"Women in the global and local economy"

March 3, 2006

Frances Moore Lappé, co-author with her daughter of Hope’s Edge: The Next
Diet for a Small Planet, will be the keynote speaker at the 5th Annual
International Women’s Day Conference at Simon’s Rock College of Bard,
Saturday, March 4th. The event is titled Women in the Global and Local
Economy: The Power of Connection and is cosponsored by the Berkshire Chapter
of UNIFEM/USA.

Other speakers include Marceline White of Development Training Services,
Sumathra Guha of UNIFEM, Caren Grown of the Levy Economics Institute,
Michaela Walsh founder of Women’s World Banking, Susan Witt of the E. F.
Schumacher Society, Amber Chand of Amber Chand Collection, and Anne Williams
of Common Cents.

The program begins at 9 AM at the Daniel Arts Center at Simons Rock College.
Cost is $35. For more information call 413-528-7266.

In September of 2001, just before the event that would change America’s
image of itself in relation to the rest of the world, Susan Witt interviewed
Frances Moore Lappé for a radio program on the environment. A transcription
of that interview follows.

Best wishes,
Staff of the E. F. Schumacher Society
140 Jug End Road
Great Barrington, MA 01230
(413) 528-1737
www.smallisbeautiful.org

* * * * * * * * *
Author and Activist
Frances Moore Lappé
interviewed by Susan Witt (September 8, 2001)

Susan Witt: What do you think is the most pressing issue facing the
environment over the next ten years?

Frances Moore Lappé: The most pressing issue is that our mental map is
going global. We are being told that the global market is our salvation. I
was in China in the late 1980s when the state farms were being dismantled,
and the loudspeakers that ten years before were broadcasting Mao aphorisms
were now carrying the message that the market will make everyone wealthy.
The new global religion, with its false notion that the market mechanism can
somehow allow us to reconnect with the earth and protect the earth, poses
our greatest environmental threat.

In Hope’s Edge, the new book my daughter, Anna, and I wrote together we look
for examples of the market becoming re-embedded in community. Only in
recent history has the market been torn out of the community, out of the
culture, and become the all-controlling force, with everything reduced to
market value. Our greatest hope is that there will be an awakening to the
fact that the market is simply a tool.

Susan Witt: Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future of the
environment?

Frances Moore Lappé: I think you would call me a possibilist. From what I
have observed, having spent so much of the past year traveling to places
that are part of the emergence of a new/old way of relating to the earth, I
definitely think it is possible that we will awaken from the trap we are in
of believing that everything can be reduced to market value, and I want to
do everything I can to make the possible happen.

Susan Witt: Why is food your organizing issue?

Frances Moore Lappé: Food is our most direct daily link to the earth. It
also bonds us to one another. Food has always played a role in human
culture and ritual. In community the breaking of bread together has been a
bonding ceremony of human culture. Food is connected with celebration. The
message of my life’s work, and certainly of the book I’ve written with my
daughter, is not “you should,” not “Oh, help me carry the burden of saving
the world.” Rather, it is that we can all be attuned to our deeper needs to
connect with one another, to be effective in the world. That is the root of
our joy. I think food captures that celebratory element. Our book has
sixty vegetarian recipes from leading chefs like Alice Waters, Molly Katzen,
and Laura Robertson. These are wonderful people who wanted to contribute to
the book in order to celebrate the progress that has been made over the
thirty years since my first book appeared.

Food has tremendous power; it is something we all need to survive, something
we all love to talk about. It is quite quantifiable. We can argue about
what kind of housing we need or what kind of transportation we need, but we
know how much and what kind of nutrition human beings need to thrive. So it
is arguable that many of us are not getting the kind of nutrition we need,
and this is increasingly true for those who live in the “wealthy” countries
as well. It is not only food scarcity that causes malnourishment; for the
first time in human history many of us are overfed rather than underfed.

Food is rapidly being commodified today, being removed from culture at an
incredible rate of speed. A new MacDonald’s is opening somewhere in the
world every five hours. I just read that Coca-cola is now the largest
employer in Africa. How do we reclaim something so basic to our animal and
our cultural past? Because our connection to food is so personal and yet so
universal, I see it as an entry point for finding ways to restore our
connection to the earth.

Susan Witt: What changes have you seen in the food industry since the
publication of your first book, Diet for a Small Planet, in 1971?

Frances Moore Lappé: Two contradictory trends have emerged. On the one
hand MacDonald’s restaurants are proliferating, food has become increasingly
debased, and there is widespread malnutrition from overeating what’s not
good for us. On the other hand, more and more people are eating whole
foods, seeking out food grown without pesticides, food grown by local
producers. More people are eliminating meat from their diet, which is
healthier and avoids harming animals.

I read in the paper recently that vegan hot dogs are now being sold at
Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. And at the supermarket near where I live in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, a really standard supermarket, there is now a
small organic section and a certain amount of locally produced food. The
Community Supported Agriculture movement didn’t exist when I wrote my first
book. The farmers’-market movement, which has burgeoned in the past six to
eight years, was yet to be born. So there are many signs that people are
discovering the joy of reconnecting to the earth through food.

Susan Witt: Please describe your new book.

Frances Moore Lappé: The book is a sequel, not an update, to Diet for a
Small Planet. The title is Hope’s Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet:
Life Beyond Globalization. It describes a mother-and-daughter journey on
five continents. We observed an emerging trend that is still largely
invisible: people are reinventing the market with more humane values,
respecting the earth, respecting community. It was a journey on which we
saw people filled with fear of change who nevertheless sometimes experienced
moments in which they became conscious of the disconnect between their life
and their deepest values. Do they deny this awareness and go on in the
cycle of fear, or do they step out of it to meet new people and connect with
a more positive cycle? The book has a lot to do with fear but also with
what is emerging to counter that fear in positive ways.

The book begins and ends with the theme of perception. We human beings are
so much the product of who we believe we are. We live according to a
dominant mental map with five thought traps that Anna and I have identified,
traps that make us create the scarcity we fear. We keep replicating who we
believe we are. If we believe we are simply encapsulated egos for whom
accumulation is the goal, then that is what we will go on doing. But if we
are able to pause, to recognize our deeper needs for connection and for
effectiveness in the world, then we can let go of that ersatz meaning tied
to consumption and find a more satisfying life. So the book is a
multi-level, mother-and-daughter exploration of the key questions for our
planet.

Susan Witt: Thank you.

 

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