Frances Moore Lappe-Standing at the Crossroads of History

A CONVERSATION WITH FRANCIS MOORE LAPPÉ

For over thirty years, renowned author and food activist Frances Moore
Lappé has worked tirelessly for the rights of all people to healthy food
and true democracy. From her seminal, best-selling book, "Diet for a
Small Planet," and numerous other writings, to her co-founding of the
organization Food First, and subsequent founding of the Center for
Living Democracy, Ms. Lappé has been a leading voice in the struggle for
fair and equitable distribution of food and land throughout the world.

Her new book, "Hope's Edge, the Next Diet for a Small Planet," authored
with her daughter Anna, chronicles their worldwide journey and describes
the hope that many people are finding as they regain control over their
food and their lives. Click on the link above to read our extended
review of this timely and incisive book.

My wife Zizi and I were honored to talk with Ms. Lappé in her Cambridge,
Massachusetts home on the morning of 21 May 2002.

Francis Moore Lappé: I'm so glad you're here. It just makes me happy to
be with people who are doing what they believe can heal.

SV: I guess what we're trying to do is get it down to the level of
putting seed in the ground. Beginning to understand food on that level,
then expand out to a broader consciousness, while always bringing it
back to the garden or farm. Some of the things that you talk about in
the new book--the community gardens, the children, the prisoners, the
power of gardening, of growing food, to restore values and heal--that's
what I was hoping we could talk about.

FML: It's been interesting, that first chapter, the beginning of the
journey. So many journalists that have interviewed us have focused on
that. Two journalists, and you know how journalists are generally so
objective--"I'm not really engaged in this, I'm just here to interview
you"--well two of them have said they wanted to start school gardens.

SV: At some point, I suppose you just have to drop that idea of
journalistic objectivity. I guess we're just blatant propagandists. I
mean we're trying to be factual and do our job as reporters, but we're
clearly promoting an idea, and fighting something else. So you don't
have to worry about us being objective. (laughter)

I have no idea where my original copy of Diet for a Small Planet is. I
think I gave it away--a few times actually. So I picked up a new copy,
which was the 20th anniversary edition. In the very beginning of the
book, I guess this was 1990, you mention that it was a time of
technological advancement, you were talking about working on your laptop
and faxing your article and that it was this dramatic change of
consciousness.

SV: You were talking about that time as one of these great opportunities
that comes along every so often. I was wondering, twelve years later,
how you feel about that now, in light of the fact that we've made
another quantum technological leap?

FML: I guess this relates to what I was just saying a few moments ago
about the paradox of this era, and one of the things that Anna and I
have been talking to audiences about the last few months. It comes back
also to what Wangari sort of stands for for me. (Wangari Maathai is a
leader in Kenya's Greenbelt movement,
http://www.geocities.com/gbm0001/.) And that is, I think "objectively"
that one can say that the trend lines, the negative trend lines, have
sped up, that the destruction of the planet, the destruction of our
biotic community is speeding up, but at the same time there are these
breakthroughs in consciousness, and not just in consciousness, and we
get at this in Hope's Edge. There is so much more knowledge, and you all
represent that, about how to live and lighten our footprint on the
earth, and create a sustainable way to inhabit this planet. So, I guess
the opportunity then, when things are so stark, when the paradox is so
stark, when things are getting worse, is that we're learning so much so
quickly about how to heal. It is such a moment where the choice is so
clear.

To be alive at such a time, we just happen to be here, you all and me,
on this planet at a time when this contrast is so clear. And therefore
we have a choice, do we choose death or do we chose life? And I don't
think previous generations, before this last twenty years, could see
what we can see, that our choices really do make an ultimate difference,
have ultimate consequences. This is quite an extraordinary time to be
inhabiting this planet.

So that sense of choice, and the Wangari piece of that, I don't know if
you remember from the book, the slogan that the greenbelt movement women
wear on their t-shirts. It's just very simple-- "As for me I've made a
choice." and that will just stay with me forever. And that had a lot to
do with what I just said, that unless we make that choice for "life"
then we are participating in "death." And I guess that's what I hope my
work can make clearer and clearer. It's not as if by "not doing" we
aren't having an effect. We are having a very big effect with all of the
choices that we make every day. So what I hope to communicate more and
more is the special quality of this era. I guess the other piece of it
that I didn't really feel so much in 1990--it's only been that last few
years doing the traveling for the book and the writing of the book and
speaking about the book--is the awareness of how much energy most of us
spend, and maybe this is just me, but how much energy is spent shielding
ourselves from the bad news because it is so bad. When you look at [the
fact that] a third of all species are threatened with extinction, and
that it will take 10 million years just to regenerate what we've already
destroyed and the increase now in slavery and violence--I'm getting off
your question--but what I feel now is that, for the first time in my
life, I can let in the bad news without being overwhelmed by it.

SV: Is it because you see this other force, this positive force that's
beginning to catch fire?

FML: Maybe, but I think I've just always focused on the positive,
believing somehow that if you really let in the bad news, that you'd
become paralyzed. So I've just focused on the positive; "We really do
have enough food to feed the world. We really do." I've been kind of a
cheerleader. So the big change for me--in Hope's Edge we say that Anna
and I have learned a lot about the human heart this year, that it can
grow bigger than me, that the human heart can grow large enough to hold
the pain and suffering and the hope and joy at the same time. I think
that's really the theme of my life right now. I think that blocking out
the bad news numbs us; it cuts us off from each other--our own
suffering, others suffering. So that theme of how to sing and cry at the
same time is the theme of my life right now--to drop the cheerleader
role.

And I think that even though we have to acknowledge the devastation and
how hard it's going to be to turn it around in the time necessary, now
we have new threats--I mean, I thought the cold war was scary, but I
feel that this period is even scarier than the cold war with people
talking about terrorists using nuclear weapons, bio-terrorism. I don't
know--the cold war, which I grew up under, was either going to happen in
this big way where we were all going to be annihilated or not, so it was
hard to think about on a daily basis. But now it feels like the threats
are sort of everywhere and totally random and there's not just one
center that we have to defeat like in the cold war, where if we just got
rid of communism. I just feel that it's a more threatening time for many
people.

So, anyway, the next book that I'm working on is a book about fear and
has a lot to do with this idea of learning to sing and cry at the same
time. Where you learn to accept the extent of suffering in the world and
the threat to our well-being and not be paralyzed by fear and realize
that fear in such an era is inevitable. That change is required of all
of us and that change is frightening. So how do we see fear in a totally
different light? The tentative title for our book is Fear Means Go!

FML: Yes, it's the theme of being able to acknowledge through various
means, as we hopefully suggest in the book, that once we make this
choice to choose life that then we choose to bring into our lives those
people who will reinforce us in our risk taking. And so our fear of
breaking with the pack will be diminished as we bring into our lives
people who are nourishing us in choosing "life" so to speak. And knowing
that there is this awakening that we try to capture in the book--some
feeling that we can all be part of it.

SV: I try to think of it as a critical mass. I keep thinking that, as a
movement, we're reaching a point where it's no longer a few people, or
one publication, that it's not just a few voices out there, that it will
feel safe for people and help them with their fear. Like, "Oh, there's a
bandwagon I can jump on and feel good about."

FML: Exactly. That's why we wrote the book the way we did, and made it
so pretty, so people would feel, "Oh yeah, I don't have to be some
radical extremist to get on this bandwagon." This is all about life and
hope and food and beauty. And the human spirit is strong. That's why
we're so happy with the way the book publisher created something that's
warm feeling, precisely so that people can feel like there's a home for
them in this movement.

SV: I love the way you have the recipes after each chapter so that you
don't have to wait until the end of the book--you're constantly reminded
that food is the thing that really binds us together.

I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about some of the other
things you've been doing for the last thirty years, your work with Food
First, to give people a little background. I mean, you've written these
two books that have gotten all this publicity, but there's a whole body
of work in between that a lot of people don't know much about.

FML: It's true. Most people think I've written one book. People come up
to me all the time and say, "I've read your book." So I try not say, "so
which book?"

SV: Well, to be sure, Diet for a Small Planet is the one that had the
popular success and probably the most impact?

FML: We'll it's funny that you'd ask that because I just picked up a
book last week at the Harvard Coop. It's an edited volume called Global
Backlash. It's about the movement, a sort of bottom up approach to
globalization. It's edited, very short pieces from historical and
current [sources] critiquing the dominant corporate globalization model.
I got to the historical section and there was an excerpt from the book
Food First about the way colonialism contributed to what we now
experience as world hunger. Just reading this, that Joe Collins and I
had written in 1977--and I hadn't read this since probably 1978 or
so--it was so interesting to see it there and to see that it still made
sense. It was sort of a helpful condensation of literature about how
colonialism undermined local food crops and put in cash crops. When Joe
and I were in the founding of Food First, that was in the seventies when
the world was saying that there's not enough food in these poor
countries, they're so underdeveloped, they're so hungry, and our job is
to ship food aid to them because we have this great breadbasket and they
obviously don't have enough land and don't have the expertise to grow
the food they need. That was the framing.

So Joe and I wrote Food First and founded the organization and said
"wait a minute," there are amazing resources everywhere on our planet
for people to feed themselves, but people have been actively robbed of
the land and the skills and the self-confidence that they can feed
themselves. So that was really the beginning, and to see that it was
still found to be useful by somebody in 2002 was very gratifying--both
gratifying and alarming that in some ways it's still not common
knowledge that, in fact, the third world was underdeveloped as a verb.
You know we think of underdeveloped as an adjective, but it's really a
verb. There was an active underdevelopment going on as cash crops were
forced on peasant populations. It's like the story I was just telling
you that Wangari told last night about how cocoa and coffee and other
crops just clear out the diverse trees and other food crops that were
appropriate to the drought prone areas and that sort of thing.

After I wrote Diet for a Small Planet, the next big step was the
founding of the organization Food First and writing the book Food First,
which all were happening at once, because that was the first burst of
interest in the seventies, in world hunger. It was like "Oh! There's
starvation in the world" and the impulse was understandably, "let's give
them our food." This kind of noblesse oblige charity approach.

And so the founding of that organization was to educate people about the
social roots, that the problem of hunger is a scarcity of democracy, not
a scarcity of food. And that's really the theme of all our work at Food
First. Whether we said it or not, it was helping people understand that
the root of hunger is in social relationships, that hunger is simply a
reflection of a breakdown in human relationships and therefore the
relationship to the land. It wasn't a direct problem of just inadequate
resources. So, that consumed my life for about fifteen years. I was
there at Food First and wrote many books. Actually, this current book is
my thirteenth. My lucky thirteenth!

They ranged from a book called Taking Population Seriously that said,
"Ok, if we're serious about population then we have to get to these
underlying roots," to a book on US foreign aid, called Aid as Obstacle,
to two books on Nicaragua and land reform. Then there was the book I did
with my kids called What to do After You Turn off the TV.

FML: It was not a big seller. I couldn't get on TV! Another book I wrote
in the nineties, called The Quickening of America, which is a book on
democracy emerging--sort of a domestic version of Hope's Edge--sold
maybe 25,000 copies, and it's still in print. It doesn't seem like a
lot, yet I was in a small college two days ago and the professor sitting
next to me said his mother-in-law had used that book to teach democracy
to Romanians, who were building democracy from the ground up. And they
went through every exercise in the book. And I thought, you know, I
would have written the whole book just for that.

But, again, the book I did with my kids was very gratifying. It's all
sort of related, in my view, to this same fundamental issue of people
appreciating their own power to create rather than deferring to
television.

FML: Oh, it wasn't difficult at all. It was really fun though. My son
illustrated the book. It was our first sort of family project. So my
books have ranged all over.

Anyway, back to Food First. That was what was driving me there, in a
sense to use food, and I don't mean that in a crass way, but to say that
if people could, through food, understand the social dimension, that
it's all about human relationships, then they'll be focused on the human
relationships, and not get sidetracked into some sort of mechanistic
notion of just numbers of people per acre [as if] that's the problem.
The fundamental issue is how we create community. What we consider to be
the norms of expectations of healthy community, and is one of them that
we all have access to healthy food? That's why, of course, the Bella
Horizonte chapter is so important to the book, where food had been
declared a human right.

SV: I was curious about the Nicaragua work. I hadn't realized that you
worked on that issue. I spent some time there myself. It just seemed
like all through Latin America, or Central America at least, that the
absence of food was directly related to the absence of democracy, if not
to flat out repression. I was in Guatemala at Santiago Atitlan one time
and the people we're afraid to go out. To get to the marginal land that
they had to farm, they had to travel by foot an hour or two from their
village. They were afraid they would be killed. That's an extreme case,
but not entirely unusual.

SV: It was right after the massacre at Atitlan when they ended up
driving the army out. It must have been December 1989.

FML: Oh, I have this video--a friend of mine created one of the most
moving videos about everything we're talking about--in Guatemala,
following the life of a peasant, a Mayan, over about a twenty five year
period--where he had been working to improve the agricultural practices
so he could increase the yields of corn. Anyway, it's a progression of
his life and how he ultimately decided to join the guerillas--and the
price he paid--and takes us on to his death.

SV: You can have all the agricultural practices in the world but if you
don't have the freedom to farm, then its meaningless, which brings me
around the whole idea of "Living Democracy" that you talk about, that
hunger isn't brought about by scarcity, but rather by the absence of
democracy.

FML: That's why I went on then to found the Center for Living Democracy.
Because I'd preached from the podium for so long about how we can't have
a foreign policy that promotes democracy abroad unless we have democracy
here. I said, "well, you should start listening to what you're saying
from the podium and act on that." So I left Food First and founded the
Center for Living Democracy and I thought that would be the rest of my
life, that I would be using that vehicle to help people grasp this
emergence, and using the metaphor of living, that it's our living
practice, living in the sense that it's organic and ever evolving--it's
not just a structure that we inherit, it's what we create in our own
lives. That was directly growing out of Food First.

One of the motivations for leaving Food First and starting the Center
was my heartbreak over what happened in Nicaragua, because my sense of
it was that there were authoritarian strains in the Sandinistas and
there were democratic strains. And it seemed so clear that the US
response, the military response, understandably brought out the more
authoritarian strains. And so we were robbed, the whole world was
robbed, of learning what might have been.

Yeah, so that experience was very formative for me. That experience of
getting so close to something so hopeful and then seeing it destroyed
through the US foreign policy--I'm sure that contributed to my ultimate
decision to leave Food First and start the Center for Living Democracy.
I came to believe that people wouldn't believe in democracy unless they
had a taste of it. I guess "taste" both literally and
figuratively--that was why I founded the Center, that was why I founded
the news service, and that's why I wrote the book the way that we did,
to give people the taste of what it could feel like to be in a community
where people really have voice and um... hope.

SV: Especially in the chapter on the Landless Workers Movement--that
whole triumphant...

FML: Yeah, it is amazing--whenever I feel glum I just flash back to some
of those moments with those people. So now I have all these people with
me, I have them in me, I have Wangari and the Landless Workers, and
Belo, and all these people. So I feel so much stronger and hopefully
people who read the book will feel that way too. I guess that was our
hope most of all, that people could have that vicarious fortification of
knowing that these people are human beings just like us, and they're out
there doing it.

SV: In the beginning, I think Seeds of Change was a little too
aggressive with a lot of the information about how we've lost all this
diversity, especially within crops, the perils of chemical pesticides,
etc. We never talked enough about the hope and the other models that
were happening in the world. I think we may have scared some people off.
We never talked enough about the joys of gardening, and the joys of
organic food and growing your own food, and what it really tastes
like--that whole experience. So now, we're trying to find that line
where we can show people the models and make people feel that this is a
positive step you can take, while still being aware of the larger
issues.

FML: What you're saying is very much what I was trying to say. To help
people see that it's not "either you're out there just attacking how
terrible things are, or you're in your garden doing your own happy
thing"--that both are essential and we have to be sounding the alarm at
the very same time we're ringing the bells of joy for what is emerging.
We can do both. I guess that's the theme for me right now--figuring that
out for myself personally and sharing that with other people. Hope's
Edge is the first attempt at that, without pulling the punches about how
desperate the situation is for those people. The hardest one was
actually the Bangladesh chapter. That was the hardest chapter to write
because the position of women is so, so terrible there. Yet, compared to
where it was when Muhammed Yunus started, it's progress.

SV: It was interesting how you wrap that chapter up by talking about how
many women are actually working for the Grameen Bank.

FML: And fewer and fewer. It's shrinking. And the whole consumerism--you
just see it beginning to take over in Dakka--and the effect of that. I
was just reading that a huge number of women in Bangladesh work in these
export processing zones, where they just get a pittance, and working
just incredible hours, and starting so young. And this is progress? So
that was really hard to see. But [it is progress] relative to what it
was when men and women couldn't even talk. It was really hard; it's the
closest I've come personally to despair--was when we got back from
Bangladesh.

SV: I heard Vandana Shiva speak at the Common Ground Fair in Maine last
year. I guess one of the stories in your book that was the most powerful
for me was about her Navdanya movement and the power of seeds and seed
saving. I was completely taken by they way people in India have taken
back control of their lives through their seeds.

FML: Well, when you say that, of course the first thing I think of is
this journey that Vandana sent us off on. As soon as we got to Dehli she
said, "get on the night train, you're going to Dehra Dun." As you know
from the book, we ended up in these villages where the huts that are
part of the seed savers all have this little emblem on them marking that
they were all part of the seed savers network. The sense that we had
from the people that we talked to--and of course these were all men we
talked to, the honchos of the villages--was that this was an incredible
moment of truth for them. They were saying, "Oh my God! What have we
bought in to?"

The impression that we had was that for decades they had been denying
the consequences of chemical agriculture, and even though there was
sickness, they weren't putting it together as to why--even though they
said, "we never really had a pest problem until we started using
pesticides." But they weren't putting it all together until Vandana
Shiva's network, this Navdanya network, sent who we called the
circuit-rider guy, Negi who was also our guide, out there to sit with
them and talk with them and get them to stop and reflect.

You know, in the beginning the government actually gave away these
commercial seeds and the chemicals to go with them. And the [farmers]
gradually got hooked. Of course, once they started using the pesticides
they had to keep using them. They kind of forgot that their seeds tasted
better and they didn't have a big pest problem, and they didn't have
these health problems. So just having somebody there--at least this was
the impression that we got--allowed them to reflect on what they had
experienced. They said, "wait a minute, we were really led down the
wrong track." And then being willing to go through the years of change,
to go back to that which was tradition for millennia, meant several
years of transition back to organic and diversified approaches. It was
really moving to see these people acknowledge that they were mislead.
That's hard for all of us to do.

SV: I think that's the hardest thing for people who've made this
commitment for so long with a vision of higher yields and less work.
When you start to realize you went down the wrong path it's hard to turn
around.

FML: It's very hard. One of the things that really helped, as you know
from the book, is that there is this one that we called the pesticide
pusher. This guy had been the one to peddle the pesticide thing. When
Negi got to him, and he converted, and then became the local organic
"truck stop," metaphorically speaking, I think that really influenced a
lot of people. He was actually just reacting to his own heath problems
from handling pesticides.

That was very moving of people to admit, "You know I've been on the
wrong track," and that's very hard. And that brings up this whole moment
of dissonance, a theme of our book. How so many people we met did have
those moments when the world kind of cracked, and they said, "Ok, do we
kind of stay in denial, or do we take the risk of change."

Like Jim Miller, the farmer in Wisconsin. When his father, the patriarch
of the family, died, his siblings were all farmers, all chemical
farmers, they all looked at each other and said, "Well, do we admit that
dad really died of exposure? And if we admit that, then what are we
going to do?" And they all went together; the whole family went organic.
And now Organic Valley is a huge success.

So back to the seed savers--it shows how easily we loose confidence in
our own wisdom. Whether it be in Africa or India, the example of people
revaluing their own traditional seeds and practices--how quickly people
can learn helplessness. In our Africa chapter we mention a book by
Martin Seligman called Learned Optimism. He's a theorist who talks about
learned helplessness and how you think of human beings as being so
creative, and how we have to have a certain amount of self-confidence in
order to have survived and evolved as a species. But what is so striking
is how quickly human beings can lose that when they're told in so many
ways, both indirectly and directly, that they're not of value and that
something else is superior. How quickly they can devalue their own
culture and their own wisdom. And then to see people in those moments
say, "Oh yes!"

I remember Lea Kisomo in Kenya, this elder who would talk about the
porridges they ate when she was growing up. She would almost get teary
eyed just with the memories. And, of course, that morning we'd been
served white bread for breakfast. And to see her joy in realizing that
"Oh yes, young people are beginning to value what we had, and that we
weren't all just backward and ignorant, that there was wisdom in what we
had done."

So, just that affirmation that we can trust our common sense--I didn't
get any sense from these people that they didn't think they could learn
from abroad or from western science, but really valuing the wisdom that
had grown out of a more intimate relationship with the earth, and
trusting their own experience of sickness and seeing what the
consequences were. And even things like the pleasure of eating food that
tastes good. In all my work over these years that has related to food,
so much of the agricultural literature never mentions taste at all as a
variable. So to see people unapologetically talking about "Of course
we're not going to use these government seeds any more because ours
taste so much better." Eating food we love is a great part of the joy of
being alive. It's not lesser than anything else. So I think that was a
key part of it, and then I think also the social part of the seed saving
and exchanging [is important].

When we were in Bangladesh we talked with Farida Akhter, who with her
husband, co-founded this seed saving organization called Nayakrishi.
When the women gathered around and were talking to us, it was clear that
the revival of seed saving was also the revival of women's relationships
and sense of control over their own destiny; the revival of seed saving
and exchange was also strengthening for women.

Their material is just so poetic. They, more than any other people that
we talked to about these issues, wove together, without being in any way
"new agey" in a flaky sense, because it's all grounded in their culture,
both a spiritual sense and being very agronomical. They seem to have
this way of combining the cultural, spiritual, and the agricultural in
their approach. They have these big festivals each year where thousands
and thousands of farmers come. They have various theatrical
presentations as they are doing the seeds exchange.

SV: That would be a great thing to see. On the other end of that
spectrum is your story about the kids in the schoolyards. These kids are
starting out knowing this way of growing food, not having to go back and
unlearn. They can do it without having that sense of helplessness--that
the only food is down at the supermarket. Did you visit any other
schools?

FML: We visited a school in Kenya where they were planting trees. But
the only school garden we visited was the Martin Luther King School--but
in California now they have a goal of a garden in every school.

FML: One of the things I think was so important about this garden was
that it was designed by kids. There were no straight lines. And as the
teacher out there said, they didn't use any lumber because they wanted
everything to be a success and you can't create ugliness if you use only
natural materials. No matter how kind of sloppy it is, if it's nature it
looks good. So it's just branches and twigs and vines to create spaces.
I think we mentioned that there was this big mud mound. We asked, "What
is that?" They said this is a bird's nest that the kids created that was
big enough for them to get into because they wanted to get into a bird's
nest. They obviously just let the kid's imagination just go.

SV: So it crossed over to a lot of other things besides gardening, like
design and making art.

SV: Maybe you could talk a little bit about the prison garden project in
San Francisco.

FML: We just saw Catherine Sneed last month when we were out there. I
guess the first thing that comes to mind is the profound frustration I
felt last night while listening to Wangari talk about her financial
struggle, and thinking of Catherine too and how much money she's saving
taxpayers, and yet she's also struggling to raise money--doing this on a
shoestring. It's like, wait a minute, this is proven to reduce
recidivism. It's proven to reduce crime, so why isn't this just taking
off?

SV: That's an interesting point. I hadn't really thought of it in those
terms--that if we put a little bit of money into these gardening
projects, that it could save a lot of money in the long term. But maybe
there isn't a real incentive to save money on prisons?

FML: Prisons are a big lobby. I think we point out that in the 1990
campaign the prison guards' association was the biggest contributor to
the governor's campaign. So there's a prison industry that has a strong
interest in keeping people in prison and having more prisoners.

FML: When we were writing the book we tried--not too hard, but we
tried--to get some other data, but it's not easily available. It must
exist in other places.

SV: I think that one of the reasons these things happen in California is
that the climate is so great there. It would be hard to have a school
garden in Maine, considering that the kids are out of school for most of
the growing season.

FML: Although, Eliot Coleman has developed these simple greenhouses.
Things like that would be so cool for kids--especially in the winter, to
have something that relates them to growth and to the earth.

You know, one of the most fun things Anna and I did on this tour was
when we were at a small college in Pennsylvania, we went to an organic
farm run by an Amish farmer that had a CSA (community supported
agriculture) with the faculty at Allegheny College. He was telling us
that he had gone to the library and found Eliot Coleman and was trying
to do it, following his guidelines. I thought the Amish would be mostly
organic but many of them are not. He said, at least there, that they are
mainly chemical. Even the other Amish farmers thought that he was a
little weird at first.

Anyway, he got our book and came to hear our lecture. The next day he
called the professor who had invited us and said, "Tell the Lappé's that
the mental maps are cracking!" He's able to support seven children on
seven acres with this CSA with thirty families.

SV: We interviewed Bill Mollison a while back and that's the model that
he describes as the answer to how we should be feeding ourselves--the
local, the sustainable, farmers markets, CSAs, knowing the farmers that
you are getting your food from. It just seems that the more we can talk
about success stories like that, the more people will get interested.
And it comes back to that taste thing. Putting real food in front of
people. We have a lot of people out to our farm in Maine and we'll cook
up some potatoes and beet greens and they'll say, "This is so good!" and
it's just mashed potatoes and beet greens. But they're organic potatoes
that we just dug and beets that were growing fifteen minutes ago. It's
just not the same food you get at the supermarket.

FML: It was so great! I don't know what I'm going to do now. I've
collaborated with so many people. More than half my books are
co-authored, but she's the best. She's just so smart and so quick and so
careful and fun.

FML: It was just so fantastic. It's so hard [to describe]. People ask me
that and I don't know how to summarize it--just how marvelous it was and
how natural it felt. We had this natural complimentarity: where I'm kind
of the big picture person, where a lot of my thinking over the past
thirty years frames the book, but my daughter comes at it with totally
fresh eyes. And, having been studying international public affairs at
Columbia when she began this research, she's just an indefatigable
researcher. So it was just kind of a perfect compliment. And she's such
an excellent writer, we just went back and forth and back and forth. Our
only standing tension/joke was about my "cheesiness." Cheesy was the
worst adjective that she could come up with to condemn my writing. So
she developed this little icon that she'd put in the margin if she
thought that I was going over the top. I'd have to tone it down a little
bit. I guess I wanted this book to be very personal, and she took out
some of the more personal stuff. I don't know who's right, but I thought
that the more I could reveal of myself and my own self doubts, the more
it would help the reader feel that he or she is not alone.

Certainly it will change our relationship forever to have these common
memories for the rest of our lives.

SV: What about the internet? This is an electronic newsletter that were
doing. So we're using the internet to put these ideas out there. It
seems like a lot of the people that you met use these tools to make
their work viable.

FML: It's true. Our book--when you think how difficult that would have
been if we couldn't have scheduled everything by contacting people
through the internet... And when you think of the French Farmers
Organization (http://www.confederationpaysanne.fr) connected to Vandana
Shiva's (http://www.vshiva.net) seed saving and anti-GMO campaign in
India, connected to the Landless Workers Movement in Brazil
(http://www.mstbrazil.org). They are all part of La Via Campesina
(http://ns.rds.org.hn/via), the international farmer's movement. People
communicating mainly through the internet and really keeping up and just
gaining strength I would think, from just knowing what each other is
doing and being able to confer that way. I think it's a huge part of why
this is happening now and not before.

FML: As we said in the book, "Hope is more a verb than a noun." Hope is
impossible unless we ourselves are engaged in something that is
meaningful to us. Hope is not a calculation; it's not weighing the
evidence. It's not about a tally, but it's about becoming hope, not
finding hope. So I guess my answer is that the only time that I'm
despairing, or even to the edge of that, is when I don't feel that I'm
being useful. As long as I can feel that I'm applying my particular
combination of attributes to a way that is choosing life, then I feel
hopeful--just like the people in our book who are facing death perhaps,
or terrible drought, or facing incredible deprivation, and yet their
spirits were the most hopeful of anyone we met. And it wasn't about
evidence; it was about their own actions and realizing what they could
do.

That is really the message that I want to communicate to people, that if
you're feeling depressed--and what is depression but hope-less-ness...
and so the antidote do depression is hope-full-ness. And how do we
become hopeful? We say, "Only in action, only in discovering how our
unique gifts intersect with what this world needs to sustain life." So
for myself, very personally, my dark moments are when I feel like I'm
off-track, when I feel like I don't really know where that intersect is.
And when I feel like I'm in that flow, as I did so much in this book
process with my daughter, I felt,more than ever in my life with this
book,that I was a vehicle. I think that's when we feel so good because
we know that there's this connection between our uniqueness in the net
of existence with the rest of humanity. When we feel that we're there,
then we're fine. So that's the art of existence, isn't it? Finding that
connection, that intersect between our own gifts and what the world
needs to heal.

For more information about what Francis and Anna are up to these days,
check out their website at http://www.dietforasmallplanet.com/

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