Hope's Edge_ The Next Diet for a Small Planet - Frances Moore Lappe [94]
For Kathleen Cusick, the decision to stop eating meat was the first step which led her to work with Rural Resources, a Loveland, Ohio, group which has helped set up tailgate farmers’ markets in Cincinnati and a Citizen’s Alliance to fight a proposed sewer project in a nearby rural community.
“It began with the negative emotional responses I got from people even to that one personal decision not to eat meat,” she recalls. “The more I followed through on that decision, and discovered why I made it, the more I discovered that my decision to become involved in food work was something that very few people were doing.
“It was frightening because for a long time there was really no support,” she remembers. “This kind of decision—to be an organzier or activist—really has to be made with some community support. Otherwise it can turn you into a loner, and make you very ineffective and unhappy.”
Working with Others
“What keeps me going,” Kathleen explains, “is that I feel I’m on a frontier. I feel that the whole group is on a cutting edge, able to share a sense of vision, and able to support each other personally in our work.”
For Leah, as for Kathleen, working with other people has made all the difference. “Working in groups is the most important thing because you can get support from other people and test your ideas,” Leah says. “I discovered that a lot of things I thought were true were not. When I kept my thoughts to myself, I didn’t have an audience to check them. Once I started interacting in groups I got challenged on my ideas, on the way I lived, on my capacity as a person.”
“You have to find some kind of core group, maybe only two or three people that you can relate to value-wise,” adds Jody Grundy, who works with Kathleen Cusick at Rural Resources. “They can be a renewing source of energy for work that is often isolating and lonely. We three women in Rural Resources have a sense we can do anything!”
To do more than we think we can do, most of us need a push. For some this means taking a position in which a lot more is expected of us than we feel prepared for. Keith Jardine, one of the key people in the Canadian People’s Food Commission (a two-year-long nongovernmental initiative to involve people at the grassroots in analyzing problems of the Canadian food system), told us, “I began with the Commission as a volunteer, and when a staff position opened, I was hired. I suddenly found myself helping to organize this enormous project. I had no particular training or experience, other than a minimal amount of educational work in my food co-op. Most of my experience was shuffling boxes around.” From the experience with the Commission, Keith concluded, “If I changed, then other people can!”
Direct Experience of Oppression
Many people first got involved by “playing the hand they were dealt,” but for others personal travel in the third world (even a vacation trip to Mexico or Jamaica) or a stint in the Peace Corps or VISTA made the difference. Their life directions were profoundly altered when they put themselves as close as possible to the deprivation and oppression which previously they had only read about.
Larry Simon was a college professor before he joined Oxfam-America, a development organization based in Boston. “I suppose what changed me the most was not reading or intellectually grasping the structures of oppression but having the opportunity to actually go to Latin America, to talk to peasants, to talk to cane-cutters working for Gulf + Western Corporation, to feel the incredible repression in the air, to taste and smell the awful, needless poverty.”
Sue Penner found that her work as a Peace Corps