Free Hope's Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet by Frances Moore Lappé; Anna Lappé

I learned one important rule, useful to everyone in public life—never listen to the questioner, just say what you believe needs to be said!
    Rubbing Elbows with the “Experts”
    Fortunately , this period of my life came to an end in 1974. In November I attended the World Food Conference in Rome, that much-heralded meeting of government and corporate leaders to design a blueprint to overcome the problem of world hunger. Every major newspaper carried a front-page series on this conference, at which Henry Kissinger announced that in ten years no child would go to bed hungry.
    I had gone to Rome at the urging of friends and because I wanted to rub elbows with people who I thought knew a lot more about the problems than I. By now I had two very young children, but I had continued to read and write articles as well as speak and appear on TV. Still, I did not think of myself as especially knowledgeable, certainly not in comparison to the experts gathered in Rome.
    Rome was a major shock. People were asking me for my opinion. Microphones turned my way. I was asked to appear on a panel of experts. That was pretty startling in itself, but listening to the experts was more shocking still: I discovered that the officials to whom I looked for the answers were still locked into the false diagnoses, and therefore false cures, that I had discarded through my independent study, modest as it was.
    This was the second stage in the growing realization which has since formed the basis of my work. I slowly realized that those who have been schooled to direct the powerful institutions which control our economic system are forced to accept and to work within the system that creates needless hunger. Beneficiaries of these institutions, they have been made incapable of seeing outside their boundaries. Rather than preparing them to find solutions, their training has inhibited them from asking questions that could lead to solutions. Those supposed authorities who gathered in Rome in 1974 were still promoting the belief that greater production would solve the problem of hunger, but I had come to see that you could have tremendous production—indeed, I lived in the country with the greatest food abundance in history—and yet still have hunger and malnutrition.
    I left Rome feeling I had shed critical layers of self-doubt. I saw more clearly than ever that the real problems in our world—the widespread needless deprivation—will never be solved by the government leaders now in power in most nations. So who will solve them? And how can they be solved? I finally realized that the gravest problems facing our planet today can be solved only as part of an overall movement toward a more just sharing of economic and political power, not as separate technical problems. Thus, the solutions will come only when ordinary people, like me and like you, decide to take responsibility for changing the economic order.
    In other words, the only way that power will come to be more democratically shared is if you and I take more of it ourselves. If this is true, then the challenge to each of us becomes clear: we must make ourselves capable of shouldering that responsibility.
    If I really believed this, then what I had to do was clear: I had to take my own work much more seriously. I had to refuse to be dismissed simply as a “cookbook” writer. I had to apply myself with greater diligence than ever in my life.
    Finally the veil lifted. I remember feeling like “superwoman” when I returned home that November of 1974. Anything seemed possible. I vowed to completely revise the first edition of Diet for a Small Planet and make its political message much clearer. I marched in to talk with the president of Ballantine (the new president, since the Ballantines had sold the company) and presented him with a list of demands concerning the book, its publication date, and its promotion. He agreed to everything.
    I completed the revisions in three months, while taking care of