The Plowboy Interview: Frances Moore Lappe

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PLOWBOY: That does make eating a prime steak sound absurdly wasteful. But as you said, not eating meat won't solve the world's food problems. What other steps do you recommend that an individual take?

LAPPE: You have to start by changing yourself. Assume that you've been miseducated and taught a lot of fallacies about how the world works. Learn what's really happening, and then question your life choices-where you live, how you treat your children, where you work, what you eat-and ask yourself whether these actions support a status quo that promotes suffering or offer an alternative that's even one small step better.

Of course, we all have to make compromises between our visions for the future and what we have to do to survive in our society. If you, for example, attempted to sever all links between yourself and the exploitative aspects of our culture, you'd probably drive yourself-and those close to you-nuts! On the other hand, though, you have to be willing to risk really changing by trying things you haven't done before.

I also believe that it's almost impossible for people to change alone. We need to join with others who will push us in our thinking and challenge us to do things we didn't believe ourselves capable of. Thus a big part of our work at the institute involves helping people link up with the thousands of groups around the country that are working for democratic change.

I'm not, however, suggesting that everyone become a food activist like me. Maybe some other issue—a community problem, perhaps—ignites your passions. Most of the gravest difficulties facing our society today—whether they be in education, health, the legal system, or energy policy—have common roots. I believe they can be solved only as part of an overall movement toward a more just sharing of economic and political power. And the only way such a democracy can be built is for the less influential people, ordinary folks like you and me, to take on more power . . . to take responsibility for working to change the social order.

PLOWBOY: What do you believe the U.S., as a nation, should do to help limit world hunger?

LAPPE: The best thing for America to do right now would be to stop making things worse for underdeveloped countries. Our nation's role shouldn't be to go in and "solve" problems there, but—instead—to identify the obstacles that stand in the way of people's struggle for selfdetermination in the Third World . . . especially the stumbling blocks we've created through U.S. financial and military aid to repressive governments!

And, of course, we should never forget that there are many people in the United States, right now, who don't have enough to eat—some 25 million Americans live below the poverty line—and that our country hasn't accepted the responsibility of providing for the basic needs of its most vulnerable members, such as the elderly, the disabled, and the single-parent families. In a recent study of eight industrial countries, the United States ranked among the lowest in the adequacy of benefits for those in need. Our infant mortality rate-14 deaths per 1,000 birthsranks sixteenth in the world, almost double that of Sweden or Finland. Worse still, among nonwhites the infant death rate is 22 per 1,000 . . . which is about the same as that of an extremely poor country like Jamaica!

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