The Plowboy Interview: Frances Moore Lappe

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Then in late 1969, in my basement library hideaway, I discovered a few facts about the U.S. agricultural system that changed the very questions I was asking . . . and also changed my life. I found out that over half of the food harvested in our country is used to feed livestock, and that only a tiny fraction of that energy and protein value gets returned to us in the form of meat. I also learned that most Americans consume about twice the protein their bodies can use . . . and that certain plant food combinations can create proteins that are just as valuable to the body as is meat protein.

In other words, our food system-goaded by a relentless push to continuously increase production-seems almost designed to get rid of a tremendous abundance of grain! Hungry people throughout the world can't afford to buy that food, so it's fed to livestock and converted to meat . . . which is sold to people who are already well fed! Upon understanding that scenario, I felt like the little boy in the fairy tale who cries, "The emperor wears no clothes! "

PLOWBOY: Why were you-unlike the "experts"-able to ask questions that challenged the basic assumptions behind our food production system?

LAPPE: I finally realized why those people kept asking the wrong questions when I attended the much-heralded World Food Conference in Rome in 1974 . . . and watched all the agricultural authorities constantly ask the chemical corporation executives how to increase food production. Such individuals are trained to help direct the powerful institutions that control our economic system, so their work is done within the system that creates needless hunger. They've become incapable of seeing outside the boundaries of their own work environments.

"We shouldn't feel deadened by guilt about the plight of the hungry of the world . . . we're all victims of the same economic forces!"

I, on the other hand, spent a lot of time just "following my nose", reading on my own. Then, too, the fact that I'm a woman may have helped. My sex has been a great handicap to me in that I was brought up to have a poor self-image and not to take my intellectual capacity seriously. But being a woman has also been a great advantage, because it allowed me to keep from being locked into society's expectations and institutions and enabled me to stand outside, ask the unorthodox questions, and uncover some of the central myths of the hunger issue.

PLOWBOY: What are those myths?

LAPPE: Essentially, they are the beliefs about the causes of hunger: that hunger is brought about by a scarcity of resources, or by overpopulation, or by insufficient food production. I believe, instead, that it's created by a steadily increasing concentration of control over food-producing resources. Hunger is a people-made phenomenon, so the central issue is power: the power of those who make the decisions about what is grown and who, or what, it's grown for.

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