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Hope's Edge: Making New Maps for a Global Future
By Kimberly Christensen
Frances Moore Lappe. David Sielaff photo. |
Awareness of the impact of our personal choices on society deepened in 1971, when Diet for a Small Planet helped connect our personal food choices to the problem of global hunger. In this book, Lappe asserted that the world's farmers produce sufficient food to feed all people. However, this food is not distributed equitably, which causes hunger.
"Feeding ourselves and our offspring is our most primal task, said Moore Lappe. "So our question must not be 'Why hunger?' but 'Why hunger in a world of plenty?'"
Diet for a Small Planet proposed that each person, by choosing to eat a vegetarian diet, could help create changes in this food distribution. The grains that normally would be fed to livestock raised for slaughter would instead feed people. Enough people taking this simple action would cause global changes in food distribution and the eradication of hunger.
As the world changed in the 30 years since the publication of Diet for a Small Planet, the nature of food problems also shifted. Corporate globalization and biotechnology intensified hunger by throwing such things as the patenting of life forms and genetically modified organisms into the mix.
According to Moore Lappe, she was challenged to respond to these changes by her children, Anna and Anthony, on a gray and drizzly day while the three conversed in a dark bar.
"They were clear about my next step," she said. "They told me, 'We need a book for our generation, Mom. Go back to the beginning. Go back to food.'"
It didn't take long for their conversation to generate enough ideas for a handful of books.
Anna Lappe. David Sielaff photo. |
In the other parts of the world, the narrowing of the food industry has compounded food shortages. Moore Lappe and daughter Anna traveled around the world to witness these problems firsthand. What they found surprised them in many ways. Although the problems were severe, the people resisted defeat.
"The people I would think should be the most hopeless were the most hopeful people I have ever met. Their hope was more verb than noun. They were hopeful because they had chosen to act," said Anna Lappe.
Hope's Edge tells the stories of these inspirational people who live on 5 different continents and yet all must struggle to reclaim the basic right of food. It describes people in India who experienced health problems because of chemical agriculture. Now, they are working to promote organic farming and to preserve their native seeds. On top of that, they are also resisting Western corporate interference in their farming practices, uniting against agribusinesses that sell "terminator" seeds which are sterile after one generation.
The people of Brazil's fourth largest city, Belo Horizonte, decided that food is a basic right of citizenship. The city government now corrects "market failure" so that the poorest people are not prohibited from eating good, quality food. This is accomplished by actions such as directly linking smaller farmers with school lunch programs and giving organic farmers access to the best public spaces in which to sell produce.
The Lappes use these stories to inspire change. Moore Lappe suggests that our ideas about reality limit us and determine what we can become. These ideas become our "mental maps" that guide us through living and decision-making. In order to change the decisions we are making, we need new mental maps. Hearing the stories of other people can allow us to create new mental maps for ourselves and to move away from the dominant mental map, which she said is "literally killing us."
"How can it be that we as societies are creating a world that we as individuals abhor?" asked Moore Lappe. "Not one of us would wake up and say, 'My goal today is to have a child die of hunger,' but 32,000 do each day. We must replace our destructive mental maps and choose a life of alternatives."
The Lappes will be bringing their message of hope and social change to communities across the country. Their tour schedule, which includes radio interviews, can be found at http://dietforasmallplanet.com/.
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