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Dignity, Democracy and Food: An Interview with Frances Moore Lappè

Frances Moore Lappè’s iconic Diet for a Small Planet has helped awaken millions of people to the connections between our diets, our bodies, and the fate of the planet. Since its publication in 1971, a rich array of food-related movements has risen up, taking on everything from nutrition and health, to farmer and farmworker justice, to world hunger and climate crisis.

What is the balance between crisis and progress? Can food activism possibly keep pace with the food industry’s destructive swath? Lappè, author or co-author of 17 books – including a new updated edition of World Hunger: 10 Myths, with co-author Joseph Collins – calls herself a “possibilist.” In a recent hour-long interview, she adroitly juggled bright-eyed hope with clear-eyed realism.

August 13, 2015 | Source: Common Dreams | by Christopher D. Cook

Frances Moore Lappè’s iconic Diet for a Small Planet has helped awaken millions of people to the connections between our diets, our bodies, and the fate of the planet. Since its publication in 1971, a rich array of food-related movements has risen up, taking on everything from nutrition and health, to farmer and farmworker justice, to world hunger and climate crisis.

What is the balance between crisis and progress? Can food activism possibly keep pace with the food industry’s destructive swath? Lappè, author or co-author of 17 books – including a new updated edition of World Hunger: 10 Myths, with co-author Joseph Collins – calls herself a “possibilist.” In a recent hour-long interview, she adroitly juggled bright-eyed hope with clear-eyed realism.

Somewhere between that hope and realism, Lappè exudes a passionate dedication to the idea that food is about more than filling stomachs sustainably – as she explains, it’s also about community, democracy, and human dignity.

I sat down with Lappè during her visit to Berkeley this May to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Food First, the prolific and influential think tank she and Collins founded in 1975. Lappè now runs the Small Planet Institute with her daughter, author and activist Anna Lappè.

Christopher D. Cook: Since the publication of Diet for a Small Planet, what’s changed and what hasn’t changed?

Frances Moore Lappè: On the one hand, things are so much worse than I could have imagined in terms of the concentration of power in the world, and the destructiveness of industrial agriculture. Never could I have imagined the extent of the dislocation, the extent of the cycles we are in with industrial agriculture. On the other hand are the things we’ve been documenting in our new book—the emergence of people aligning their lives with the laws of nature, human nature included. There is a deeper understanding of what it takes for people to thrive—that human dignity is not some add-on after we get everything else met. I think so much disruption in the world today is because our structures deny so many people their basic human dignity.

How would you describe the state of food activism, then and now?

It was such a different era, because it was really the awakening to world hunger, famine in Bangladesh, famine in Africa. In 1974, world hunger hit the international marquee, when the United Nations called a World Food Conference. At that conference, I was just stunned. Corporations were so present. There was still so much buy-in to the scarcity diagnosis and the corporate solution that I came home just shaken.

Then, the focus that Joe Collins and I were called to was world hunger. We weren’t as focused on the U.S. food supply and its degradation. We were part of a very alive world hunger movement that was very international, that in some ways doesn’t exist today. It’s morphed into all these different dimensions.

The things that inspire me today, I would never have imagined possible when Joe and I founded Food First, and that’s very humbling. The science behind agroecology is now widely accepted. The Indian government admits that the testing ground for the industrial model in Punjab has failed horribly, and there are two million farmers in two southern Indian states who are transitioning to agroecology.