The Power of Choice
13 May 2002
In their book, Hope's Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet, Anna and Frances Moore Lappé reintroduce us to the significance of choosing what we eat, reporting on the declining status of diet and agriculture around the world.
by Jennifer R. Wilder
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| Anna and Frances Moore Lappé |
“I am going to make a choice about the way I eat.”
That’s hardly a radical idea, but in their recent book, Hope’s Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet, Anna and Frances Moore Lappé reintroduce us to the significance of choosing what we eat. Frances Lappé first wrote about the importance of food 30 years ago in her bestselling Diet for a Small Planet. Today, she and her daughter, Anna, revisit the same issues, reporting on the declining status of diet and agriculture around the world.
Despite the urgency of the problems, the Lappés offer hope that each of us can make small – but significant – choices that lead to control over our diets, the environment, and finally, the quality of our lives.
POWERLESSNESS AS ABSENCE OF CHOICE
Why, ask the Lappés, are we as a species creating a world that we abhor and cannot recognize? We are killing off the environment, allowing 32,000 children to die daily of hunger-related illness, and burning a hole in the ozone that is a doorway for cancer. We don’t own this world and feel powerless to change it.
The Lappés argue that the state of food production and consumption is basic to the problem. America’s high-fat, high-sugar diet is a killer. Weight-related illnesses absorb one in nine of our health care dollars, and our eating habits are connected to four out of ten cancers. Public schools serve fast foods and sell exclusive rights to soda companies, despite the crisis of obesity in children.
Agricultural production, controlled by a few corporations, is destroying our environment, with chemicals polluting waterways and soils depleted by single crop harvests. Worldwide demand for meat diverts almost half of all grains to feed livestock that return a fraction of those nutrients when eaten. Meanwhile, biodiversity is at great risk. Is this efficiency?
Many Americans are oblivious to the destructive nature of our agricultural methods. Wedded to the idea that mass production equals efficiency, we remain unaware of the real costs of food: massive agricultural subsidies, environmental damage, and health problems.
THE JOURNEY
Hope’s Edge takes mother and daughter on a journey to 5 continents,encountering courageous and creative people who find alternative ways to organize themselves and their resources, make humane choices, and empower the poor.
Of course, it’s not that simple. Hope’s Edge is really about people taking risks. From Berkeley, California, to Brazil, India, Kenya, and France, the Lappés find communities controlling the source and quality of their food and taking bold steps to nurture their threatened natural resources. The remarkable, joyful message of this journey is that, despite the precarious status of society, teetering on “Hope’s Edge,” inspiring individuals and communities are taking charge and choosing change.
“Hunger is not caused by scarcity of food but by scarcity of democracy,” says Frances Lappé. Control over agriculture and food is highly political. In Belo Horizonte, Brazil, malnutrition drove Adriana Aranha and other city leaders to drastic steps: “‘Food security’ – having enough food to feed yourself and your family – is a human right, a right by virtue of being a citizen,” she explained. The city set up low-priced fresh produce markets and community and school gardens, while providing enriched flour for baking. The city’s health and spirit have been transformed.
Women in some of the world’s poorest communities, in Bangladesh and India, inspired the Lappés with their newfound sense of power and identity gained through action. Women of the Grameen Bank, founded in Bangladesh by Muhamman Yunus, are building their own businesses with small loans.
In India’s Punjab region, farmers of The Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology are regaining control over their traditional crops, moving away from costly dependence on fertilizers and chemical pesticides. They are now moving to block international corporations from patenting seeds for crops that the farmers have grown for thousands of years.
In Nairobi, Kenya, tens of thousands of women in the Green Belt movement have planted 20 million trees to stop the deforestation of their land. They are regaining food security by relearning how to grow traditional crops that are adapted to the soil and climate. Green Belt members have been able “to unlearn helplessness” and to see themselves as citizens with rights to their environment.
The Lappés complete their journey in France where European groups support sustainable agriculture and reject genetically modified foods with greater impact than in the U.S. Americans are only beginning to recognize how much control over our diets we have ceded to agricultural corporations.
Each of these chapters is an entry point to hope, where readers gain inspiration by example. By choosing what we eat, the Lappés point out, we can choose where our food comes from, which leads to who controls what is produced and whether the environment is damaged. Ultimately, like those in the many communities they visit, we can create a world that we do recognize, own, and treasure as humane, promising, and worthy of our grandchildren.
Unwilling to limit a book on food to the intellectual realm, the Lappés have laden Hope’s Edge with a rich and tempting selection of healthy, international recipes. The reader is moved to place their book on the cookbook shelf after digesting the food for thought.
Hope’s Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet is published by Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, a member of Penguin Putnam, Inc, New York, 2002.
