Hope's Edge_ The Next Diet for a Small Planet - Frances Moore Lappe [21]
My understanding has changed enormously since the 1975 edition of this book. Some say I realized my book’s thesis was “naïve.” Some claim that since the first edition of Diet for a Small Planet I have become more “political.” Others say I have shifted my emphasis away from what the individual should do toward a call for group action. All of these judgments contain some truth, but they are not the way I see it.
To explain how I do see it, I’ve written the next chapter—about my personal journey from desperate social worker to co-founder of an international food action center investigating the causes of hunger in a world of plenty. If I believe so much must change, I must be willing to change myself.
* Others in search of my book have told me that bookstore clerks pointed them toward the science-fiction department!
† Coauthor Joseph Collins, with Cary Fowler (Ballantine Books, 1979).
2.
My Journey
“HOW DID YOU get interested in food? How did you come to write Diet for a Small Planet?” Countless times I have been asked these questions. Invariably I am frustrated with my answers. I never really get to explain. So, here it is. This is my chance.
I am a classic child of the 1960s. I graduated from a small Quaker college in 1966, a year of extreme anguish for many, and certainly for me: the war in Vietnam, the civil rights movement, the War on Poverty. That year was the turning point.
While I had supported the U.S. position on the Vietnam war for years, finally I became too uncomfortable merely accepting the government’s word. I set out to discover the facts for myself. Why were we fighting? I read everything I could find on U.S. government policy in Vietnam. Within a few weeks, 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 I was learning that “my” government was not mine at all.
From that state of shock grew feelings of extreme desperation. Our country seemed in such a terrible state that something had to be done, now, today, or all hope seemed lost. I wanted to work with those who were suffering the most, so I did what people like Tom Hayden suggested. For two years, 1967 and 1968, I worked as a community organizer in Philadelphia with a national nonprofit organization of welfare recipients—the Welfare Rights Organization. Our goal was to ensure that welfare recipients got what they were entitled to by law.
Most evenings I came home in tears. Perhaps I had helped someone get her full welfare payment, or forced a landlord to make a critical repair. But I realized that even if I succeeded each day in my immediate goal, I was in no way addressing the root causes of the suffering that was so evident to me. The woman I worked most closely with died of a heart attack at the age of forty-five. I was convinced she died of the stress of poverty.
During these years I became more desperate, not less. But I just kept on doing what I was doing, because I did not know what else to do.
In 1968 I ended up in graduate school, studying community organizing at the School of Social Work at the University of California at Berkeley. As part of my training, I worked on fair housing policies in Oakland. But this work did nothing to resolve my questions. I was becoming more miserable, more confused.
The Most Important Decision
Then, in the spring of 1969, I made the most important decision of my life (next to the decision to have children, that is): I vowed not to do anything to try to “change the