Writer, author, world traveler and activist, Frances Moore Lappé has spent the last 30 years developing a revolutionary philosophy on how hunger, poverty and global food systems affect civilization. She is currently on a speaking tour to promote her latest book, Democracy’s Edge: Choosing to Save Our Country by Bringing Democracy to Life (Jossey-Bass). The book is both a sobering diagnosis of society’s current state of depression, inaction and fear, and a prescription for its rehabilitation that she calls “living democracy.”

Lappé will appear in Buffalo at the First Presbyterian Church, 1 Symphony Circle, this Sunday (October 21) as the keynote speaker of the third annual “World on Your Plate” food sustainability conference sponsored by Food for All, the WNY Peace Center and Indigenous Women’s Initiative.

A dynamic speaker and writer, “Frankie” has endured battles with Big Agriculture, skeptical critics, even cancer. In her bestselling and groundbreaking book Diet for a Small Planet (1971, Random House), she was one of the first to publicly question how and why we grow, harvest, distribute and consume food the way we do, and why poverty and scarcity are allowed to exist in an age where production outstrips use.

After writing Diet at the age of 26, Lappé went on to publish 13 books, notably You Have the Power: Choosing Courage in a Culture of Fear (2004, Tarcher), and Hope’s Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet (2002, Tarcher), both part of a trilogy with Democracy’s Edge. In 1975 she co-founded Food First/Institute for Food and Development Policy to research the causes of hunger and to promote agricultural stewardship. She eventually left Food First to concentrate on the problems with democracy she witnessed while traveling the world with her daughter, Anna, who just wrote Grub: Ideas for an Urban Organic Kitchen (2006, Tarcher). In 2001, Frankie and Anna founded the Small Planet Institute, a grassroots business development organization based in Cambridge, Massachusetts that helps villages become sustainable by capitalizing on their own value systems.

Frankie now lives in Boston, where she continues to promote the ideas in Democracy’s Edge. She has received numerous honors, including the Rachel Carson Award and the Right Livelihood Award, an international award often called the “alternative Nobel Prize,” for “her vision and work healing our planet and uplifting humanity.”

Artvoice spoke with Lappé just before she flew to Columbia to visit Gaviotas, a fully sustainable eco-village established the same year Diet for a Small Planet was published. Below are some salient excerpts from the conversation.

AV: You mentioned traveling to the Peruvian Amazon earlier in the year, and now Columbia. Is constant travel part of your working life now, or do you try to find down time in Boston?

Moore Lappé: I’m definitely taking advantage of not having a book deadline over me, like I’ve had for the past six years. I finished three books in six years, so it was hard to do this kind of thing.

AV: Describe your first job, which you mention in Democracy’s Edge.

FML: It was my first year out of college, in 1967 and during the “war on poverty.” There was an economic renewal program in Philadelphia that involved the housing authority in the Germantown area of the city. I was hired, ostensibly, as a housing inspector by radicals and changemakers in the government who wanted to go door-to-door and organize a welfare rights organization. Part of what I did was tell renters in very poor areas about loans available for homeownership.

AV: How did this job change your outlook on the world?

FML: It was a life-changing experience. Here I was, 23 years old, a little white girl walking around a predominantly black neighborhood, and being treated so beautifully. As I write in Democracy’s Edge, there was a woman there who died while I was working with her, named Lily. I became aware for the first time that she had really died of poverty, not of a heart attack as officially listed.

AV: What did you do next?

FML: I felt that I had to get to the roots of Lily’s death, which led me to enroll in a graduate program for social work at UC-Berkeley. I was still trying to figure out what “social work” meant, but it led directly to the research at the Berkeley libraries that enabled me to write Diet for a Small Planet. I was a desperate young woman trying to make sense of the world, but I had the intuition that food could be the way in. I eventually discovered that scarcity of food…hunger…was a kind of myth that was more complex than we ever imagined.

AV: You write that you had to “let go” of your past work with food as you’ve moved towards writing Democracy’s Edge. Are food systems still a framework for what you do?

FML: I started feeling constrained by focusing on food, although I’m so very proud to see Food First continuing on its mission. I feel like I have to go beneath all the individual issues and figure out that underneath hunger is the same crisis that’s destroying our environment. I wanted to find out the causal patterns of how decisions are made, and what are the assumptions we make about the problem-solving mechanism we call democracy. What about it limits us?

Still, I think food will always be an important wake-up call for many people. Now I see so many of us are having that “aha” moment I went through in the early ’70s, but at a whole new level in terms of how we relate to what we eat. I feel like everything I wrote about is coming around again in this spiral of worsening truths.

AV: How so?

FML: Well, now we have to deal with global heating. The word “warming” is too benign. That clearly wasn’t on my radar in 1971, how our food systems are contributing to it and to undermining our water supply…80 percent of our fresh water is used for agriculture.

AV: This leads me to ask you about society’s sense of powerlessness, which you mention in You Have the Power and Democracy’s Edge. Using the recent e. coli outbreak in our spinach crop as an example, how can individuals go about improving our food systems, or more broadly, the way our society even functions?

FML: I’ve come to believe we’re rapidly heading in two directions at once: one disastrous and one extremely hopeful. When I was working on the first book at age 26, I never thought that we could go in both good and bad directions simultaneously, in terms of damaging our ecosystems and silencing people’s individual voices. Now that I’m considered an elder in this movement, I’ve come to realize that this duality is possible.

The spinach contamination from livestock farm runoff is an example of where we as individuals must look at the questions beneath what is happening, to question why this occurred in California in the first place, and then come to a solution by asking why our government wasn’t prepared to regulate our food system to prevent it, leaving only voluntary recalls as our “course of action.”

Alternative methods do exist in everything—politics, agriculture, ecology, education—and I’ve seen so many people working together to create this living democracy, but we also need to be individually courageous to find solutions that take money out of the equation and put people first.

AV: In Democracy’s Edge you also discuss “thin democracy” as the current reality, and “living democracy” as the goal for a sustainable society.

FML: Yes. Basing our society solely on a market economy and so-called democratic elections is what I call thin democracy, and inevitably it leads to a concentration of power. Living democracy is where individuals work collectively towards political and economic equality, where everyone has a say in what happens. What I wanted to do in all three of the books is to help center us in a world where we can’t deny how bad things are, to give real examples of how people are moving towards a positive future.

AV: Are you standing along any other “edges” right now?

FML: (Laughs) At the moment, no, although I had a fantasy of getting back the rights to You Have the Power and renaming it Fear’s Edge, because that’s really what the book is about: in all the metaphoric meanings of using fear to help us, to give us an edge, and not letting it stop us.

“World on Your Plate III” is a free, all-day forum open to the public. Tickets to Lappé’s speech and luncheon are $20; for reservations, call the WNY Peace Center at 894-8705 or Food for All, 882-7705. For a video clip from Lappé’s speaking tour, visit www.democracysedge.org.