Frances Moore Lappe

Frances Moore Lappé is best known for her 1971 book Diet for a Small Planet, which became the bible for environmental activists and put many on the road to vegetarianism. In this book Lappé said that a person can be healthy without eating meat, that Planet Earth and the poor were paying a high price for the raising of domestic animals whose meat was consumed by the relatively rich. Forests were being cut down to graze cattle or to raise grain for animal food; animal waste was polluting waterways; and the poor were being forced to raise single crops for export rather than multiple crops for themselves. The book raised awareness of how the food choices we make every day have effects across the globe. Its revised version is still in print today.

In 2001 Frances Moore Lappé and her daughter Anna Lappé created the Small Planet Fund for the purpose of creating grassroots solutions to issues of hunger, poverty, and environmental destruction. Throughout her writing career Frances Lappé has maintained that world hunger is the result, not of food shortages, but of the way we think about food. She uses the phrase ‘thin democracy’ to describe our way of voting for politicians who, once elected, create inefficient unjust corporate-friendly food systems. That contrasts with ‘living democracy’ in which each of us becomes aware of how and where food is produced and making conscious choices that contribute to the welfare of people and the planet.

On Tuesday, May 22, these ideas will be presented at a Constructing Hope workshop at the Best Western Ramkota Hotel, 2111 North Lacross in Rapid City. The workshop is open to all who wish to gain a better understanding of their relationship with food. It will be from 9:00 am to 1:00 pm.

For more information contact Shirley@midco.net or Linda Edel at wsdcap@rapidcity.com.

Heart disease patient in intensive care unit

When I was a kid, polio was the scariest disease. A lot of children got it, and those who survived—after time spent in an iron lung–were often paralyzed for life. No one knew how it was transmitted (the local swimming pool?) and there was no cure. My friend Ben spent much of his life sitting in a wheelchair watching the rest of us play.

There were other diseases as well—chicken pox, scarlet fever, mumps, TB, whooping cough, the German measles, and the ‘red’ measles. We all experienced some of them and luckily survived. Then antibiotics came along and were successful in curing the bacterial diseases and immunizations were developed for the viral diseases. So for many Americans these diseases have been brought under control.

Now we have a whole new set of feared diseases: diabetes, obesity, hypertension, cancer, heart disease, autism, insulin resistance, allergies, Alzheimer’s, asthma, atherosclerosis, liver disease, COPD (formerly emphysema), gluten intolerance, Crohn’s disease, osteoporosis, stroke, depression, drug addiction—the list goes on. These are known as the ‘diseases of civilization’ because they are caused not by bacteria or viruses but by the tens of thousands of man-made chemicals we’re exposed to, by the highly processed food we consume, by our sedentary lifestyles, by our use of drugs legal and illegal, and by the stresses of living in a man-made world where we compete for resources, status, and power.

Our genetic inheritance sets us up for these diseases. We are genetically programmed to like meat, fat, and sweet foods. During our evolutionary history meat and fat gave us the calories we needed to survive, and fruit was a ‘safe’ food without the toxins found in most plant leaves, roots, and seeds. And our taste buds haven’t changed. But the availability and processing of food has.

Today the cheapest, tastiest, most addictive foods are made from sugar, fat, grains, chemicals, and salt, and we eat a lot of them. Way too much. We’re programmed to do that. Our ancestors ate a lot of food when it was available and lived off their own fat when times were tough. Fat storage was a survival strategy. But for those surrounded by food year round, that is no longer the case.

We are also programmed to save energy. This, again, goes back to the times when food was in short supply. So today we’d rather watch TV than clean the bathroom, weed the garden, or fix the roof. We love our cars and trucks and airplanes and can get where we want to go with minimum physical effort.

To reverse our trending towards these lifestyle diseases is not easy. We are working against our evolutionary heritage, the abundance of affordable food available to us everywhere we go, and all the ‘labor saving’ devices that allow us to sit most of the day.

But we do have tools that work in our favor. We are attracted to bright colors, to a variety of fresh foods, and to fruit. At local farmers markets we can choose the beautifully shaped colorful veggies and fruits that keep us healthy and are a pleasure to consume. Information on those markets will be coming soon.

Many of the fresh fruits and vegetables grown in the United States are planted, tended, and picked by foreign-born workers who are paid low wages, may receive harsh treatment, and suffer from diseases (and their children from birth defects) caused by exposure to pesticides. Most of these workers, also known as migrant workers, seasonal farmworkers, or illegal aliens, are Spanish speaking and come from Mexico.

I got interested in this subject when I moved to southern Arizona in 1996. I soon realized that white-skinned people live the good life there because brown-skinned people were doing the worst jobs for low pay: washing dishes, cleaning hotel rooms, mowing golf courses, repairing roads and painting roofs in 120 degree heat, and bending over all day long picking our fruits and vegetables.

I saw the small planes delivering the pesticides. I saw the workers waiting along Chandler Boulevard for the bus that would take them to the pesticide-laden fields. I’ve watched hundreds of young men crossing the border in groups of 5 to 25, each one dressed in dark-colored pants and a dark-colored hoodie (when the temperature was 110), often traveling at night so they’d be invisible to the border patrol planes flying overhead. I was followed more than once by border agents who thought I might be breaking the law by helping the new arrivals. I’ve seen workers taking a 30-minute noon nap under a pickup truck in July so they can keep on working till the sun goes down. I’ve seen the overloaded old pickup trucks on I-10 taking Mexican families and all their possessions from the California or Arizona fields to those in Texas. I’ve seen the fields in Mexico once inhabited by Yaqui farm families now owned by American corporations producing food for Americans.

These field workers are not just in the Southwest. They are in every state, even South Dakota. Many are here illegally, and for that reason they cannot complain about their treatment. Maybe they don’t know about the pesticides. What they do know is that their families back in Mexico or Guatemala are poor and need the money they can make working long hours doing work that Americans won’t do.

Gabriel Thompson, a young American writer, picked lettuce in Yuma Arizona and wrote about it in his book “Working in the Shadows.” In an interview about the book he said, “…I never saw another white person in the fields.” He went on to say, “…there’s a huge movement around food right now. I think that movement, looking at where the food comes from, whether or not it’s grown organically, hasn’t quite yet looked enough at who are the workers within that food system, in what ways can we make their lives better…” You can read the whole interview here.

Another book about life in the vegetable fields is “Tomatoland,” which Tonya reviewed for DLFN.

Here’s Tonya’s thought: “I often hear that illegal workers take away jobs from US citizens. The thinking goes that if all the illegal immigrants were to leave, farmers would pay a higher wage to citizens to pick their crops. After pondering this some more, I would hazard a guess that most farmers are operating within a very tight budget in order to make any profit. I don’t see how many farmers, especially small ones, would be able to pay higher wages and survive.”

Tonya recommends a Mother Jones article about what happens when states make life so difficult or threatening for undocumented workers that they leave the US and are not replaced by American citizen-workers. An agriculture lobbyist made this comment: “Not only do we lack citizens who are physically capable of doing this work, we lack the skill.”

There are no easy solutions. The problem of the mistreatment of workers can partially be solved by each of us learning where our food comes from and the conditions under which it was produced. Each time we make a food purchase we are voting for or against abuse. The cheaper the food, the more likely the abuse–of animals, of workers, of the environment. Big Ag makes billions off the backs of workers. They won’t change the system on their own. But we the people, if we really care, can make that change happen. We can support the farmers close to home and be willing to pay them what they deserve for producing what we all need–fresh high quality food—without abuse.

Tonya and Shirley, both concerned about the mistreatment of field laborers in the US, worked on this article together.

In case you didn’t know, the Food Revolution is in progress. Around the globe farmers and consumers are resisting the corporate takeover of our food supply by growing, distributing, selling, and preparing local food in sustainable ways. To learn more about this revolution, join the Food Revolution Online Summit that starts April 28 and runs through May 6. Details are here.

We are impressed by the speakers: Bill McKibben, Vendana Shiva, Frances Moore-Lappe, Dr. Joseph Mercola, Dr. Dean Ornish, Raj Patel, Jeffrey Smith, and Dennis Kucinich, among others.

Organizer John Robbins tells why he, along with his son Ocean, created the summit: (1) the current industrialized food system is not working, (2) most doctors don’t know much about nutrition, and there’s a lot of inaccurate information out there, (3) people are demanding change and want to work together to make that happen, (4) people are concerned about their health and that of their children, (5) animal abuse in the system is ongoing, (6) genetically engineered food is a big concern, and (7) the health of the planet is vital to our survival.

While the online summit is free to all, you can order the “Empowerment Package” for $97. The ‘free gifts’ that are part of the package are listed on the website. We at DLFN wanted to know how the money will be used and put that question to Ocean. Here’s what he said:

“Our model is to make the Summit available for free, so we can reach lots of folks, but also to have an extra item for sale, so we can hopefully cover costs for the Summit. The free gifts and the transcripts and recordings are all electronic, so there’s no per unit cost for the empowerment package, but lots of costs (and time!) involved in setting this all up, as you can imagine.

“Most of our outreach is done by affiliates who in turn receive 40% or 50% of any revenues from sales they help generate. Then there’s paying the costs of website design and development, infrastructure, list management, call hosting, organizing staff time, etc.  If there’s anything extra, then I get compensated for my 6 months of organizing time — which would be lovely. We aren’t in it for the money, but of course it helps if we can be sustained doing good work.”

So there it is. We hope you enjoy all this information from reliable sources and are inspired to carry on the work of the revolution in your own community, at the farmers market, and in your own back yard.

What is ‘fair food,’ you might ask? Well, it’s food that’s sold at a high enough price that the field workers and factory workers get a living wage.  We might like the food prices we have in this country, but they come at a cost.

One of those costs is animal abuse—pigs and chickens confined to cages, milk cows confined to big barns, beef cows confined to feedlots, all of them fed grain, not their natural food.

Another cost is the processing some foods undergo in order to taste good enough that we will buy and eat them and come back for more. Breakfast cereals, bread, crackers, Cheetos—all have chemicals added so they taste like more than ground-up grain, which is what they are. The milling process turns grains into high-glycemic-index foods—they digest quickly and can put too much carbohydrate into the bloodstream, leading to obesity, insulin resistance, diabetes, and other diseases of civilization.

And then there’s the human cost—low-income people picking tomatoes in pesticide-laden fields or working the fast-moving assembly lines in meat processing plants. These non-union workers are usually afraid to complain about unsafe working conditions for fear of losing their jobs. But one group went on strike anyway.

In early March sixty farm workers, supported by other community members, went on a hunger fast in Lakeland, Florida, asking for a slight rise in tomato prices so they could have better working conditions and higher pay. The fast lasted six days. Ethel Kennedy showed up.

As of this writing, the targeted supermarket Publix had not given in, despite high profits. While the fast failed to produce the hoped-for results, you and I can refuse to support the industrial ag system by not buying winter tomatoes and waiting for the local farmers market tomatoes to arrive. Our local farmers usually pick their tomatoes themselves—or give the job to a family member, and they charge a price that helps them make a living. Our food choices make a difference!

For more on the Florida tomato story, read Tonya’s “Tomatoland” book review here.