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April 19,
2002
Frances
Moore Lappé and Anna Lappé to Speak April 23
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Frances
Moore Lappé (right) with her daughter Anna Lappé
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While the United States feeds mountains of grain to livestock
(that return—in the form of McBurgers—a tiny fraction
of the nutrients fed to them), millions of people starve worldwide.
In 1971, Frances Moore Lappé exposed this truth in Diet
for a Small Planet, a best-seller that challenged readers to use
the world's food resources more efficiently by adopting a diet
that reduces or eliminates eating meat and centers around eating
grains and vegetables. Thirty years later, with continued concerns
about world hunger—now complicated by corporate globalization,
agriculture monopolies, and genetically modified organisms—Frances
Moore Lappé and her daughter Anna Lappé have published
a sequel, Hope's Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet
(Archer/Putnam 2002). The authors will discuss their book in the
talk "Fat, Famine, and Froot Loops: Where's Democracy When
You Need It? A Conversation about Hope's Edge," Tuesday,
April 23, at 7:30 pm in Gamble Auditorium. A book signing will
follow the talk, which is sponsored by MHC's Department of Earth
and Environment and the Florence Purington Fund.
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Says Anne Wibiralske, visiting assistant professor of environmental
studies, "Hope's Edge offers a powerful antidote to
the common student lament, we are learning about environmental
problems, but how can I be a part of the solution? The Lappés
outline a framework for understanding how we become distanced
from problem solving and show how regular people are closing this
gap and making positive changes in their communities. Hope's
Edge has inspired one of my students interested in sustainable
agriculture to begin her work in agriculture by growing a few
vegetable plants in her dorm room."
Hope's Edge begins with a critical look at five culturally
engrained ideas, including "survival of the fittest"
and "there isn't enough to go around." The Lappés
argue that these ideas are myths that are the foundations for
hunger, poverty,
and environmental catastrophes, "thought traps" that
keep us from living in ways that meet both our physical needs
and our emotional and spiritual values.
Through their travels across five continents, the authors then
introduce communities that have freed themselves from these myths:
landless peasants taking on big landowners in Brazil, Bangladeshi
peasant women using micro-credit to restore their independence,
poor villages creating tree nurseries in Kenya, and organic farmers
in Wisconsin effectively competing against giant agribusiness.
These communities have created new economic systems that are free
of life-destroying patterns, say the Lappés. Their successes
"call us to travel 'hope's edge,'" they argue, giving
us courage to use new thought patterns in our own communities
and push forward the looming edge of the end of hope about world
hunger. "With food as a starting point, we can choose to
meet people and to encounter events so powerful that they jar
us out of our ordinary way of seeing the world, and open us to
new, uplifting and empowering possibilities," writes Frances
Moore Lappé.
In addition to Diet for a Small Planet and Hope's Edge:
The Next Diet for a Small Planet, Frances Moore Lappé
has authored eleven other books, including Rediscovering America's
Values and The Quickening of America: Rebuilding Our Nation, Remaking
Our Lives. She is the cofounder of the California-based Institute
for Food and Development Policy (Food First) and the Center for
Living Democracy, two national organizations concerned with food
and the roots of democracy. The recipient of fifteen honorary
doctorates from distinguished institutions, she has been a visiting
scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is currently
a senior fellow at Boston's Second Nature, an educational nonprofit
striving to advance human and ecological well-being.
Sharing her mother's passion for a global perspective, social
justice, and education, Anna Lappé studied educational
policy and history at Brown University, then taught at a high
school in South Africa and worked for several nonprofit organizations,
including a youth development program in the United Kingdom and
an advocacy and training organization for low-income women in
New York City. She recently completed her master's degree at Columbia
University's School of International and Public Affairs. She has
traveled to more than twenty countries and worked and lived on
four continents. She is cofounder, with her mother, of the Small
Planet Fund, which will provide resources for the community movements
profiled in Hope's Edge.
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