Predictions made by 21st century scientists are that stopping the use of fossil fuels, although essential, is no longer enough to make the Planet sufficiently whole to sustain life. Many of these well-informed experts have also concluded that a global shift to plant-based dietary patterns is required for any hope. This target diet is not radical or new. A simple U-turn, back to traditional diets is the change in eating patterns we are proposing.

All large populations of trim, healthy, athletic-competing, war-fighting people throughout verifiable human history have obtained the bulk of their calories from starches. Examples of thriving populations include the Japanese, Chinese, and other Asians, who ate sweet potatoes, buckwheat, and/or rice; Incas in South America who ate potatoes; Mayans and Aztecs in Central America were known as “the people of the corn;” and the Middle East, formally known as “the breadbasket of the world,” fed hundreds of millions on a diet of wheat and barley. I say “ate,” rather than “eat,” because, since the early 1980s Western eating patterns have prevailed over traditional eating patterns consumed over millenniums. This is, by no coincidence, the same past 40 years that the greatest damage to Planet Earth from manmade climate change has occurred.