Top 112 Quotes & Sayings by Frances Moore Lappé
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American author Frances Moore Lappé.
Last updated on December 21, 2024.
I read a book in the late 1990s called The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, by Erich Fromm, and it had a profound impact on me. Fromm takes Descartes' statement, "I think, therefore I am" and changes it to "I effect, therefore I am."
Freedom is not the capacity to do whatever we please; freedom is the capacity to make intelligent choices.
Breaking with the pack may be exactly what we should be doing. Saying "no" to the dominant culture that is trapping us in destructive ways of living might be the most life-serving thing we can do.
I think back to when I was growing up in Fort Worth, Texas, in the 1950s, during the [John] McCarthy era, with two parents who founded a Unitarian Church. We lived in a little frame house, and my bedroom was just down the hall from the kitchen. My favorite memories of childhood are of the smell of coffee wafting into my bedroom as my parents and their friends talked about the big, important things - about racism and about how to move our country to live its values.
The problem is that our whole tribe - if you will, the larger community of humanity itself - is on a death march ecologically and in terms of the intensification of violence and conflict.
The act of putting into your mouth what the earth has grown is perhaps your most direct interaction with the earth.
Recent breakthroughs in science show we have just the capacities we need to face our planet's challenges. We're "soft-wired" for cooperation, empathy, fairness, along with a deep need to "make a dent," as social philosopher Erich Fromm put it. My hunch is that one reason depression is a global pandemic is that the dominant mental map denies so many of us expression of these deep needs and capacities.
The real cause of hunger is the powerlessness of the poor to gain access to the resources they need to feed themselves.
I had left graduate school, determined that I wasn't going to do anything else to "save the world" until I understood how I could get at the underlying causes of deepening suffering. To do that, I had to start by admitting that I didn't know.
Democracy is not what we have. It is what we do.
When we say we have "hit the limits," we are saying that nature is the problem, when in fact the limits we have hit are the limits of destruction and waste, not nature.
Hunger is not caused by a scarcity of food but a scarcity of democracy.
I think we are at a new evolutionary stage. We evolved in tight-knit tribes in which we faced death if we didn't have the support of the rest of the tribe.
Nature is with us if we can learn how to align with it and not break the basic laws that generate life.
Science is showing us that we are even more connected to each other than we ever realized.
Despite a tenfold increase in the use of pesticides between 1947 and 1974 (in the US), crop losses due to pests have...remained at an estimated 33%. Losses due to insects alone have nearly doubled, ...from 7% in the 1942-1951 period to about 13% in 1974.
I get goose-bumps when you talk about Diane Wilson. Who knows where she found that courage? When she was a child, she would crawl under the bed when a stranger came to the house. But in 1989, she found out that her county in south Texas was ranked worst in the country for toxic waste. She wondered if the effluent, dumped into the waters where she and her family had shrimped for generations, might be responsible for the dwindling fish populations. And she suspected that her son's autism might be related to the pollution.
I think of Wangari Mathai in Kenya. If she started out saying she wanted to plant 20 million trees, she would have been laughed at. In fact, the foresters and the government did laugh at her. They said, "Villagers? Un-schooled villagers? Planting trees? No, no, no, it takes foresters." So she planted trees anyway.
Nature has an incredible capacity for regeneration and growth, but we can't experience it if we stay fearful and focused on lack.
We got hooked on grain-fed meat just as we got hooked on gas guzzling automobiles. Big cars made sense only when oil was cheap; grain-fed meat makes sense only because the true costs of producing it are not counted.
Making conscious choices about what we eat, based on what the earth can sustain and what our bodies need, can help remind us that our whole society must begin to balance sustainable production with human need.
A life-long mission has been to counter the notion that political engagement is the spinach we must eat in order to have the dessert of freedom.
Hunger is a people-made phenomenon, so the central issue is power: the power of those who make the decisions about what is grown and who, or what, it's grown for.
Hope is not what we find in evidence, it's what we become in action.
I think that fear of embarrassment is the essence of the human challenge.
Every choice we make can be a celebration of the world we want.
Imagine sitting down to an eight ounce steak, and then, imagine the room filled wit 45 to 50 people with empty bowls...For the feed cost of your steak, each of their bowls could be filled with a cup pf cooked cereal grains.
This is the first generation to know that the choices we're making have ultimate consequences. It's a time when you either choose life or you choose death ... Going along with the current order means that you're choosing death.
That's what happened when my own life crumbled. The people who came into my life bolstered me to take more risks, to be even more true to myself.
I had no identity [when I was 27] - I was terrified that somebody would ask me what I was doing, and I would have no answer.
I've grown certain that the root of all fear is that we've been forced to deny who we are.
Even the fear of death is nothing compared to the fear of not having lived authentically and fully.
In the late 1960s, there were alarming predictions that worldwide famine was around the corner. I wondered if humans had already lost the race, overrun the Earth's capacity. I let one question lead to the next, and unearthed information that would forever change my life: Not only is there enough food in the world to feed every man, woman, and child on Earth, there is enough to make us all chubby.
[O]ur greatest contributions to the cause of freedom and development overseas is not what we do over there, but what we do right here at home.
Hope is a stance, not an assessment.
I also believe that it's almost impossible for people to change alone. We need to join with others who will push us in our thinking and challenge us to do things we didn't believe ourselves capable of.
Individuality doesn't just mean individualism-standing alone. It means developing one's unique gifts, and being able to share them for the enjoyment of oneself and others.
What is different and exciting is how much we have learned. We learned we were right that we don't need the chemical model of agriculture. We know so much more about the life of soil now and we understand how plants synergistically work together with microbes and animals to create healthy conditions.
We can't see ahead of time what actions are going to be the ones that move history in dramatic ways.
Food has always been at the center of community bonding, of family life, and simple pleasure, but it is becoming more and more an obsession, a source of pain.
The good life is not about avoiding fear. Just the opposite.
We evolved to be problem-solvers, to create, to be choosers of our own future!
What we need to get right is not focusing on the fear associated with quantity - not enough, scarcity, and lack - and moving instead to a worldview that explores quality and connectedness.
I learned this [ that fear doesn't have to stop me] when my world came apart. I was living a life-long dream of a family life combined with an organization to promote living democracy - all on a gorgeous 45-acre compound in rural Vermont. I'd spent a decade building my dream, and then it started to crumble, piece by piece - my marriage, my organization, my confidence.
Our heavily meat-centered culture is at the very heart of our waste of the earth's productivity.
Every aspect of our lives is, in a sense, a vote for the kind of world we want to live in.
If we start with "limits" and a premise of scarcity and fear, it makes us fearful of each other, and that makes us vulnerable to anti-democratic systems.
We hear, "Oh, we need to patent GMOs and develop new strains and new chemicals because Nature can't provide what we need." I have to debate people all the time who say that Nature can't provide enough.
I don't rule anything out, and I couldn't underscore more the importance of what YES! is doing to show that there are people who are pushing the edge of hope, who are stepping into the unknown and taking risks, because that will then enable others to do the same.
For me hope isn't wishful thinking or blind faith about the future. It's a stance toward life - one of curiosity and humility.
How we frame the world - how we talk about it and define it - affects how we see things and how we live.
There are surprising turning points; there is the straw that breaks the camel's back, and you never know if your action could be the straw.
Many families participate in the Community Supported Agriculture movement, which allows a family to buy shares in a farmer's produce so that they know where their food is coming from, and they can take their families out and see the farm and meet the farmer. That movement has helped create a new culture around food.
Each of us carries within us a worldview, a set of assumptions about how the world works - what some call a paradigm - that forms the very questions we allow ourselves to ask, and determines our view of future possibilities.
Women can succeed in villages all over the world today without relying on heavy machinery or debt. They can take leadership roles in agriculture, eliminating hunger and inequity.
What an extraordinary time to be alive. We're the first people on our planet to have real choice: we can continue killing each other, wiping out other species, spoiling our nest. Yet on every continent a revolution in human dignity is emerging. It is re-knitting community and our ties to the earth. So we do have a choice. We can choose death; or we can choose life.
I understand, of course, that grain-fed meat is not the cause of the world hunger problem - and eating some of it doesn't directly take food out of the mouths of starving people - but it is, to me, a symbol and a symptom of the basic irrationality of a food system that's divorced from human needs. Therefore, using less meat can be an important way to take responsibility. Making conscious choices about what we eat, based on what the earth can sustain and what our bodies need, can help remind us that our whole society must begin to balance sustainable production with human need.
My path has not been smooth. But the great thing about getting to be an elder is that you can look back and see the intense times of confusion and challenge, and see that if you keep walking through them, they can lead to times of great satisfaction and reward.
The spirit that I am advocating is reframing how we view the world, and shifting from the negativity of lack and "not enough" to the positive frame of aligning with Nature.
I had the realization that hunger is not caused by scarcity of food, it is caused by the production system and an absence of democracy throughout the world.
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