By Jacqueline Manetta, Belmont Voice correspondent
When 9-year-old Frances Moore Lappé opened the front door to her Fort Worth, Texas, home in 1953, FBI agents stood on the porch. Her parents had co-founded the city’s first Unitarian Church — an integrated congregation in a segregated city.
“Growing up in that time, and knowing the power of anti-democratic government to come after people because they were just living their values, set me up to really question things,” Lappé said. “I’m very grateful to my parents.”
At 81, Lappé has spent a career questioning the systems that shape how people eat and govern themselves. Her 1971 book, “Diet for a Small Planet,” has sold more than three million copies, reframing hunger as a political problem rather than a scarcity issue. Throughout her work, she has changed the way many people think about hunger, democracy, and the environment.
As a freshman at American University in Washington, D.C., she wanted to be a diplomat and save the world by working in the U.S. Department of State. It took her about a week to realize that was a mistake.
“The State Department wasn’t about helping the rest of the world,” Lappé said. “It was about helping the U.S.”
She transferred to Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, where a course on the history of science changed her life.
“The teaching was that we don’t see the world as it is, but as we are,” Lappé said. “We all see the world through these culturally determined frames, and we literally can’t see what’s outside the frame.”
After graduating from college in 1966, Lappé was paid by the city of Philadelphia to help organize a welfare rights organization. She spent much of her time going door to door in the city’s poorest neighborhoods.
One woman she worked closely with, Lily, died of a heart attack in her 40s.
“Lily died not of poverty; she died of powerlessness, a lack of democracy.” Lappé said. “I wanted to go to the root of Lily’s death, and I had this great privilege of having time to ask, ‘Okay, what is the deeper question?’”
That’s when Lappé ended up at a graduate program in social work at the University of California, Berkeley. She left the school after one semester, but she came to realize that enough food existed in the world to feed everyone. From then on, her concern has been about who’s making decisions.
That insight led to “Diet for a Small Planet,” which urged plant-based eating as a way to improve health, reduce environmental impact and combat food insecurity.
“I always tell young people that I made a C on my first English paper in college,” Lappé said. “I only wrote my first book because I had to get answers to some questions myself.”
In 1975, Lappé co-founded the California-based Institute for Food and Development Policy, known as Food First, working to address the root causes of hunger. In 1990, she co-founded the Center for Living Democracy, a nine-year initiative dedicated to strengthening democracy by encouraging citizens to participate in solving community issues.
In 2001, Lappé and her daughter, Anna, co-founded the Small Planet Institute in Cambridge, a network focused on solutions to hunger by empowering people and communities. They also co-founded the Small Planet Fund, which distributes resources to democratic social movements across the globe.
“She always shared with me what she was learning, why she was doing the work she did and how important it is to be motivated by curiosity and compassion,” Anna Lappé said. “I have always felt called to contribute, inspired very much by my mother, my father and core family values that put a life of service and meaning at the heart of life’s purpose.”
On a typical day, Lappé and Corinna Rhum, Senior Writing Associate and Institute Manager, work at their Eliot Street office on a new book called “Hidden Hope,” which is intended to offer hope to those who feel lost. Lappé expects to finish next year.
“There’s a pretty substantial age difference between us, but she really treats me as an equal,” Rhum said. “She wants to hear every idea and explore every possibility, and really wants to work together.”
“I call myself a possibilist, not an optimist,” Lappé said. “If you put yourself out there, keep asking the question, do things that you’re uncomfortable with and make friends with people who challenge you, change is possible.”
