Frances Moore Lappe: Activist for Food Democracy

Frances Moore Lappe once posed a very simple question: Why are millions starving in a world full of food? Her research led her to conclude that lack of democracy, rather than lack of food, was the true problem that would need to be addressed.

Grandma told me the other day that when she was little, her mama said to her, "Come on, clean your plate. There are millions of starving children (somewhere) who would LOVE to have that broccoli to eat."

To which she replied, "Fine. Let's box it up and send it to them."

What is the cause of starvation?

It's a question all our kids ask sooner or later, isn't it? If I've got too much, and somebody else doesn't have enough, why can't I just share my extra with them, and make us all happy?

Everybody knows that extreme poverty, including starvation, just IS. It's always been, and it's caused by lack of wealth. Ask any first-grader: If you've got enough money, you can buy food, and then you're not hungry anymore.

My friend Cammie, a first-grader herself, tried to explain this to me.

"Why are those kids hungry?" I asked her as we watched a special on Mother Theresa.

"Because they don't have enough food," she said. Duh.

"Uh-huh, but why not?"

She thought about it for a bit, then shrugged and said, "They lost their lunch money?"

Yeah, or somebody beat them up and took it. We'll save the talk about colonialism for another day; )

Our wastefulness causes scarcity for others.

"Thirty years ago," Frances Moore Lappe says in the prologue to "Hope's Edge", her 2002 book on globalization, poverty, food and hope, "I wrote the original Diet for a Small Planet because I had to: What I was learning was too shocking. All around me experts were predicting famine, saying we'd reached the earth's limits to feed ourselves. More chemicals! Bigger farms! More technology! were the mantras of the day. Yet, in the basement university library where I had gone to pursue my curiosity as to how we might feed this small planet, I discovered that what I was hearing - the experts' call-to-arms - was, frankly, wrong. Not only was there enough to feed us all; there was more than enough."

In other words, food itself isn't scarce. There's plenty to feed everybody (still). But what Frances found was that the very things which were being promoted to combat the imaginary scarcity and feed the starving millions were actually causing scarcity...

...through wasting resources.

"Here, in the US, only one to six percent of all the stuff that goes into producing things turns up as products we can actually use," she goes on. "We waste more than 90 percent." (from Natural Capitalism.)

"We humans are creating scarcity - exactly what we say we most fear," she says.

"But we go on swallowing the prevailing framing of the problem as scarcity, we go on bowing to 'experts'..." who say we need new technologies and ever more wasteful farming methods to combat the scarcity.

Lappe asks, "Why have we, as societies, created that which as individuals we abhor?" (Speaking of the US and other wealthy - and wasteful - nations.)

• No one of us would choose to let a child die of hunger or preventable disease, let alone 32,000 children a day.
• No one would intentionally destroy so many species in just this century that it could take the planet 10 million years to recover.
• No one would seek to poke a hole the size of a continent in the ozone layer, causing cancer deaths to soar.
• No one would decide to create a greenhouse effect disrupting life in ways we are only barely beginning to understand, or make our food production - our fossil-fuel-driven industrial model - into one of the biggest culprits, responsible for about one-fifth of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.
• No one would consciously design a world community in which a few hundred individuals control as much wealth as half the world's population; and where - as it is here at home (the US) - 1 percent end up with more than do the bottom 95 percent combined.

And yet, here we are.

We're tripping over our BIG HUMAN BRAINS.

So why do we go along with this?

Maybe because we have a hard time imagining doing anything else!

• The enemy is scarcity, production is our savior. With the human population doubling every fifty years or so, there just isn't enough stuff to go around...like land, food, and water. To survive, we have to produce more and more.
• Thank our selfish genes. We're selfish by nature. Actually, that's the trait that catapulted us to the top of the food chain. It might not be pretty, but it worked. Who wants to argue with Darwin?
• Let the market decide, experts preside. Since we're a greedy bunch, it's a good thing we can count on the market to keep everything balanced out so YOUR self-interest doesn't overwhelm MY self-interest. And when that's not enough, thank goodness there are experts around whose technological genius will keep us one step ahead of scarcity.
• Solve by dissection. Everybody knows that a problem is really just a bunch of little problems all smooshed together in a messy glop. Pick all the little problems apart and solve them, and don't worry about the interconnections.
• Welcome to the end of history. Global, multinational corporate rule is the product of years of economic evolution, and represents the best system we've ever had, and is the best we'll ever be able to do.

Exerpt, liberally paraphrased by me, from "Hope's Edge", a collaborative effort between Frances and her daughter, Anna. Visit Small Planet Institute for more information on their work.

What "thought traps" keep us PINNED TO THE PUMP?

I wrote a little about this in an askpatty.com blog post a while back called "What are you waiting for?". I was talking about electric cars, of course, and the legitimate-sounding reasons people give for not having one, even though it would be GREAT to be driving electric; )

What's holding you back, I was asking.

What kind of thoughts keep us American women going to the gas-gobbler day after day, paying through the nose to put record profits in the pockets of the unscrupulous, polluting, putting tons of carbon in the atmosphere...

...when we really don't want to? Maybe our thoughts don't have to hold us hostage anymore.

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