Frances Moore Lappé is one of the few people who can credibly be said to have changed the way we eat, and one of an even smaller group to have done it for the better. With the publication of her best-selling book, “Diet for a Small Planet,” in 1971, Lappé argued for the health and ecological benefits of a plant-based diet and surfaced the harmful links among meat production, increased societal consumption and environmental degradation — all of which is now widely taken as common wisdom. Lappé, a recipient of the prestigious Right Livelihood Award, often referred to as the alternative Nobel Prize, has also long been focused on the equally fundamental subject of how to make our democracy work better for more people. “I want to shift people away from thinking: Democracy, that’s for somebody else. That’s policy, wonky stuff,” said Lappé, who is 75 and whose most recent book, with Adam Eichen, is “Daring Democracy.” “It’s not. Participating in democracy is the essence of a good life.”
I was out getting lunch today, and I was walking behind these two guys who were talking about a PETA billboard for veganism. One of them was saying he didn’t want to be told that eating meat is ruining the world. Do you think about framing your ideas about ecological consequences and consumption in such a way that they might reach that guy? Well, I don’t think that’s the issue. It’s not about directly telling somebody, “You have the wrong frame.” The real question is why are we, together, creating a world that none of us as individuals would ever choose? Nobody gets up and says: How can I heat the planet today? But what is it that isn’t encouraging us to participate in the creation of the world we do want?
And what’s the answer? I think it’s because the dominant story in our culture is one that creates a feeling of powerlessness, and it starts with this reductive understanding of human nature. We’ve taken Adam Smith and Charles Darwin and distorted their real messages. We grow up in this culture believing that the only thing we can count on is materialism, selfishness, competitiveness. It’s survival of the fittest, and the way we handle it is this wonderful device Adam Smith told us about called the free market. But Adam Smith understood the depth of our social nature.
Frances Moore Lappé in the late 1960s. From Frances Moore Lappé
You mean our inclination towards mutually beneficial interrelationships rather than individualism? Absolutely. Adam Smith wrote that the great precept of nature is that we love ourselves only as we love our neighbor. Yet we took this complex thinker and reduced him to “everybody follows their self-interest.” We took Charles Darwin, who in “Descent of Man” says that in primal tribal societies everything was judged good or bad solely as it affected the welfare of the tribe, and reduced him to survival of the fiercest. So our work, in this do-or-die moment of climate change, is to recognize how destructive that dominant story is and how false it is about who we really are, and rewrite that story by our actions.
As far as actions go, I can make all the ecologically conscious consumption choices I want, and the effect will still be a drop in the bucket of what’s needed for meaningful climate action. So what’s a way to think about individual responsibility that doesn’t wind up at powerlessness? This is what I’ve been struggling with all my life. For me, choosing a plant-centered diet was an act of rebel sanity. The more we align our individual choices with the world we want — it doesn’t change the world, but it changes us. We become more convincing to ourselves. We feel less a victim. The solar panels on my house, the clothes out on the line instead of in the dryer, eating low on the food chain, taking the bus to work — it makes me feel less powerless and more energized. Individually, of course we can’t make large-scale changes. But our individual choices are helpful to the extent that we can show possibilities and feel more committed. But, really, the core question here is democracy. The grain-fed, meat-centered diet that I wrote about in “Diet for a Small Planet” was itself not the problem. It was a symptom and a symbol of a deep system problem. We use 77 percent of our agricultural land in the world for livestock that gives us 17 percent of our calories. I wasn’t saying if you just eat less meat then something will be solved. I’m saying that if we had real democracy, if the agribusiness industry and the meat producers didn’t have the political wherewithal that they do, then we could really talk.
I get that individual choices can have cumulative political power, but what if we look at something like smoking? People knew about the effects of cigarettes for years, but it was only when the government took steps to make smoking harder that the number of people smoking went down. Does something similar need to happen with certain foods? The deeper question is: Can we have policies that actually prioritize healthy farming? Now farm subsidies focus on financing the biggest commodity crops that get used to produce processed foods and grain-fed-meat products. How would we get to the point where we have policies that prioritize regenerative agriculture? How do we set policies that make possible a healthy diet for more people? We’re so far from being able to. Do we shift policy so that meat is discouraged? I would say that if we want more access to healthy food and not so much emphasis on processed foods and grain-fed meat, then the problem you’re actually speaking to is the inordinate amount of influence that private money and corporate interests have in our political system.
A minute ago, you used the term “real democracy.” Tell me what that means. Democracy stands for a set of three conditions that are necessary to bring forth the best in our nature and keep the worst in check. It means the continuous and wide dispersion of economic and political power; it means transparency; and it means cultivating a culture of mutual accountability. The reason that this system is creating such incredible misery is that our essential needs for power, meaning and connection are not fulfilled by it. The challenge is trying to embody those needs in our lives and work for them in terms of changing the system’s rules and norms. It relates to the idea of finding your inner citizen and participating in changing system laws, not just policy laws.
Lappé with her son, Anthony, and her daughter, Anna, in the early 1980s. From Frances Moore Lappé
Do you think climate change is the issue that’ll move people into direct democratic engagement who otherwise might not get involved? I’m sure this is more about my own gloominess than anything else, but the enormity of the problem can induce a kind of paralysis. I just spoke at Marist College, and the first slide in my speech shows a picture of a tree that has been toppled in a storm, and the slide says that sometimes in a fierce storm even the biggest tree will fall, and then we can see the roots for the first time. The climate crisis allows us to see the roots in our political system and economic system, and seeing that is bringing people together. I wrote on my blog about a young woman in Maine, Chloe Maxmin. She won election to the Maine House of Representatives from a rural district. She’s now 27. Maxmin’s district includes part of a county that is demographically one of the oldest in the country and she has championed a “Green New Deal for Maine.” Her team knocked on 10,000 doors and talked about how this crisis could, as Maine steps up, help grow quality jobs. She engaged people, and she won.
It’s not coincidental that she was able to do that in a state with clean-money elections. Yes, Chloe could probably not have run and won without clean elections. But also the way that she went about it was not ranting and pointing fingers but engaging people. So your question was: How can you expect people to change? By showing them what other people are doing.
I want to go back to what you were saying about the way certain narratives influence our political attitudes. You’re obviously dissatisfied with the primacy of narratives that prioritize free-market capitalism. But isn’t it possible that a reason those narratives persist is because there’s something about the American character — whatever that may be — which is sympathetic to the ideas those narratives express? I agree that the story we’ve been told is that we let those who are the most fierce rise to the top and that any other way of thinking in the market is somehow going to destroy the goodies that we get. The market is a great tool, but every market has rules, and our rule is this: You do what brings highest return to existing wealth. Then you end up with extreme concentration of wealth. We have more extreme income inequality than over 100 countries and territories. But we can set rules that make a market work for all of us.
How? By making different rules that have different consequences. I think of the years from my childhood to adulthood and then the years from my children’s childhood to their adulthood. So from the ’40s to the ’70s and then the ’70s to the 2000s. In that earlier period, nearly every quintile doubled their family income, but the poor gained the most. Then you look at my children’s era, and the poor saw virtually no gain, while the wealthy advanced enormously. The tale of these two generations has to do with the narrative that we’re telling ourselves about ourselves. I was part of the Great Society. I saw government as a great ally. It’s important to remember that what you’re thinking of as the American character is the result of a very rapid turn, and it was very deliberately set. The tale of these two generations has to do with the narrative that we’re telling ourselves about ourselves, and it’s important to grasp that today’s narrative is the result of a very rapid turn. Beginning in the 1970s, corporate America felt constrained by the growth of government environmental and social protections and began strategizing how to regain a market system that ensures wealth rushes to the top. Now, it doesn’t help to demonize. I know folks in the Koch network, for example, probably believe they’re serving America by promoting this world view. That said, what’s deadly for democracy is allowing enormous private wealth — especially with neither transparency nor accountability — to gain vast political influence. That the reach of the Koch ideological network now rivals that of the Republican Party undermines democracy.
That’s related to what I’m trying to get at. You and I might think a given ideology is harmful, but isn’t a possible explanation for why libertarian-capitalist ideas resonate because a lot of Americans accept the idea that money talks, even if what it’s saying is bad for them as individuals? These are not necessarily ideas that could have gained purchase only by being imposed top-down. I totally acknowledge that there is this storyline there to be tapped that government is bad and the market is good. But another frame has always been there. It was there during my youth with Kennedy, with Johnson’s Great Society and war on poverty. That frame that I was working in is that we all do better when everybody does better. A society does better when people thrive in general, not just at the top.
Lappé at a rally in Washington in 2016. From Frances Moore Lappé
One sign of hope in your books is that even though America is thought of as extremely politically divided, there are issues on which most of us agree. Is it something like 80 percent of people want big money out of elections? Yes, 85 percent of us want a fundamental reform in how campaigns are funded.
But how do we take a figure like that and then move forward together in positive, bipartisan ways? Because it’s one thing to say in the abstract that we all want big money out of politics. It’s another thing to say that eliminating super PACs might mean that your candidate who was backed by one is now more likely to lose. You ask very hard questions. I’ll start with this. I’m not an optimist. I am a possible-ist. We humans are so in need of purpose and meaning that we don’t have to have certainty of outcome. But we do have to have a sense of possibility. We were talking earlier about Lyndon Johnson. I grew up in Texas, and my parents were liberal, and they didn’t think much of him. Then he was the president introducing the Voting Rights Act and saying “we shall overcome” and making Martin Luther King cry. Or think of the improbability of electing a black man president. Think back to the end of the Soviet Union. Now some of those Eastern European bloc countries have higher standards of electoral integrity than we do. David, sometimes you just have to go for it and not be so measured. We’ve never been here before. We’ve never faced that existential threat of climate change. We’ve never had the level of communication and knowledge that’s available. We’ve never had young people striking or taking leadership like Greta Thunberg. Let me give you a very personal thing. In the 1950s, my parents’ church that they helped found was almost destroyed by McCarthyism. It was a Unitarian church, and the F.B.I. came and interviewed people because somehow they thought we must be some kind of Communist cell, which was completely untrue. People lost their jobs. Families broke up. It was a nightmare. Then in 1966, a little more than a decade later, there I am working in the ghettos of Philadelphia organizing people to fight for their welfare rights and being paid by the government. Ten years earlier, my parents would have said, “Our daughter is going to be supported by the government for helping the poorest people in America?” So it’s not possible to know what’s possible.
Along those lines, what’s been most encouraging — and most discouraging — about changes to the way we eat in the time since “Diet for a Small Planet” was published? We’re moving in two directions at once. Globally, the harmful processed-food and junk-food diet is continuing. Most of the leading causes of noncommunicable diseases are diet-related. There was a study that just came out that said between 1992 and 2014, our ecoculture became 48 times more toxic. And people talk about food deserts: Our society is so economically stratified that the healthy foods that I take for granted literally aren’t there in the neighborhoods for lower-income people. So it’s hard for me to talk too much about progress when concentration of wealth is intensifying. But at the same time, when I wrote “Diet for a Small Planet,” there was only a tiny group of questioners realizing that whole foods and less processed foods and less meat-centered, more plant-centered diets were better on every count, from avoiding pesticide consumption to getting more fiber and on and on. So I do see enormous awareness and more access to better eating.
What about the same question but applied to politics? What makes you hopeful, and what incurs some cynicism? In my younger life, I could never have imagined the Trump phenomenon, the breaking of democratic norms and the crude, harsh, combative aspect of politics now. All the issues around the election of how the Russians interfered — it’s terrifying. That’s the dark part. At the same time, in the 2018 midterms 18 cities and states and one county that passed democracy reforms, important things like moving ahead with redistricting. One of the young people who became a hero was Katie Fahey, who took on gerrymandering in Michigan and traveled around holding her own town-hall meetings and helped pass an initiative to amend the state constitution. Or there’s ex-felon enfranchisement in Florida that passed by over 60 percent. Or in Seattle, they’re experimenting with a new system for city elections called Democracy Vouchers. All eligible residents receive four $25 vouchers to give to their choice of qualifying candidates. Now people from all walks of life can participate. Is there room for me to say one more thing?
Of course. We have to work on courage. This is the time to do what scares us. Rather than being individualistic, humans are actually so social that it’s hard to be different from the pack — even if the pack is heading over the falls. But fear doesn’t have to kill us. Fear can be exhilarating. Choose people in your life who are gutsier than you, more willing to take risks, and absorb that from them and be courageous yourself. That is what this moment calls for. We see how vulnerable we are to being told that the enemy is “them.” We have that tendency, but we’re capable of overcoming it. If we understand that we’re vulnerable to it and work against it, that would make a huge difference. Because we’ve got to pull together. That’s what democracy is all about.
David Marchese is a staff writer and the Talk columnist for the magazine.
This interview has been edited and condensed from two conversations.
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