Hope's Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet (8 page)

So I found myself in another apparent ethical dilemma. Did I refuse to be put in the woman’s slot on the talk shows, as the writer of a “cookbook,” or did I seize the opportunity to reach out to people who would never pick up my book if they knew it was about politics and economics? I chose the latter course. From Boston to San Francisco, from Houston to Minneapolis, I appeared on midday and midnight shows, on morning shows, and on the six o’clock news. Standing there stirring my beans and rice, I would try to get in what I thought was important.

The low point of this period came in Pittsburgh on a late-night talk show. Talk-show hosts search for some common ground among their guests; unfortunately that evening the only other guest was a UFO expert. I got only one question the whole evening: “Ms. Lappé, what do you think they eat on UFOs?” I launched from that question into the economic and political roots of hunger. (Now you know why I got only one question.)

Although this was a difficult time, I learned one important rule, useful to everyone in public life—never listen to the questioner, just say what you believe needs to be said!

Rubbing Elbows with the “Experts”

Fortunately
, this period of my life came to an end in 1974. In November I attended the World Food Conference in Rome, that much-heralded meeting of government and corporate leaders to design a blueprint to overcome the problem of world hunger. Every major newspaper carried a front-page series on this conference, at which Henry Kissinger announced that in ten years no child would go to bed hungry.

I had gone to Rome at the urging of friends and because I wanted to rub elbows with people who I thought knew a lot more about the problems than I. By now I had two very young children, but I had continued to read and write articles as well as speak and appear on TV. Still, I did not think of myself as especially knowledgeable, certainly not in comparison to the experts gathered in Rome.

Rome was a major shock. People were asking
me
for my opinion. Microphones turned my way. I was asked to appear on a panel of experts. That was pretty startling in itself, but listening to the experts was more shocking still: I discovered that the officials to whom I looked for the answers were still locked into the false diagnoses, and therefore false cures, that I had discarded through my independent study, modest as it was.

This was the second stage in the growing realization which has since formed the basis of my work. I slowly realized that those who have been schooled to direct the powerful institutions which control our economic system are forced to accept and to work within the system that creates needless hunger. Beneficiaries of these institutions, they have been made incapable of seeing outside their boundaries. Rather than preparing them to find solutions, their training has inhibited them from asking questions that could lead to solutions. Those supposed authorities who gathered in Rome in 1974 were still promoting the belief that greater production would solve the problem of hunger, but I had come to see that you could have tremendous production—indeed, I lived in the country with the greatest food abundance in history—and yet still have hunger and malnutrition.

I left Rome feeling I had shed critical layers of self-doubt. I saw more clearly than ever that the real problems in our world—the widespread needless deprivation—will never be solved by the government leaders now in power in most nations. So who will solve them? And how can they be solved? I finally realized that the gravest problems facing our planet today can be solved
only
as part of an overall movement toward a more just sharing of economic and political power, not as separate technical problems. Thus, the solutions will come only when ordinary people, like me and like you, decide to take responsibility for changing the economic order.

In other words, the only way that power will come to be more democratically shared is if you and I take more of it ourselves. If this is true, then the challenge to each of us becomes clear: we must make ourselves capable of shouldering that responsibility.

If I really believed this, then what
I
had to do was clear: I had to take my own work much more seriously. I had to refuse to be dismissed simply as a “cookbook” writer. I had to apply myself with greater diligence than ever in my life.

Finally the veil lifted. I remember feeling like “superwoman” when I returned home that November of 1974. Anything seemed possible. I vowed to completely revise the first edition of
Diet for a Small Planet
and make its political message much clearer. I marched in to talk with the president of Ballantine (the new president, since the Ballantines had sold the company) and presented him with a list of demands concerning the book, its publication date, and its promotion. He agreed to everything.

I completed the revisions in three months, while taking care of two children. It was really a new book. I stressed that I did not believe that a change in the American diet would solve the world food problem. I wrote:

A change in diet is not an
answer
. A change in diet is a way of experiencing more of the
real
world, instead of living in the illusory world created by our current economic system, where our food resources are actively reduced and where food is treated as just another commodity.… A change in diet is a way of saying simply: I have a choice. That is the first step. For how can we take responsibility for the future unless we can make choices now that take us, personally, off the destructive path that has been set for us by our forebears?

I had never worked so hard in my life. It was exhilarating. But when the new book was out (in April 1975) and all the publicity tours were over, I collapsed—from exhaustion, I thought. Soon, however, I learned that fatigue was not my real problem. The real problem was that I did not know where to go next. Here I was, in a suburb of New York, with two small children. I also had a wonderful husband, but his life’s work—medical ethics—and his friends who revolved around that work were not mine. I had no political allies and few friends. My isolation overwhelmed me. I sank deeper and deeper into depression. I saw no escape. Only months earlier my confidence had been at its peak, my calling clear. Now I felt more lost than ever. I knew I had power and energy, but I had no idea how to apply it.

Food First: The Challenge

But a seed had been planted even before the new book was out. On Food Day, in March 1975, I lectured at a conference at the University of Michigan. Among the other speakers was Joseph Collins of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington. He heard part of my lecture (later he told me that the blah vegetarian meals served during the three-day conference left him so hungry he dashed out midway through my speech for some Kentucky Fried Chicken!) and we were introduced afterward. I learned that Joe was beginning work on a book about the political and economic causes of hunger. He, too, had been at the World Food Conference in Rome the autumn before. He had represented the Transnational Institute and had helped write a report for release there which indicted the conference for failing to address the roots of hunger in the political and economic system. Joe was preparing to take off from that document to write a full-length, more popular book.

I thought no more about it until I received Joe’s outline in the mail after I got home. He asked if he might visit me to get my perspective on his project. He came, and slowly it dawned on me that Joe wanted me to write the book with him. But how could I? He lived in Washington; I lived in New York. My children were still so tiny. My daughter, Anna, was barely walking. I said no. While my husband encouraged me, I pulled back.

However, I must not have let go of the idea altogether. I remember saying to my husband, “That man is going to write a book I wanted to write. What am I going to do?” But I felt I wasn’t ready for a commitment so enormous.

In April I was invited to speak at a church-sponsored retreat in the Midwest. Gathered there were church leaders, the church experts on world hunger. Again I was shocked. I tried to shift the emphasis from a charity approach to one that focused on the political and economic links between Americans and the causes of world hunger. One church leader responded that he wasn’t sure that we should criticize our government’s policies, because the government can exert its power over the churches and the churches should not take chances. The general level of discussion was so uninformed that again I found myself thinking: as unprepared as I feel to take on this new book project, if not me, who? I knew that people’s unwillingness to take chances was a major factor in allowing needless hunger to continue. Was I also unwilling? If I didn’t feel prepared, perhaps I could become prepared. All these thoughts went through my mind. But no decision.

After the evening program on the last night of the retreat, a film was shown. On the screen before us were people actually dying of starvation in the Ethiopian famine. I had never seen anything like this before: babies sucking futilely at shriveled breasts; desperate mothers. The narrative told how the corrupt government of Haile Selassie had created this horror.

The decision to write
Food First
came as I watched this film. It was an emotional decision. Intellectually I had decided I wasn’t ready and that my responsibility to my family wouldn’t allow it, but emotionally I felt there was no choice. I
had
to do what I could do, no matter how impossible it seemed. I called Joe in Washington at midnight and said I would write the book with him if he could move to New York.

Within three weeks Joe had moved to New York. Within six weeks we had a contract with Ballantine.

When Joe and I started to work, I was terrified. Here he was, the most worldly man I had ever known—fluent in six languages and a world traveler since the age of thirteen. He had gone through a demanding Jesuit education; in my twelfth-grade social studies class we had made popsicle-stick models of historical events. I was sure that I would be so intimidated that even before we agreed on the book’s outline I’d be a humiliated heap of tears. How could my skills measure up to his?

Well, I was amazed.

Joe treated me as a total intellectual equal. It turned out that rather than being unequal, our skills were—and are—miraculously complementary. Joe is a maniac for detail. He will leave no stone unturned in his research. He’s also got a lot of chutzpah, so whatever information we need, Joe can figure out some way to get it. Me, I’m a maniac about organization and deadlines.

So it worked. Instinctively we knew we didn’t have to compete. Each of our contributions was essential and appreciated by the other. (No one believes this, but I swear it is true: in writing all 412 pages of
Food First
, Joe and I never disagreed over a single word. We edited and reedited each other’s material, but we both knew when we hit just the right phrasing.)

In the next year and a half everything in my life—except my relationship with my children—changed. Instead of just writing a book, Joe and I soon decided to use our advance payment for
Food First
to establish an organization to fill a critical gap. We named it the Institute for Food and Development Policy.

We were aware of the growing number of people asking, why hunger? What can I do? By 1975, when we met, every major church body had established a commission or task force on world hunger. Campus action groups were springing up. In courses ranging from nutrition to geography to world politics, students and professors were asking, what are the causes of and solutions to world hunger?

In addition, a new wave of food co-ops had emerged. Learning from their predecessors (which had begun in the 1930s), these initiatives were democratically managed with the goal of providing quality “whole” foods at lower cost than the supermarket. These co-ops were aware of the larger, political implications of the diet they were promoting and the service they were providing.

These initiatives were not centrally coordinated but represented an embryonic movement. Many people, working on many different projects related to food and farming, were becoming aware of and taking encouragement from one another.

What was missing was an independent research and education center to provide ongoing analysis of the roots of needless hunger to these varied projects. This was the gap we set out to fill. At the time, information and analysis came overwhelmingly from agencies funded by corporations, governments, or churches. Each of these sources, we felt, had a vested interest in maintaining the “hunger myths”—the first and most pervasive being that hunger is caused by scarcity.

Exploding the Hunger Myths
^*

For us, learning began with unlearning these powerful myths. As we studied, traveled, and interviewed, we were able to cut through the media-repeated themes of scarcity, guilt, and fear. As we worked on the book, certain themes emerged that have grounded our work ever since.

• No country in the world is a hopeless “basket case.”
The illusion of scarcity is a product of the growing concentration of control over food-producing resources. From Bangladesh villages to Wall Street commodity brokerages, fewer and fewer people are deciding how food resources are used and for whose benefit, yet the most wasteful and inefficient food systems are those controlled by a few in the interests of a few.

• The hungry are not our enemies
. Actually, we and they are victims of the same economic forces. The direct cause of hunger in the third world—-the increasing concentration of economic power—is also accelerating here in the United States: 3 percent of U.S. farms now control almost half of farm sales. But concentration of production is only one aspect. Economists warn that monopoly power in the food-processing industry results in close to $20 billion in overcharges to Americans every year.
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