’ve never regretted it. That change opened up a whole new world of different foods and cuisines and ways of cooking, and I can honestly say I joyfully left that meat-and-potatoes world behind a long time ago.

At the same time, I learned an approach to making real change in my life that I’ve used ever since. The first step is simply slowing down enough to give thought to my actions instead of just mindlessly doing them. While Lappé’s intention may have been to draw her readers’ attention to food and the very real problems inherent in the American meat production industry, the most important lesson I learned was to slow down so that I could observe my habitual routines, and then change them.

This ties into my previous posts about weaning myself from the internet here. More to come.