It was 1970, and the extent to which our species—supposedly the most intelligent—had failed as steward of the planet had only begun to sink in on me. At age twenty-six, in my first big “ah-ha” moment, I was struck by the realization that we humans had actively created the food scarcity we claimed to fear. We were (and still are) feeding more than a third of the world’s grain to livestock, which return to us only a fraction of those nutrients.
