DIET FOR A CHANGE By Peter Carroll Photos by Theresa Marquez Frances Moore Lappe, the Berkeley dropout who wrote Diet For A Small Planet in 1971 and went on to build a national reputation as “the Julia Child of the soybean circuit, ”admits she doesn’t know beans about gourmet eating. But what she is sure about is that the current upscale tastefor haute cuisine—fresh! natural! wholesome!—is just another classy way to ignore the realfood problems in the world today “It’s just another example of our class- divided society,” declares the lean, darkhaired 42 year old, dismissing the latest culinary trends. “You have increasing poverty and increasing wealth. And people now, with the Reagan ideology, are less defensive than ever about ostentatious living. Fine food is one way to dispense with a lot of money.” “Doesn’t eating a vegetarian diet make any difference?” I ask. “Any conscious improvement is a step in the right direction,” she concedes. “Eating well can mean, Tam no longer just a victim of advertising. I can make a choice.’ But,” she cautions, “if it stops there—simply How can I eat better?— clearly it’s not the next step.” What is the next step? “It’s not enough to say I’m taking care of my body,” she says. “It’s understanding that our daily choices about food connect us to a worldwide economic system. And that economic system—not scarcity—creates worldwide hunger for millions of people.” If Frances Lappe was once stereotyped by some readers as an Earth Mother who mixed politics with recipes for legumes and whole grains, she has by now become an internationally known visionary, a philosopher-polemicist, who is working harder than ever to change popular attitudes about food, hunger, and the global economic system. Her goal, quite simply, is to save the starving multitudes—not in the face of scarcity, but abundance. Lappe’s outspoken position on the food front has brought tribute from a wide range of established figures: the New York Times (which calls her “one of the most respected critics on food issues in this country”); she’s won honorary doctorates from the University of California at Berkeley, Notre Dame, Bucknell, and Lewis and Clark. And though they might seem to be in an entirely different camp, the mavens of haute cuisine also praise her efforts. “She’s right,” comments M.F.K. Fisher, American’s foremost authority on the art of eating. “I really admire her work. There’s no doubt that food is a commodity used ruthlessly by politicians for their own purposes.” She musters a wealth of statistical information which shows convincingly that the world's grain production alone is sufficient to provide every human being on the planet with 3600 calories a day. "That's enough to make people fat!" Alice Waters, founder of Berkeley’s world famous Chez Panisse restaurant and trendsetter of gourmet chic, acknowledges the importance of Lappe’s vision. “She’s understanding in ways I haven’t even begun to think. We have a common purpose. The more we discover what’s polluting the food, the more scarey it becomes. But I’m a romantic, an idealist. She’s a realist.” So it’s no wonder that when “Frankie”—as she’s known to her friends and colleagues—takes me to lunch at a Hunan restaurant near her modest home just across the bay from San Francisco, the bill comes to a staggering $6.85! for two! And to make another point, she orders—dare I report it?—a calamari salad. “Not very vegetarian,” I observe. “I’m not a vegetarian,” she explains coolly. Like many non-meat eaters, Frankie distinguishes seafood from animal meat. But her point now is more sophisticated than that. Fifteen years ago, when she was writing Diet, she accepted the prevailing opinion that world food resources were limited and that by eating low on the food chain—vegetables rather than meats—we could increase the available protein supplies to feed the starving people of the world. Today, she denies that any such scarhunger—they will do what is good to end it. Such a philosophy sees education as the basic catalyst for social change. And so Lappe assumes considerable responsibility when she describes herself as a physical, but I couldn’t play jacks.” She did become a high school cheerleader and ranked high in popularity. She also got another B—in Latin. “Her entire educity exists. In her newest book, World Hunger: Twelve Myths (coauthored with her longtime colleague, Joseph Collins, and published last October to coincide with the United Nations’ World Hunger Day), she musters a wealth of statistical information which shows convincingly that the world’s grain production alone is sufficient to provide every human being on the planet with 3600 calories a day. “That’s enough to make people fat!” she adds. According to her meticulous research, the control of agricultural land by elite groups, the preference for profitable cash crops, and the greed of brokers and shippers—all conspire to leave 700 million people undernourished and hungry every day. “Those with sufficient money eat well; those who lack it go hungry.” Lappe does not believe that U.S. foreign aid programs can solve the problem. “Our government is already intervening in countries where the majority of people are forced to go hungry,” she declares. “Foreign aid only reinforces what is there. .. . Where the recipient government answers only to a narrow economic elite, our aid not only fails to reach the hungry, it girds the very forces working against them.” Her solution: Cut all foreign aid to undemocratic regimes. And that’s why she now believes eating one less hamburger a week—something Hubert Humphrey once suggested as a solution to world hunger—won’t solve the hunger problem either. But what such restraint will do, says Frankie, is give each of us a sense of control, empowerment, over the most elemental facts of our lives. “Even an apparently small change—consciously choosing a diet that is good both for our bodies and for the earth—can lead to a series of choices that transform our whole lives.” There’s a trace of Texas in her voice. She is shy, almost inaudible at first. But as the conversation moves from her personal diet to the political values that define it, she becomes intense, impassioned. Her cheeks redden; her brown eyes focus intently. As she speaks, her right hand rolls out in waves, underscoring her points, like a conductor reaching for the crescendo. Frances Moore Lappe’s views ulti- “communicator”—by which she means someone who translates abstract concepts into a readily understandable political vocabulary. And it’s this grandiose responsibility, her desire to save the world, that drives her unrelentingly forward. Food, forLappd, is just the beginning. “I’ve chosen food as a vehicle, but I don’t want to be held back by that,” she says. “My work is trying to change people’s whole world views. It’s not trying to make food their cause or to send money to Africa. It’s trying to get them to.... ” She pauses for a second. . .the Aha! moment—Aha! It’s not what I thought it was! My government is not serving my interests!” For Frankie, the Aha! moment came during the Vietnam war, when she discovered to her shock that the values and assumptions she had grown up with just didn’t fit-the political realities. “That’s what I’m trying to have food and hunger do for other people,” she says. “We accept the right to vote; we accept the right to an education,” she says heatedly. “Why not the right to life? Only when people are able to see food—the right to life itself—as part of democracy, can there be an end to hunger.” rances Moore was born and raised ^in Fort Worth, Texas, in a family composed, she says, of “odd- I balls.” Her father, John Moore, worked as a weatherman for the federal government; her mother was a housewife. What made them different? “They read books, subscribed to The New Republic, founded a Unitarian church. They had black friends. They had ideas.” It was, in short “a very ethically grounded family,” And they lived, as Frankie recalls, on “a typical diet of meatloaf and hamburgers.” Early on, Frankie was famous for her seriousness and intensity. “We had to keep telling her she didn’t have to work so hard,” her father remembers with a chuckle. “She wanted to do things too perfectly, and we were worried about her being such a perfectionist.” After a week in kindergarten, for example, she wanted to quit because it wasn’t organized enough. And, naturally, she excelled in all her academic subjects. But in the ninth grade she got a B in physical education because, as her father tells it, she never took the time to learn how to play jacks. He congratulated her with a one dollar bill. “Is that true?” I ask Frankie. “Um, hmm,” she responds, pleased that her father remembers the story. “Nobody believes that but it’s true. I was very cation cost me $2,” says her father with pride. From such a background, it’s not surprising that Frankie went off to college in 1962 with grandiose ambitions. “My first goal in life was to be a diplomat—a servant of democracy—and save the world through the U.S. State Department,” she admits. But after six weeks at American University in Washington, D.C., she concluded “that wasn’t a very effective way to save the world.” She transferred to a small Quaker college in Indiana, majored in history, and envisioned a career in social work. But then the Vietnam war came along and challenged her complacency. She’d supported the war at first, believing that the government knew more about Southeast Asia than the antiwar demonstrators on campus. After all, her parents, “as far to the left as anyone I could imagine being,” supported the administration. To resolve her questions, however, Frankie adopted a strategy that would characterize all her subsequent work: plunge into the subject, read everything, learn more about it than anyone else. In 1966, her research provoked a classic identity crisis. “Within a few weeks,” she wrote recently, “my world began to turn upside down. I was in shock. I functioned, but in a daze. I had grown up believing my government represented me—my basic ideals. Now Iwas learning that ‘my’ government was not mine at all.” She still had plans to save the world, of course. And so like many another convert, she embraced the new faith—the antiwar movement—with the fervor of a missionary. “Our country seemed in such a terrible state that something had to be Clinton St. Quarterly— Fall, 1987 33
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