Hope's Edge_ The Next Diet for a Small Planet - Frances Moore Lappe [92]
Harry used his fame as a singer in other imaginative ways. For example, he was able to convince radio station managers in ten major cities all over the country to hold “world hunger radiothons”—24 hours of commercial-free air time, during which all the breaks were filled with information and insight about the causes of hunger. And the shows were not just “Harry’s shows.” His staff, led by Jeri Barr and Wray McKay, did the tiresome work of drawing in local spokespeople to tell about the problems and the struggles right in the local community. The goal: to ignite local activism.
Harry started with what he had and used it. That’s the challenge of his life to us.
The First Step Is the Hardest
From Harry Chapin, from the many, many people I have met in the last ten years, I learned that we must each begin from where we are. Each person’s interests, passions, abilities, age, and geographical location affect the actions one can—and wants to—take. In seeking a focus for action, many choose to look close to home, doing what they can right now, and then taking the next step as it comes.
Cathy Adrian of Santa Barbara, California, was working in a doughnut shop when she became interested in food problems ten years ago. “I began to see things in a different light,” she explains. “A spark had been set off inside me that has continued to get stronger.
“I started talking to my customers who were friends about nutrition and found myself talking people out of buying coffee and doughnuts,” she remembers. “It goes without saying that I felt out of place at the doughnut shop.” Today she works as a teacher’s aide for special-education preschoolers. At the food co-op where she shops, she has set up two bulletin boards because “I needed a way to effectively share information. I want to help people become more aware and, most importantly, become active.”
Twelve years ago Joan Gussow was forty, at home with two children, and working two days a week on a book project she was less than enthusiastic about. When that work was completed, Joan said, “I kept asking myself, ‘Now what are you going to do when you grow up?’ ” When she first thought of going back to school to study nutrition, the idea frightened her. “I realized that I had my last chemistry course in 1949!” Joan said. “But, being more honest with myself, I realized that my main reservation was nutrition’s dull image. (Let’s face it, nutrition is not one of the high-prestige fields.) But that’s a pretty crummy reason for not doing something you believe in … just because other people don’t think it’s important. I told myself, if you think it is important, make it important.”
Joan is now head of the Department of Nutrition and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, a sought-after speaker, and author of The Feeding Web: Issues in Nutritional Ecology (Bull Publishing, 1978).
In retrospect Joan believes that the decision to go back to school to study nutrition was probably the first real decision in her whole life. “Yes, I responded to offers, and in other instances there seemed to be no choice, so I went through whatever door opened,” she says. “But in this case I made the decision because of what I thought was important. And I’ve never regretted it.”
Bob Pickford, who works for the Federation of Ohio River Co-ops in Columbus, says he “became involved in co-op work as a consumer at a food cooperative, looking for higher-quality food than was available in the supermarket, or a little less expensive food.
“I spent more time at the co-op, began to understand a little bit about what a food cooperative was, and started to work as a volunteer. Since then I’ve worked as a paid worker in several stores, and now as a paid employee in the warehouse.” The Federation operates a central warehouse and about 100 buying associations in Ohio, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Indiana. It places a few cents’ tax on every product from the third world and uses that fund for educational projects