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 For over thirty years, renowned author and food activist Frances Moore Lappe has worked tirelessly for the rights of all people to healthy food and true democracy. From her seminal, best-selling book, Diet for a Small Planet, and numerous other writings, to her co-founding of the organization Food First, and subsequent founding of the Center for Living Democracy, Ms. Lappe has been a leading voice in the struggle for fair and equitable distribution of food and land throughout the world.
Her new book, Hope's Edge, the Next Diet for a Small Planet, authored with her daughter Anna, chronicles their worldwide journey and describes the hope that many people are finding as they regain control over their food and their lives. Click on the link above to read our extended review of this timely and incisive book.
My wife Zizi and I were honored to talk with Ms. Lappe in her Cambridge, Massachusetts home on the morning of 21 May 2002.
Scott Vlaun: Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us today.
Francis Moore Lappe: I'm so glad you're here. It just makes me happy to be with people who are doing what they believe can heal.
SV: I guess what we're trying to do is get it down to the level of putting seed in the ground. Beginning to understand food on that level, then expand out to a broader consciousness, while always bringing it back to the garden or farm. Some of the things that you talk about in the new book—the community gardens, the children, the prisoners, the power of gardening, of growing food, to restore values and heal—that's what I was hoping we could talk about.
FML: It's been interesting, that first chapter, the beginning of the journey. So many journalists that have interviewed us have focused on that. Two journalists, and you know how journalists are generally so objective—"I'm not really engaged in this, I'm just here to interview you"—well two of them have said they wanted to start school gardens.
SV: At some point, I suppose you just have to drop that idea of journalistic objectivity. I guess we're just blatant propagandists. I mean we're trying to be factual and do our job as reporters, but we're clearly promoting an idea, and fighting something else. So you don't have to worry about us being objective. (laughter)
I have no idea where my original copy of Diet for a Small Planet is. I think I gave it away—a few times actually. So I picked up a new copy, which was the 20th anniversary edition. In the very beginning of the book, I guess this was 1990, you mention that it was a time of technological advancement, you were talking about working on your laptop and faxing your article and that it was this dramatic change of consciousness.
FML: Yeah, from my slide-rule and gram-scale days.
SV: You were talking about that time as one of these great opportunities that comes along every so often. I was wondering, twelve years later, how you feel about that now, in light of the fact that we've made another quantum technological leap?
FML: I guess this relates to what I was just saying a few moments ago about the paradox of this era, and one of the things that Anna and I have been talking to audiences about the last few months. It comes back also to what Wangari sort of stands for for me. (Wangari Maathai is a leader in Kenya's Greenbelt Movement.) And that is, I think "objectively" that one can say that the trend lines, the negative trend lines, have sped up, that the destruction of the planet, the destruction of our biotic community is speeding up, but at the same time there are these breakthroughs in consciousness, and not just in consciousness, and we get at this in Hope's Edge. There is so much more knowledge, and you all represent that, about how to live and lighten our footprint on the earth, and create a sustainable way to inhabit this planet. So, I guess the opportunity then, when things are so stark, when the paradox is so stark, when things are getting worse, is that we're learning so much so quickly about how to heal. It is such a moment where the choice is so clear.
To be alive at such a time, we just happen to be here, you all and me, on this planet at a time when this contrast is so clear. And therefore we have a choice, do we choose death or do we chose life? And I don't think previous generations, before this last twenty years, could see what we can see, that our choices really do make an ultimate difference, have ultimate consequences. This is quite an extraordinary time to be inhabiting this planet.
So that sense of choice, and the Wangari piece of that, I don't know if you remember from the book, the slogan that the greenbelt movement women wear on their t-shirts. It's just very simple— "As for me I've made a choice." and that will just stay with me forever. And that had a lot to do with what I just said, that unless we make that choice for "life" then we are participating in "death." And I guess that's what I hope my work can make clearer and clearer. It's not as if by "not doing" we aren't having an effect. We are having a very big effect with all of the choices that we make every day. So what I hope to communicate more and more is the special quality of this era. I guess the other piece of it that I didn't really feel so much in 1990—it's only been that last few years doing the traveling for the book and the writing of the book and speaking about the book—is the awareness of how much energy most of us spend, and maybe this is just me, but how much energy is spent shielding ourselves from the bad news because it is so bad. When you look at [the fact that] a third of all species are threatened with extinction, and that it will take 10 million years just to regenerate what we've already destroyed and the increase now in slavery and violence—I'm getting off your question—but what I feel now is that, for the first time in my life, I can let in the bad news without being overwhelmed by it.
SV: Is it because you see this other force, this positive force that's beginning to catch fire?
FML: Maybe, but I think I've just always focused on the positive, believing somehow that if you really let in the bad news, that you'd become paralyzed. So I've just focused on the positive; "We really do have enough food to feed the world. We really do." I've been kind of a cheerleader. So the big change for me—in Hope's Edge we say that Anna and I have learned a lot about the human heart this year, that it can grow bigger than me, that the human heart can grow large enough to hold the pain and suffering and the hope and joy at the same time. I think that's really the theme of my life right now. I think that blocking out the bad news numbs us; it cuts us off from each other—our own suffering, others suffering. So that theme of how to sing and cry at the same time is the theme of my life right now—to drop the cheerleader role.
And I think that even though we have to acknowledge the devastation and how hard it's going to be to turn it around in the time necessary, now we have new threats—I mean, I thought the cold war was scary, but I feel that this period is even scarier than the cold war with people talking about terrorists using nuclear weapons, bio-terrorism. I don't know—the cold war, which I grew up under, was either going to happen in this big way where we were all going to be annihilated or not, so it was hard to think about on a daily basis. But now it feels like the threats are sort of everywhere and totally random and there's not just one center that we have to defeat like in the cold war, where if we just got rid of communism. I just feel that it's a more threatening time for many people.
So, anyway, the next book that I'm working on is a book about fear and has a lot to do with this idea of learning to sing and cry at the same time. Where you learn to accept the extent of suffering in the world and the threat to our well-being and not be paralyzed by fear and realize that fear in such an era is inevitable. That change is required of all of us and that change is frightening. So how do we see fear in a totally different light? The tentative title for our book is Fear Means Go!
SV: So fear as a motivation instead of paralysis.
FML: Yes, it's the theme of being able to acknowledge through various means, as we hopefully suggest in the book, that once we make this choice to choose life that then we choose to bring into our lives those people who will reinforce us in our risk taking. And so our fear of breaking with the pack will be diminished as we bring into our lives people who are nourishing us in choosing "life" so to speak. And knowing that there is this awakening that we try to capture in the book—some feeling that we can all be part of it.
SV: I try to think of it as a critical mass. I keep thinking that, as a movement, we're reaching a point where it's no longer a few people, or one publication, that it's not just a few voices out there, that it will feel safe for people and help them with their fear. Like, "Oh, there's a bandwagon I can jump on and feel good about."
FML: Exactly. That's why we wrote the book the way we did, and made it so pretty, so people would feel, "Oh yeah, I don't have to be some radical extremist to get on this bandwagon." This is all about life and hope and food and beauty. And the human spirit is strong. That's why we're so happy with the way the book publisher created something that's warm feeling, precisely so that people can feel like there's a home for them in this movement.
SV: I love the way you have the recipes after each chapter so that you don't have to wait until the end of the book—you're constantly reminded that food is the thing that really binds us together.
I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about some of the other things you've been doing for the last thirty years, your work with Food First, to give people a little background. I mean, you've written these two books that have gotten all this publicity, but there's a whole body of work in between that a lot of people don't know much about.
FML: It's true. Most people think I've written one book. People come up to me all the time and say, "I've read your book." So I try not say, "so which book?"
SV: Well, to be sure, Diet for a Small Planet is the one that had the popular success and probably the most impact?
FML: We'll it's funny that you'd ask that because I just picked up a book last week at the Harvard Coop. It's an edited volume called Global Backlash. It's about the movement, a sort of bottom up approach to globalization. It's edited, very short pieces from historical and current [sources] critiquing the dominant corporate globalization model. I got to the historical section and there was an excerpt from the book Food First about the way colonialism contributed to what we now experience as world hunger. Just reading this, that Joe Collins and I had written in 1977—and I hadn't read this since probably 1978 or so—it was so interesting to see it there and to see that it still made sense. It was sort of a helpful condensation of literature about how colonialism undermined local food crops and put in cash crops. When Joe and I were in the founding of Food First, that was in the seventies when the world was saying that there's not enough food in these poor countries, they're so underdeveloped, they're so hungry, and our job is to ship food aid to them because we have this great breadbasket and they obviously don't have enough land and don't have the expertise to grow the food they need. That was the framing.
So Joe and I wrote Food First and founded the organization and said "wait a minute," there are amazing resources everywhere on our planet for people to feed themselves, but people have been actively robbed of the land and the skills and the self-confidence that they can feed themselves. So that was really the beginning, and to see that it was still found to be useful by somebody in 2002 was very gratifying—both gratifying and alarming that in some ways it's still not common knowledge that, in fact, the third world was underdeveloped as a verb. You know we think of underdeveloped as an adjective, but it's really a verb. There was an active underdevelopment going on as cash crops were forced on peasant populations. It's like the story I was just telling you that Wangari told last night about how cocoa and coffee and other crops just clear out the diverse trees and other food crops that were appropriate to the drought prone areas and that sort of thing.
After I wrote Diet for a Small Planet, the next big step was the founding of the organization Food First and writing the book Food First, which all were happening at once, because that was the first burst of interest in the seventies, in world hunger. It was like "Oh! There's starvation in the world" and the impulse was understandably, "let's give them our food." This kind of noblesse oblige charity approach.
And so the founding of that organization was to educate people about the social roots, that the problem of hunger is a scarcity of democracy, not a scarcity of food. And that's really the theme of all our work at Food First. Whether we said it or not, it was helping people understand that the root of hunger is in social relationships, that hunger is simply a reflection of a breakdown in human relationships and therefore the relationship to the land. It wasn't a direct problem of just inadequate resources. So, that consumed my life for about fifteen years. I was there at Food First and wrote many books. Actually, this current book is my thirteenth. My lucky thirteenth!
They ranged from a book called Taking Population Seriously that said, "Ok, if we're serious about population then we have to get to these underlying roots," to a book on US foreign aid, called Aid as Obstacle, to two books on Nicaragua and land reform. Then there was the book I did with my kids called What to do After You Turn off the TV.
ZV: How did that go over?
FML:It was not a big seller. I couldn't get on TV! Another book I wrote in the nineties, called The Quickening of America, which is a book on democracy emerging—sort of a domestic version of Hope's Edge—sold maybe 25,000 copies, and it's still in print. It doesn't seem like a lot, yet I was in a small college two days ago and the professor sitting next to me said his mother-in-law had used that book to teach democracy to Romanians, who were building democracy from the ground up. And they went through every exercise in the book. And I thought, you know, I would have written the whole book just for that.
But, again, the book I did with my kids was very gratifying. It's all sort of related, in my view, to this same fundamental issue of people appreciating their own power to create rather than deferring to television.
SV: How long did it take you to find a hundred families without TV?
FML: Oh, it wasn't difficult at all. It was really fun though. My son illustrated the book. It was our first sort of family project. So my books have ranged all over.
Anyway, back to Food First. That was what was driving me there, in a sense to use food, and I don't mean that in a crass way, but to say that if people could, through food, understand the social dimension, that it's all about human relationships, then they'll be focused on the human relationships, and not get sidetracked into some sort of mechanistic notion of just numbers of people per acre [as if] that's the problem. The fundamental issue is how we create community. What we consider to be the norms of expectations of healthy community, and is one of them that we all have access to healthy food? That's why, of course, the Bella Horizonte chapter is so important to the book, where food had been declared a human right.
SV: I was curious about the Nicaragua work. I hadn't realized that you worked on that issue. I spent some time there myself. It just seemed like all through Latin America, or Central America at least, that the absence of food was directly related to the absence of democracy, if not to flat out repression. I was in Guatemala at Santiago Atitlan one time and the people we're afraid to go out. To get to the marginal land that they had to farm, they had to travel by foot an hour or two from their village. They were afraid they would be killed. That's an extreme case, but not entirely unusual.
FML: When were you there?
SV: It was right after the massacre at Atitlan when they ended up driving the army out. It must have been December 1989.
FML: Oh, I have this video—a friend of mine created one of the most moving videos about everything we're talking about—in Guatemala,following the life of a peasant, a Mayan, over about a twenty five year period—where he had been working to improve the agricultural practices so he could increase the yields of corn. Anyway, it's a progression of his life and how he ultimately decided to join the guerillas—and the price he paid—and takes us on to his death.
SV: You can have all the agricultural practices in the world but if you don't have the freedom to farm, then its meaningless, which brings me around the whole idea of "Living Democracy" that you talk about, that hunger isn't brought about by scarcity, but rather by the absence of democracy.
FML: That's why I went on then to found the Center for Living Democracy. Because I'd preached from the podium for so long about how we can't have a foreign policy that promotes democracy abroad unless we have democracy here. I said, "well, you should start listening to what you're saying from the podium and act on that." So I left Food First and founded the Center for Living Democracy and I thought that would be the rest of my life, that I would be using that vehicle to help people grasp this emergence, and using the metaphor of living, that it's our living practice, living in the sense that it's organic and ever evolving—it's not just a structure that we inherit, it's what we create in our own lives. That was directly growing out of Food First.
One of the motivations for leaving Food First and starting the Center was my heartbreak over what happened in Nicaragua, because my sense of it was that there were authoritarian strains in the Sandinistas and there were democratic strains. And it seemed so clear that the US response, the military response, understandably brought out the more authoritarian strains. And so we were robbed, the whole world was robbed, of learning what might have been.
Yeah, so that experience was very formative for me. That experience of getting so close to something so hopeful and then seeing it destroyed through the US foreign policy—I'm sure that contributed to my ultimate decision to leave Food First and start the Center for Living Democracy. I came to believe that people wouldn't believe in democracy unless they had a taste of it. I guess "taste" both literally and figuratively—that was why I founded the Center, that was why I founded the news service, and that's why I wrote the book the way that we did, to give people the taste of what it could feel like to be in a community where people really have voice and um... hope.
SV: I think you really capture that in the book.
FML: Thank you.
SV: Especially in the chapter on the Landless Workers Movement—that whole triumphant...
FML: Yeah, it is amazing—whenever I feel glum I just flash back to some of those moments with those people. So now I have all these people with me, I have them in me, I have Wangari and the Landless Workers, and Belo, and all these people. So I feel so much stronger and hopefully people who read the book will feel that way too. I guess that was our hope most of all, that people could have that vicarious fortification of knowing that these people are human beings just like us, and they're out there doing it.
SV: In the beginning, I think Seeds of Change was a little too aggressive with a lot of the information about how we've lost all this diversity, especially within crops, the perils of chemical pesticides, etc. We never talked enough about the hope and the other models that were happening in the world. I think we may have scared some people off. We never talked enough about the joys of gardening, and the joys of organic food and growing your own food, and what it really tastes like—that whole experience. So now, we're trying to find that line where we can show people the models and make people feel that this is a positive step you can take, while still being aware of the larger issues.
FML: What you're saying is very much what I was trying to say. To help people see that it's not "either you're out there just attacking how terrible things are, or you're in your garden doing your own happy thing"—that both are essential and we have to be sounding the alarm at the very same time we're ringing the bells of joy for what is emerging. We can do both. I guess that's the theme for me right now—figuring that out for myself personally and sharing that with other people. Hope's Edge is the first attempt at that, without pulling the punches about how desperate the situation is for those people. The hardest one was actually the Bangladesh chapter. That was the hardest chapter to write because the position of women is so, so terrible there. Yet, compared to where it was when Muhammed Yunus started, it's progress.
SV: It was interesting how you wrap that chapter up by talking about how many women are actually working for the Grameen Bank.
FML: And fewer and fewer. It's shrinking. And the whole consumerism—you just see it beginning to take over in Dakka—and the effect of that. I was just reading that a huge number of women in Bangladesh work in these export processing zones, where they just get a pittance, and working just incredible hours, and starting so young. And this is progress? So that was really hard to see. But [it is progress] relative to what it was when men and women couldn't even talk. It was really hard; it's the closest I've come personally to despair—was when we got back from Bangladesh.
SV: I heard Vandana Shiva speak at the Common Ground Fair in Maine last year. I guess one of the stories in your book that was the most powerful for me was about her Navdanya movement and the power of seeds and seed saving. I was completely taken by they way people in India have taken back control of their lives through their seeds.
FML:Well, when you say that, of course the first thing I think of is this journey that Vandana sent us off on. As soon as we got to Dehli she said, "get on the night train, you're going to Dehra Dun." As you know from the book, we ended up in these villages where the huts that are part of the seed savers all have this little emblem on them marking that they were all part of the seed savers network. The sense that we had from the people that we talked to—and of course these were all men we talked to, the honchos of the villages—was that this was an incredible moment of truth for them. They were saying, "Oh my God! What have we bought in to?"
The impression that we had was that for decades they had been denying the consequences of chemical agriculture, and even though there was sickness, they weren't putting it together as to why—even though they said, "we never really had a pest problem until we started using pesticides." But they weren't putting it all together until Vandana Shiva's network, this Navdanya network, sent who we called the circuit-rider guy, Negi who was also our guide, out there to sit with them and talk with them and get them to stop and reflect.
You know, in the beginning the government actually gave away these commercial seeds and the chemicals to go with them. And the [farmers] gradually got hooked. Of course, once they started using the pesticides they had to keep using them. They kind of forgot that their seeds tasted better and they didn't have a big pest problem, and they didn't have these health problems. So just having somebody there—at least this was the impression that we got—allowed them to reflect on what they had experienced. They said, "wait a minute, we were really led down the wrong track." And then being willing to go through the years of change, to go back to that which was tradition for millennia, meant several years of transition back to organic and diversified approaches. It was really moving to see these people acknowledge that they were mislead. That's hard for all of us to do.
SV: I think that's the hardest thing for people who've made this commitment for so long with a vision of higher yields and less work. When you start to realize you went down the wrong path it's hard to turn around.
FML:It's very hard. One of the things that really helped, as you know from the book, is that there is this one that we called the pesticide pusher. This guy had been the one to peddle the pesticide thing. When Negi got to him, and he converted, and then became the local organic "truck stop," metaphorically speaking, I think that really influenced a lot of people. He was actually just reacting to his own heath problems from handling pesticides.
That was very moving of people to admit, "You know I've been on the wrong track," and that's very hard. And that brings up this whole moment of dissonance, a theme of our book. How so many people we met did have those moments when the world kind of cracked, and they said, "Ok, do we kind of stay in denial, or do we take the risk of change."
Like Jim Miller, the farmer in Wisconsin. When his father, the patriarch of the family, died, his siblings were all farmers, all chemical farmers, they all looked at each other and said, "Well, do we admit that dad really died of exposure? And if we admit that, then what are we going to do?" And they all went together; the whole family went organic. And now Organic Valley is a huge success.
So back to the seed savers—it shows how easily we loose confidence in our own wisdom. Whether it be in Africa or India, the example of people revaluing their own traditional seeds and practices—how quickly people can learn helplessness. In our Africa chapter we mention a book by Martin Seligman called Learned Optimism. He's a theorist who talks about learned helplessness and how you think of human beings as being so creative, and how we have to have a certain amount of self-confidence in order to have survived and evolved as a species. But what is so striking is how quickly human beings can lose that when they're told in so many ways, both indirectly and directly, that they're not of value and that something else is superior. How quickly they can devalue their own culture and their own wisdom. And then to see people in those moments say, "Oh yes!"
I remember Lea Kisomo in Kenya, this elder who would talk about the porridges they ate when she was growing up. She would almost get teary eyed just with the memories. And, of course, that morning we'd been served white bread for breakfast. And to see her joy in realizing that "Oh yes, young people are beginning to value what we had, and that we weren't all just backward and ignorant, that there was wisdom in what we had done."
So, just that affirmation that we can trust our common sense—I didn't get any sense from these people that they didn't think they could learn from abroad or from western science, but really valuing the wisdom that had grown out of a more intimate relationship with the earth, and trusting their own experience of sickness and seeing what the consequences were. And even things like the pleasure of eating food that tastes good. In all my work over these years that has related to food, so much of the agricultural literature never mentions taste at all as a variable. So to see people unapologetically talking about "Of course we're not going to use these government seeds any more because ours taste so much better." Eating food we love is a great part of the joy of being alive. It's not lesser than anything else. So I think that was a key part of it, and then I think also the social part of the seed saving and exchanging [is important].
When we were in Bangladesh we talked with Farida Akhter, who with her husband, co-founded this seed saving organization called Nayakrishi. When the women gathered around and were talking to us, it was clear that the revival of seed saving was also the revival of women's relationships and sense of control over their own destiny; the revival of seed saving and exchange was also strengthening for women.
Their material is just so poetic. They, more than any other people that we talked to about these issues, wove together, without being in any way "new agey" in a flaky sense, because it's all grounded in their culture, both a spiritual sense and being very agronomical. They seem to have this way of combining the cultural, spiritual, and the agricultural in their approach. They have these big festivals each year where thousands and thousands of farmers come. They have various theatrical presentations as they are doing the seeds exchange.
SV: A celebration of seed saving sounds wonderful.
ZV: Ours is so mechanical, to actually have ritual around it sounds great.
FML: You should go to Asia and try to visit one of her events.
SV: That would be a great thing to see. On the other end of that spectrum is your story about the kids in the schoolyards. These kids are starting out knowing this way of growing food, not having to go back and unlearn. They can do it without having that sense of helplessness—that the only food is down at the supermarket. Did you visit any other schools?
FML: We visited a school in Kenya where they were planting trees. But the only school garden we visited was the Martin Luther King School—but in California now they have a goal of a garden in every school.
SV: It should be everywhere.
FML: One of the things I think was so important about this garden was that it was designed by kids. There were no straight lines. And as the teacher out there said, they didn't use any lumber because they wanted everything to be a success and you can't create ugliness if you use only natural materials. No matter how kind of sloppy it is, if it's nature it looks good. So it's just branches and twigs and vines to create spaces. I think we mentioned that there was this big mud mound. We asked, "What is that?" They said this is a bird's nest that the kids created that was big enough for them to get into because they wanted to get into a bird's nest. They obviously just let the kid's imagination just go.
SV: So it crossed over to a lot of other things besides gardening, like design and making art.
FML: It was very rich. Much more than just learning science.
SV: Maybe you could talk a little bit about the prison garden project in San Francisco.
FML: We just saw Catherine Sneed last month when we were out there. I guess the first thing that comes to mind is the profound frustration I felt last night while listening to Wangari talk about her financial struggle, and thinking of Catherine too and how much money she's saving taxpayers, and yet she's also struggling to raise money—doing this on a shoestring. It's like, wait a minute, this is proven to reduce recidivism. It's proven to reduce crime, so why isn't this just taking off?
SV: That's an interesting point. I hadn't really thought of it in those terms—that if we put a little bit of money into these gardening projects, that it could save a lot of money in the long term. But maybe there isn't a real incentive to save money on prisons?
FML: Prisons are a big lobby. I think we point out that in the 1990 campaign the prison guards' association was the biggest contributor to the governor's campaign. So there's a prison industry that has a strong interest in keeping people in prison and having more prisoners.
SV: Have you seen any other projects that came out of this?
FML: When we were writing the book we tried—not too hard, but we tried—to get some other data, but it's not easily available. It must exist in other places.
SV: I think that one of the reasons these things happen in California is that the climate is so great there. It would be hard to have a school garden in Maine, considering that the kids are out of school for most of the growing season.
FML: Although, Eliot Coleman has developed these simple greenhouses. Things like that would be so cool for kids—especially in the winter, to have something that relates them to growth and to the earth.
You know, one of the most fun things Anna and I did on this tour was when we were at a small college in Pennsylvania, we went to an organic farm run by an Amish farmer that had a CSA (community supported agriculture) with the faculty at Allegheny College. He was telling us that he had gone to the library and found Eliot Coleman and was trying to do it, following his guidelines. I thought the Amish would be mostly organic but many of them are not. He said, at least there, that they are mainly chemical. Even the other Amish farmers thought that he was a little weird at first.
Anyway, he got our book and came to hear our lecture. The next day he called the professor who had invited us and said, "Tell the Lappe's that the mental maps are cracking!" He's able to support seven children on seven acres with this CSA with thirty families.
SV: We interviewed Bill Mollison a while back and that's the model that he describes as the answer to how we should be feeding ourselves—the local, the sustainable, farmers markets, CSAs, knowing the farmers that you are getting your food from. It just seems that the more we can talk about success stories like that, the more people will get interested. And it comes back to that taste thing. Putting real food in front of people. We have a lot of people out to our farm in Maine and we'll cook up some potatoes and beet greens and they'll say, "This is so good!" and it's just mashed potatoes and beet greens. But they're organic potatoes that we just dug and beets that were growing fifteen minutes ago. It's just not the same food you get at the supermarket.
FML: You're making my mouth water. (laughter)
SV: So what was it like working with your daughter Anna?
FML: It was so great! I don't know what I'm going to do now. I've collaborated with so many people. More than half my books are co-authored, but she's the best. She's just so smart and so quick and so careful and fun.
SV: It sounds like you've had a great time.
FML: It was just so fantastic. It's so hard [to describe]. People ask me that and I don't know how to summarize it—just how marvelous it was and how natural it felt. We had this natural complimentarity: where I'm kind of the big picture person, where a lot of my thinking over the past thirty years frames the book, but my daughter comes at it with totally fresh eyes. And, having been studying international public affairs at Columbia when she began this research, she's just an indefatigable researcher. So it was just kind of a perfect compliment. And she's such an excellent writer, we just went back and forth and back and forth. Our only standing tension/joke was about my "cheesiness." Cheesy was the worst adjective that she could come up with to condemn my writing. So she developed this little icon that she'd put in the margin if she thought that I was going over the top. I'd have to tone it down a little bit. I guess I wanted this book to be very personal, and she took out some of the more personal stuff. I don't know who's right, but I thought that the more I could reveal of myself and my own self doubts, the more it would help the reader feel that he or she is not alone.
Certainly it will change our relationship forever to have these common memories for the rest of our lives.
SV: What about the internet? This is an electronic newsletter that were doing. So we're using the internet to put these ideas out there. It seems like a lot of the people that you met use these tools to make their work viable.
FML: It's true. Our book—when you think how difficult that would have been if we couldn't have scheduled everything by contacting people through the internet... And when you think of the French Farmers Organization connected to Vandana Shiva's seed saving and anti-GMO campaign in India, connected to the Landless Workers Movement in Brazil. They are all part of La Via Campesina, the international farmer's movement. People communicating mainly through the internet and really keeping up and just gaining strength I would think, from just knowing what each other is doing and being able to confer that way. I think it's a huge part of why this is happening now and not before.
SV: So, how do you maintain hope in the face of all this global chaos?
FML: As we said in the book, "Hope is more a verb than a noun." Hope is impossible unless we ourselves are engaged in something that is meaningful to us. Hope is not a calculation; it's not weighing the evidence. It's not about a tally, but it's about becoming hope, not finding hope. So I guess my answer is that the only time that I'm despairing, or even to the edge of that, is when I don't feel that I'm being useful. As long as I can feel that I'm applying my particular combination of attributes to a way that is choosing life, then I feel hopeful—just like the people in our book who are facing death perhaps, or terrible drought, or facing incredible deprivation, and yet their spirits were the most hopeful of anyone we met. And it wasn't about evidence; it was about their own actions and realizing what they could do.
That is really the message that I want to communicate to people, that if you're feeling depressed—and what is depression but hope-less-ness... and so the antidote do depression is hope-full-ness. And how do we become hopeful? We say, "Only in action, only in discovering how our unique gifts intersect with what this world needs to sustain life." So for myself, very personally, my dark moments are when I feel like I'm off-track, when I feel like I don't really know where that intersect is. And when I feel like I'm in that flow, as I did so much in this book process with my daughter, I felt,more than ever in my life with this book,that I was a vehicle. I think that's when we feel so good because we know that there's this connection between our uniqueness in the net of existence with the rest of humanity. When we feel that we're there, then we're fine. So that's the art of existence, isn't it? Finding that connection, that intersect between our own gifts and what the world needs to heal.
SV: Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us. You are an inspiration.
For more information about what Francis and Anna are up to these days, check out the Diet for a Small Plant website.
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