Francis Lappe, author of Diet for a Small Planet, visited Plymouth this week to promote student awareness of the fallacies of our current system of market-o-centric food production and sale. Her recent work, You Have the Power, has pitted her against the phantoms that perpetuate the fear in our country that causes us to hide behind the machismo of such swaggerers as GW. We caught up with her before her lecture to chat about the current state of our world and what it takes to see through a system so caked in propaganda and ulterior motives.
The Clock: So what have you done in the struggle for social balance?
Francis Lappe: That’s quite a question for Sixty-year-old! Let me start at the very beginning and then I’ll jump to the most recent period. When I was 26, I was trying to figure out why the world was in such a mess, and intuitively I sensed that food was a window into the economic and political problems. Every other species seemed to have found a way to feed themselves, so what was up with Homo sapiens? That was my starting point, the beginning of my adult life, when I asked that question: why hunger? I felt I could follow my own nose to the answer. The experts were telling us that human beings were overpowering the Earth’s ability to feed us, so when I found out that there was more than enough food in the world to make us all chubby, which is still true today, it was sort of a demystification of the “experts” and the media. It was that aha moment, like the little boy that realizes that the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes. I wanted to peel away the layers and find why it was that we as a culture were creating a world that we as individuals had come to abhor, because no one wakes up in the morning and says, “I want another child to die of hunger.” So why hunger in a world of plenty? We live within what I call mental maps that tie our hands and disempower us and end up creating this world that none of us want. In the book I wrote with my daughter, Hope’s Edge, we try to dissect these mental maps and offer an alternative that we see emerging all around the world that remains invisible because it isn’t shown on the mainstream media, which operates like any other commodity at this point. That’s really why I’m here, to help us see with fresh eyes. That’s another realization I had when I was 26, that beginners eyes could really be so useful. If you ask the big questions, like why hunger, you may find insight that specialists miss because they’re so focused on specifics. Part of my pitch for young people is to value coming in fresh, and to value being able to put things together for yourself, so that you’re not jumping over the questions that the experts have already skipped. Anybody could have put together the figures that I did. They were all in libraries, they were all US Dept. of Agriculture figures and UN figures that show that there’s plenty of food in the world to feed everyone. We were feeding a third of it, and now almost half, to livestock because the poorest people were too poor to buy that grain. So this question is where I started, and my whole life has been coming at the problem from different angles. My most recent book, You have the Power, is really about the role of fear, and how we live in a culture where fear is dominant, and is being consciously manipulated to keep us from asking these questions. Particularly with this last election, you can see how fear is really orchestrated, and how enough fear can stop people from focusing on their real interests and how they can really work towards their own security.
TC: What are the implications of our carnivorous lifestyle?
FL: Well first, it’s important to distinguish between being carnivorous, and the particular version that we’ve invented in the US and are now spreading throughout the world, which is the grain fed meat diet. Human beings have included meat throughout our evolution as a part of the hunter/gatherer diet. Because we operate in a system that is so skewed that the majority of human beings can’t even afford to buy the basic grains to survive, we turn those into a raw commodity to produce a luxury product, which is meat, which only the wealthy can afford. Grain fed meat is very fatty, and has become the center of our diet, and that’s what’s undoing our health. My emphasis has always been to show people that this grain fed meat-centered diet is a symptom and a symbol of this larger global problem of an economic system that concentrates wealth and excludes an ever-increasing amount of people. We have this illusion of surplus, cheap grain because starving people can’t afford to make a market demand for it. It gets funneled into livestock, which has enormous human and environmental consequences. To cultivate one pound of steak, we use between 2 and 10 thousand gallons of water in a world that is very fresh water-short. We know that a meat centered diet leads to heart disease and obesity. There are now as many people that are overweight as there are people starving. The disease of obesity in the US alone costs us one out of every nine health-dollars. Even if someone won’t participate in a vegetarian lifestyle, they can still support a food system that isn’t so incredibly extractive and destructive. We use sixteen pounds of grain and soy to produce one pound of steak. The wonderful thing about food is the more you understand how it’s produced and what it contains, the better decisions you can make about what to eat and the better you’ll feel. Virtually all of the corn in US either goes to livestock or is converted to high fructose corn syrup, which sweetens soft drinks. It’s sweeter than sugar, and creates fat cells, but doesn’t fill you up the way sugar does. This is one area where what’s good for your body is good for the planet, and the more you learn, the closer you see food issues related to economic and political problems.
TC: How much longer do you think the US can maintain this large footprint on the world’s resources?
FL: I just don’t see how it can continue. I don’t think we can maintain a big enough army, a big enough bullying stick, to keep the rest of the world accepting of the fact that we are six percent of the Earth’s population and we consume a third of the world’s resources. So I think it’s more a question of how long the rest of the world will allow us to continue. It’s interesting, because the fact that Bush was reelected may mean that the end is nearer. In his first administration, we went into huge amounts of debt to foreign countries like China and Japan. We borrow every day and this puts us in a vulnerable position. The only thing that’s keeping us going now is other county’s willingness to lend, and if we don’t put our own house in order, than how long will that go on? Europe has been making ecological progress, Germany in particular, with true cost economics, where corporations have to take responsibility for the entire life span of their products. It’s beginning to look bleak as the US falls out of step with these countries and looses world markets, but on the other hand, you could look at the reelection of Bush and predict that the rest of the world will take more of a leadership role and stop waiting for the US. Bush made fun of Kerry for saying we need to pass a global test, but we need to be credible as a nation to get support, because we share this planet and we have to be able to communicate our position with others, or this isn’t going to be in our best interest. I always try to see the positive, that’s been the emphasis of my life, and I feel that it’s our human capacity to choose what we focus on. On a local, grassroots level, there’s a lot being done with farm to school programs and organic farming and school gardens. So we may have tripped on a national level but change is coming, slow as it may be.
TC: Do you think that there are any countries in the world today that are living in a self-sustaining way that maybe we could emulate?
FL: I don’t think there are whole countries, but there are so many movements within countries. This is the focus of my current work, and how we were talking about Europe and full cost economics. In Brazil, the world’s fourth largest city has declared food a right of citizenship, and not taken it away from the market, but not simply left it to the market either. If you leave the market to its own devices, it will continue to return wealth to the highest financial tier. The market needs to be contained within a democratic framework. So while there isn’t one country that we can really emulate, there are very powerful lessons about how we can democratize the market, and that our choices aren’t just between monopolist power and state control. The market should support and not drive everything, and this is popping up in a lot of places, but unfortunately we aren’t jumping on the wagon.