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A New Tack on Hunger : Frances Lappe Sees Our Small Planet Needing Big Diet of Economic Reform

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Times Staff Writer

In 1971, Frances Moore Lappe turned her one-page handout on the causes of world hunger into a book that she figured “would appeal to maybe 500 people around the Bay Area,” where she was then a graduate-school dropout.

Rooted in the thesis that hunger exists in the world not because of overpopulation or insufficient food production but because of a wasteful fixation on meat production, “Diet for a Small Planet” was an odd mix of ethical, political and economic analysis, autobiographical details and recipes for mung beans, tofu, grains and legumes.

Three editions, 3 1/2 million copies and 18 years later, “Diet,” as Lappe usually refers to it, is still selling and making its impact felt around the planet. So is its author.

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Lappe has written or co-authored a host of books and reports on social conditions around the world, always with food as a focus or starting point; spoken on hunger to countless groups, and co-founded with public-policy expert Joseph Collins the Institute for Food and Development Policy, an organization here to research and educate on the root causes of hunger and related societal problems.

And now she has produced a new book, “Rediscovering America’s Values” (Ballantine), which is written in dialogue format about “freedom, fairness and democracy.” Using it as an organizing tool, she and the institute are about to participate in an ambitious five-year national effort called Project Public Life. Some of Lappe’s favorite words are attached to this project: democracy, citizen action, public decision making, community, commonwealth, participation, empowerment.

“Thinking big,” she calls it.

If mung-bean recipes do not seem on an obvious track with “democracy,” they do to Frankie Lappe.

“We have hunger in the United States,” she exclaims. “How can we say we’re a democracy?”

She is an alumna of the think-globally-act-locally school of political action; a person who believes that if you would change the world, you must first change yourself; thus a change in life style, such as reducing one’s meat consumption, Lappe reasons, is a personal first step for anyone interested in eradicating hunger at home and worldwide.

And, having spent more than 20 years figuring out such connections, she has decided she knows how to fix what is out of whack that allows hunger in the first place.

Starting from “Diet’s” central message--that meat production wastes grain (it takes 16 pounds to produce a pound of beef), wastes water and land and, she has now concluded, destroys land and water supplies--Lappe says that the solution for putting an end to hunger and poverty is economic and political. It can be simply stated, but it is not exactly a quick fix: redistribute wealth and power.

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That may sound radical to some; to her it is plain old Fourth-of-July solid-citizen democracy.

“In shorthand, we’re talking about democracy as a broad concept of accountability,” she said recently of Project Public Life. “We have to take responsibility.”

A former community organizer who retreated from action when she decided her need to understand the root causes of society’s problems had reached a critical point, Lappe says of the project: “This is where my life has come full circle. It’s one thing to stand at a podium telling people that to change anything, you have to believe you can change it. . . . It’s time now to practice what I’ve been preaching, to step out from behind the podium and try to organize a national coalition. I’ve never tried it before in my life.”

Frankie Lappe, as she is called by most who know her, is a calmly busy woman with a cheerful, bright-eyed face and soft-spoken manner. Slender and lithe, she can move quickly without seeming rushed or impatient, and manage to talk, listen and connect while on the run.

That was how she was during a recent encounter that started at the institute, continued with a walk to the nearest BART station, a ride to Oakland, a stop at the delicatessen, a walk through her neighborhood of tree-lined streets and modest homes until she finally reached her back yard, there to catch the late afternoon sun, eat a piece of pizza as a substitute for the lunch she skipped, and talk about her life and her work.

She lives in a small, pleasant house with her husband of four years, Baird Callicott, and her two children, Anthony and Anna, from her first marriage. Anthony will go to New York University in the fall; Anna is in high school. Lappe was, she said, married for 10 years and single for 10, before marrying Callicott, a childhood friend from church camp. They caught up with each other after 25 years, and now have a commuter marriage. He teaches environmental ethics at the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point.

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Vegetarian Kitchen

When they are together, she said, it is her husband who does the cooking in their inviting, well-stocked vegetarian kitchen. That, said the world-famous vegetarian who sometimes refers to herself as “the Julia Child of the soybean circuit,” is how they have divided up the work in the household.

Although not a purist, Lappe said it has been so long since meat has been in her diet that she finds “the thought of eating flesh repulsive.”

Nevertheless, she said, she is not the sort to make a great performance of picking the pieces of ham out of an omelet: “That is precisely the way not to convert people.”

And, yes, she does eat eggs. She respects vegetarians who come to their practice out of ethical beliefs but, she said, she has no moral stand that dictates never eating animal flesh. In fact, she says, eating meat as a supplement to grain is how the diet of humans evolved and it may be more feasible in some places now (such as rural or tribal communities) than a strict vegetarian diet.

In general, a plant-centered diet, with meat contributing to it--or not eaten at all--is “consistent with what our bodies need as protein” as opposed to a 16-ounce hunk of meat, she added.

“Besides,” she said, “my husband is such a great cook, I’ve come to realize that the plant world is really where the joys of taste are.”

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Lappe is on the road a lot, to visit her husband in Wisconsin, to raise funds for the institute, to speak. (Her speaking fees go to the institute.) And with the book out and the project beginning, she said, the pace has picked up.

She had been on the East Coast, and had come home over the weekend to rest, to make a quick trip to her office at the institute, and to finish a “concept paper” for an upcoming meeting in Minnesota. She was due to leave for Minneapolis the following day for what would be the first organizing meeting of Project Public Life, a joint undertaking of the institute and the University of Minnesota’s Hubert Humphrey Institute for Public Affairs. Next stop, commencement exercises at Kenyon College in Ohio where she was to receive an honorary degree, and then on to New York for more networking and fund-raising.

To her it is all connected, and a conversation with Lappe moves easily back and forth from the personal to the political, public and private, abstract and concrete--the same odd mix that “Diet” contains.

Lappe, now 45, grew up in the ‘50s in Ft. Worth, Tex., in a closely knit family that consisted of her, her brother and parents, both of whom were founders of that city’s First Unitarian Church.

It was a household where the talk at the kitchen table was about how to make the world better. So when Lappe speaks about saving the world, she sounds neither self-conscious nor boastful. Of course she wants to save the world. Doesn’t everyone?

“It was a politically argumentative family. My parents were about as critical of society as I could imagine anyone being. Their basic attitude was that the work left to be done by us caring people was to clean up the residual problems, like racism, but that everything was basically in place.”

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Such assumptions did not withstand the test of the Vietnam War for Lappe. By then, she was at Earlham, a small Quaker college in Indiana. Her parents supported the war, trusting that the government, with privileged information, was making the right decisions. Troubled, she read everything and concluded differently: She was being lied to.

“I felt like my whole world had collapsed,” she said of the war’s effect on her. “I was almost in shock.”

Desperate and Driven

She thought at first of going to Vietnam and doing “reparations work” but soon decided she had best stay home “and make my country live up to its ideals.”

Feeling desperate and driven, she trained as a community organizer and worked in Philadelphia in the early days of the welfare-rights movement, she said, then moved on to graduate school in social work at Berkeley, becoming, “if anything, even more desperate.”

Unable to see how anything she was doing related to the root problems of poverty, she dropped out of graduate school and made a private vow “not to do anything more to save the world until I understood.”

She had first to figure out what the questions were.

She read, audited courses and for the first time in her life, she says, she listened. Having chosen food as her entry point, and “following my nose,” letting one discovery lead her to the next, she eventually arrived at her one-page handout.

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She was terrified when Ballantine Books published “Diet.” She said: “What I said seemed so obvious, I figured it must be wrong or everyone would be saying it. But so many agreed, it was like I was the little boy who said, ‘The emperor has no clothes.’ ”

It made her trust her common sense, she said. “Formal training (she had none in agriculture, economics or public policy) narrows our ability to ask the right questions.”

However, involved with her two babies and not sure what to do next, she did little until 1974 when she went as an observer to the World Food Conference in Rome. “The experts were drawing up the blueprints to end world hunger,” and Lappe found herself still mystified by them and looking for leadership. She found herself the center of media attention and it made her realize the book’s impact.

“I came back feeling like Superwoman. I had to take my own work more seriously.” The experts still were not asking basic enough questions, she thought, and she decided to rewrite her book, making the political message stronger and more emphatic. The new edition came out in 1975.

Analysis of Hunger

At about this time, she met Joseph Collins, who had studied the political and economic causes of hunger and was attached to the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington. They were thinking along similar lines and decided to write a book together. “Food First” came out in 1977, and by then the two had decided to found an institute “to provide an ongoing analysis of hunger,” she said.

“Our analysis and purpose has always been popular education,” she said of the institute. “We’re not making policy statements to send to Washington. We’re directly reaching out to the broadest lay audience. . . . People need an overall framework so they can see the importance of their own actions, that problems are solvable, to see why something is important and how it contributes to something bigger.”

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The institute’s concept of “something bigger” is diverse. Lappe describes hunger as a measuring rod of political and economic systems, but says, “whatever you choose as your starting point, you have to address the structures of power.” Thus the institute’s publications, research materials and outreach work include analyses of foreign aid, the World Bank, the international debt, military support of Third World governments, pesticides, population studies.

Lappe and the institute do not say there is no population problem; but they reject the notion that overpopulation is causing hunger. They are commonly misunderstood or misquoted on that, she said.

“I had a Jehovah’s Witness come to my door once and start quoting Frances Moore Lappe to me as proof that God has provided for (all of) us. I can’t remember, but I think I introduced myself to her,” she said.

Of the effect of the institute to date, she said: “Our biggest single success is that we have helped shift the ground of the debate (about hunger) to one of human responsibility.”

However, as the decade of the ‘80s progressed, Lappe said, it became apparent she and the institute needed to take a step further. When she spoke to groups, people wanted leadership from her. They were asking, “What do we do? What does it mean?”

“As we approach the end of the century, it is less useful just to point out the problem,” she said. “I spent the first part of my life figuring out the questions and building a framework. Now it’s time to work out the solutions to what private and public life should be about.”

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She is concerned, she said, that in recent years the right wing has “monopolized the language” and narrowly defined what is morality, in the process shifting public discourse and attention away from public values to private ones.

“Progressives have been profoundly misunderstood. They’re accused of being more concerned about freedom than justice. I want to make it clear that a fair society is a freer society. I want to get out of a freedom-versus-justice trade-off.”

Project Public Life aims to do something about it, she said: Return public values to the proper domain of public discourse.

It sounds a little vague when she tries to pin it down and that concerns her because she means it to be practical, pragmatic, specific. It will involve town meetings, classroom discussions, community organizing and, she hopes, a television series. When she talks of democracy in action, she envisions, she said, people concerning themselves with campaign financing and the role of political advisory committees, with approaching “toxic waste as a problem of democratic failure.”

She doesn’t stop there. Should corporations be accountable only to their boards or to their communities? Should employees be represented on boards? All, she said, are the proper domain of the citizens.

To many, the project will sound impossibly idealistic or dangerously radical. Lappe herself seems constitutionally incapable of seeing it in such a light. To her this is clearly the kitchen table, practical and positive, solid-citizen stuff of her childhood and it fires her.

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“It’s a concept of values based on social change. We’ve got to get beyond defending or not defending capitalism. It’s democracy as an unending process. . . . It’s the notion of the unfinished society consciously realizing itself. We’ve gotten away from it.”

A humorous poster hangs over the sink in her kitchen, a ‘60s relic of radicalism, rebellion and idealism, a message that is not quite in sync with her constructive approach to the world’s ills:: “When you’re mashin’ your organic raisins, remember, you still gotta smash the state.”

When a visitor asked about it, Lappe distanced herself from it, saying it had been a gift from a friend in the ‘60s who had found it amusing. She did not want it publicized and protested, “I don’t want to come off sounding like a revolutionary.”

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