■ ■ *5^ • « 1 1 * * 5 v' i i s ® S B done, now, today, or all hope seemed lost.” After graduation, Frankie went to Philadelphia and literally stood on soapboxes in Rittenhouse Square pleading with hostile spectators to oppose the war. Meanwhile, she married Marc LappS, a student of medical ethics, and started working as a community organizer of welfare recipients. “Most evenings,” she recalls, “ I came home in tears.” Now that she was tracked, however, Frankie determined to pursue her career. In 1968, she enrolled in graduate school at the School of Social Work in Berkeley, involving herself in fair housing issues in Oakland. Once again, she was totally committed, but nowhere closer to resolving the basic questions about the purpose of her life’s work. “ I was becoming more miserable, more confused,” she says. Amidst this personal turmoil, Frankie stumbled intuitively on what some psychologists view as a healthy remedy for overwhelming stress: she completely stopped what she was doing. First, she dropped out of graduate school. The decision made her physically ill. “ My identity had been ‘social worker,” ’ she remarks. “ Now I would have no identity.” But she vowed she would do nothing “ to change the world” until she first understood why one choice was better than another, why any particu lar agenda would truly end the suffering of other people. She vowed she would do nothing "to change the world" until she first understood why one choice was better than another, why any particular agenda would truly end the suffering of other people. Luckily, her decision, made in the spring of 1969, dovetailed with the spirit of the times in Berkeley. “ I remember feeling at the time that I would not have had the courage to do it if there hadn’t been a change in the social milieu I was absorbing,” she recalls. Frankie began experimenting with natural foods and a vegetarian diet, which together with modern dance classes, helped end a lifetime struggle to lose weight. And in an obscure agricultural library on the Berkeley campus, she began to study the political economy of food. At a time when “ ecology” was first becoming a household word and academics were stressing the “ limits to growth,” the 25 year old, ex-social worker was unearthing abundant evidence showing that scarcity was not “ natural,” but the result of particular economic policies. She found, for example, that more than half the harvested acreage in the U.S. went to raise grain to feed livestock. She learned that Americans consumed twice as much protein as their bodies could use and that plant proteins, when properly combined, provided ample nutritional value. From this research came a one-page handout, then a five-page handout, then a 70-page booklet, and finally Diet For A Small Planet—which, since its publication in 1971, has sold over 3 million copies. The book’s main premise—the idea that changing one ’s personal menu could help save the world from mass hunger-appealed both to the self-help ethic of conservatives and to the back-to- nature impulses of liberals. By then, too, Frankie had become a mother and had followed her husband’s career back to the east coast. As a new author, she became the perfect guest on TV talk shows, filling the “ woman’s” slot by stirring beans and rice before the cameras while lecturing about complementary proteins. She seemed to have found a comfortable, unthreatened niche. And the birth of a second child in 1973 further narrowed her options. During this period, Frankie continued to do research in the area of world food production and found herself reaching conclusions that again disturbed her equilibrium. At the World Food Conference in Rome in 1974, for example, she found that the so-called experts were not talking about the real causes of hunger and so were p ropos ing fa lse remedies. She returned home with a missionary’s zeal to rewrite the basic premises of her book. “A change in diet is not the answer," she announced in the 1975 edition of Diet, “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.” Such a change in consciousness, she thought, would illuminate the political basis of hunger. Having reached this conclusion, however, Frankie fe lt paralyzed at the crossroads. She believed that the next step required a comprehensive study of the global food situation, examining the connections between politics, production and scarcity. But as the mother of young children, she felt overwhelmed by the prospect. Hesitant and uncertain, she attended another food conference at Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1975. There, in an ambiance of macrobiotic philosophy, Frankie challenged the emphasis on personal diet. Her talk fell on receptive ears. “ I was amazed,” says Joseph Collins then a researcher at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. He admits, however, that he heard only a portion of her speech because he was so starved by the macrobiotic menu he bolted from the auditorium to buy a box of Kentucky Fried Chicken across the street. “ I had a mental image of Frances Lappe as an older woman interested in whole grains. But she was attractive, dynamic.” Afterward, they discussed their mutual interests in the politics of scarcity. Each encouraged the other to undertake a booklength project; but each was reluctant to let go. Their meeting intensified Frankie's dilemma. “ My daughter was less than two,” she explains, “ and it was a big struggle whether to make such a big commitment when my kids were so young. I rememberthinking, I’vegottodo this for her. I’ve got to give a different model for her because my mother was such a talented woman to begin with and yet she never had the chance to develop her style and really offer what she could to the world. I had to be a different kind of mother for my daughter. That really pushed me.” Within weeks, Frankie and Joe decided to join forces. They drafted a book proposal for a major study of world food conditions (which was published in 1977 under the title Food First: Beyond the Myth of Scarcity). Then they invested the 'publisher’s advance in establishing a nonprofit research organization called the Institute for Food and Development Policy. Emboldened by the project, Frankie now felt confident enough to assert her personal independence, too. She left her marriage, though for the sake of the children, she followed her husband back to the Bay Area and transplanted the Institute to San Francisco. ^ ^ _ o d a y , there’s a no-nonsense atmo- ^ ^F s p h e re about the Institute. ApproI priately, the headquarters are lo- I cated just above the natural foods oriented Rainbow Grocery in San Francisco’s Mission District. The rooms are spacious, stark white, and utterly functional. What catches my eye in the lobby is the wall chart of works-in-progress, each dated with a deadline and a status report. I start to copy the long list—high school curriculum, slide show, college organizing piece, WorldHunger, Aid Action A le rt. . . —and then I realize the futility of capturing the tremendous scope and variety of the Institute’s projects. There are 13 staff workers and 25 volunteers and interns, not to mention a worldwide network of consultants, and correspondents. The Institute operates on an annual budget of just under a million dollars, and unlike most nonprofit organizations does not seek government funds (“ It’s a moot point anyway,” says Frankie with a laugh) or corporate donations (the single exception was $5000 from the Wells Fargo Foundation for the high school curriculum project). Instead, the Institute supports itself on individual donations (there are 20,000 members), grants from church and private foundations, and the royalties and honoraria of their books and public lectures. Their publication projects range from a comparative economic study of Mozambique and Tanzania to a global analysis of the impact of pesticides, from a critique of the International Monetary Fund to grassroots interviews in a Bangladesh village. And praise for these books comes not only from the established media and such eminent economists as John Kenneth Galbraith, but also from anonymous readers around the world. A pirated edition of an Institute expose of the World Bank’s role in the Marcos regime in the Philippines, for example, circulated underground in that coun try - generating no royalties, but lots of personal satisfaction. The work never seems to stop. Tomorrow, someone’s off to Honduras to investigate peasant land organizations and the impact of the U.S. military presence on the local agriculture; two weeks later, Collins will fly to the Philippines to offer his expertise on land use. Another staff person is working on conditions in southern Africa; yet another on food programs in China. “What’s it like to work here?” I inquire. “ There’s a laid back California style of personal interaction,” suggests one new employee, “with an underlying tension and frenzy to get things produced, to get a lot of things done.” “ She’s ambitious. She keeps you working,” comments another staffer about Frankie’s leadership. “ She works constantly. She sets a pace. She feels there’s so much to be done and she’s got so much energy, and she keeps pursuing it.” Experts around the country agree that Frankie Lappe’s impact has been profound. “ Her work has contributed enormously to raising the standards of the 18 Clinton St. Quarterly—Winter, 1987
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTc4NTAz