admin June 24th, 2008
KUOW 94.9 FM recently put up a podcast of Frances giving a talk at the Elliott Bay Book Company (Seattle) where she explained the power of ideas asking, for example, why there could be hunger in our world of plenty. Frances boils down her ideas clearly and engagingly, always with the desire to share and learn. Listen to her talk about the ideas behind Getting a Grip here:
admin June 17th, 2008
It’s been quite a month for Frances. If you’ve been following this blog, then you know she won the James Beard Foundation’s Humanitarian of the Year Award, and has a done a good deal of high-profile and wonderful indy press. In addition, her latest book, Getting a Grip, has been named the winner of the Gold/”Best in Small Press” Nautilus Award this year.
Frances shares the honor with some fine company. You’ll find a list of the other honorees here.
And to see more of the recent coverage of Frances, Getting a Grip, and her ongoing work as an author, food and world-hunger expert, and “Living Democracy” advocate, just scroll down — and keep coming back.
admin June 10th, 2008
When Frances Moore Lappé has a question about something she does her research, reaches out, and asks away.
Recently she did just that, writing directly to Robert B. Reich, in response to her read of his 2007 book, Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life. Reich wrote back at length, clearly glad to engage in the back-and-forth. Below is the seventh installment of their correspondence. Keep checking back for future installments and please: share your thoughts by leaving a comment!
RR: To explain is not to justify. Research shows that consumers prefer products that are the “best deals” in terms of cost and quality; they will not pay more for “socially responsible” products.* I wish that were not the case. I wish investors cared as much about the environment or social justice as they do about high returns. And so on. Again, my argument is not at all a justification. It seeks to explain why we are at this point in history. The good news is that we also have civic values — we are also citizens, in the sense that we care about the quality of our lives together. That we don’t express these values in our purchases and investments doesn’t mean they don’t exist. They are most easily and readily expressed through collective action — through democratic deliberation. But here, again, the central problem is the withering of our democratic institutions.
* Post-script note from
Fair trade and other ethical shopping and investing is, at 29 billion pounds a year, bigger than alcohol sales.
admin June 9th, 2008
When Frances Moore Lappé has a question about something she does her research, reaches out, and asks away.
Recently she did just that, writing directly to Robert B. Reich, in response to her read of his 2007 book, Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life. Reich wrote back at length, clearly glad to engage in the back-and-forth. Below is the sixth installment of their correspondence. Keep checking back for future installments and please: share your thoughts by leaving a comment!
6. FML: You state that “the purpose of capitalism is to get great deals for consumers and investors.” (224) Why do you exclude from the purpose of our economic system the interests of earners and producers and the maintenance of the “natural capital” on which the entire economy depends? Surely, an economic system must be judged, minimally, on how it serves humanity in all these roles as well as how it protects the source of much of our wealth—the natural resources used in production. Your limiting the purpose of capitalism to only two goals contributes to the limited thinking at the root of our planetary crisis.
RR: I limit the purpose of capitalism to getting great deals for consumers and investors in order to give appropriate place to the purpose of democracy. Capitalism alone cannot and will not serve our broader needs.
admin June 5th, 2008
When Frances Moore Lappé has a question about something she does her research, reaches out, and asks away.
Recently she did just that, writing directly to Robert B. Reich, in response to her read of his 2007 book, Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life. Reich wrote back at length, clearly glad to engage in the back-and-forth. Below is the fifth installment of their correspondence. Keep checking back for future installments and please: share your thoughts by leaving a comment!
5. FML: Throughout your book, you repeat that as consumers we now have more choice. Actually, we have less choice in many ways. In food, roughly ten corporations bring us about half the 30,000 items in a typical supermarket. Yet the choice relatively few consumers now have is healthy food, produced fairly, at affordable prices. Tens of millions of Americans live in poor neighborhoods where virtually no fresh food is to be found. Certainly choice means capacity to choose safety: Yet with untested chemicals used in most of our processed food and cosmetics and household cleaning agents etc., we do not have that choice. Last week The New York Times reported that 80 percent of ingredients in our pharmaceuticals are imported, with virtually no safety testing. Choice means little without information on which to base our selections. Yet, while 40 or more countries require labeling of food containing genetically modified organisms, such labeling has been blocked by industry here.
Certainly in all our other many roles, Americans feel choices shrinking: farmers lose the choice of staying in business. Young people lose the choice of going to college without being burdened in debt for decades. Almost 50 million feel they have no choice of affordable health insurance. And more.
RR: I don’t claim (heavens!) that the choices we make are well-informed as to safety, health, or social consequences. Quite the contrary. In chapter three, for example, I show how our choices in food may satisfy us superficially but have terrible consequences for our health. Informed choice depends on adequate labeling, safety inspections, health care, and many other “social” choices we’re unable to make because our private consumer choices trump those important social decisions.
admin June 2nd, 2008
In this new piece from the New York Times‘ Sunday Book Review, Frances’s first book Diet for a Small Planet, and her latest, Getting a Grip, have been recommended (by Michael Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver, no less) as must-reads for the next US president.
Writing about Diet (as well as of Wendell Berry’s Unsettling of America, Pollan writes: “In Diet for a Small Planet, Frances Moore Lappé shone a light on the wastefulness and environmental costs of meat-eating, predicting that humanity’s growing appetite for meat would lead to hunger for the world’s poor. Together these two visionary writers — who fell out of favor during the cheap-food and cheap-energy years that began in the ’80s and are just now coming to a calamitous close — still have much to say about the way out of our current predicament.”
About Getting a Grip, Kingsolver writes: “Forget the personality claptrap: our next president will need to know how to restructure the carbon-based economy, pronto. I assume all the candidates have read An Inconvenient Truth, by Al Gore, so they understand that anything they promise will have to be delivered without cheap fossil fuels. For further reading, Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy and Frances Moore Lappé’s Getting a Grip offer new definitions of progress and economy with an eye toward the human aptitudes for resourcefulness and community.”
admin June 1st, 2008
When Frances Moore Lappé has a question about something she does her research, reaches out, and asks away.
Recently she did just that, writing directly to Robert B. Reich, in response to her read of his 2007 book, Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life. Reich wrote back at length, clearly glad to engage in the back-and-forth. Below is the fourth installment of their correspondence. Keep checking back for future installments and please: share your thoughts by leaving a comment!
4. FML: On page 50 and following you imply inexorable economic forces have undermined the democratic aspects of capitalism, giving corporations “no choice” but to behave in a narrowly self-interested survival mode. Why do you give no weight to the cultural factors (the relentless drip-drip-drip of right wing anti-government propaganda) and specific political forces? Examples: Allowing the minimum wage to lose value or NLRB rulings favoring business over unions, or subsidies of over one hundred billion dollars annually from federal, state and local governments to lure and retain corporate giants (squeezing out independents), to name a few of these non-exorable factors.
RR: To my mind, cultural and political factors have been overestimated in explaining what’s happened. Right-wing propaganda increased after Reagan entered the White House, but the trends I note started in the early 1970s, before the right became dominant. Moreover, right-wing propaganda about the economy has been a staple of American life since the 1920s. I don’t believe for a moment that technological and economic factors explain it all, but I believe we (that is, we on the left) have paid too little attention to them.
"Getting a Grip is not an ordinary book: it's more like a new pair of glasses, allowing you to see everything around you with greater clarity. Suddenly the world is more comprehensible, more manageable, even more beautiful. You won't want to take them off." --Barbara Kingsolver More Praise
