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

didn’t feel prepared, perhaps I could become prepared. All these thoughts went through my mind. But no decision.
    After the evening program on the last night of the retreat, a film was shown. On the screen before us were people actually dying of starvation in the Ethiopian famine. I had never seen anything like this before: babies sucking futilely at shriveled breasts; desperate mothers. The narrative told how the corrupt government of Haile Selassie had created this horror.
    The decision to write Food First came as I watched this film. It was an emotional decision. Intellectually I had decided I wasn’t ready and that my responsibility to my family wouldn’t allow it, but emotionally I felt there was no choice. I had to do what I could do, no matter how impossible it seemed. I called Joe in Washington at midnight and said I would write the book with him if he could move to New York.
    Within three weeks Joe had moved to New York. Within six weeks we had a contract with Ballantine.
    When Joe and I started to work, I was terrified. Here he was, the most worldly man I had ever known—fluent in six languages and a world traveler since the age of thirteen. He had gone through a demanding Jesuit education; in my twelfth-grade social studies class we had made popsicle-stick models of historical events. I was sure that I would be so intimidated that even before we agreed on the book’s outline I’d be a humiliated heap of tears. How could my skills measure up to his?
    Well, I was amazed.
    Joe treated me as a total intellectual equal. It turned out that rather than being unequal, our skills were—and are—miraculously complementary. Joe is a maniac for detail. He will leave no stone unturned in his research. He’s also got a lot of chutzpah, so whatever information we need, Joe can figure out some way to get it. Me, I’m a maniac about organization and deadlines.
    So it worked. Instinctively we knew we didn’t have to compete. Each of our contributions was essential and appreciated by the other. (No one believes this, but I swear it is true: in writing all 412 pages of Food First , Joe and I never disagreed over a single word. We edited and reedited each other’s material, but we both knew when we hit just the right phrasing.)
    In the next year and a half everything in my life—except my relationship with my children—changed. Instead of just writing a book, Joe and I soon decided to use our advance payment for Food First to establish an organization to fill a critical gap. We named it the Institute for Food and Development Policy.
    We were aware of the growing number of people asking, why hunger? What can I do? By 1975, when we met, every major church body had established a commission or task force on world hunger. Campus action groups were springing up. In courses ranging from nutrition to geography to world politics, students and professors were asking, what are the causes of and solutions to world hunger?
    In addition, a new wave of food co-ops had emerged. Learning from their predecessors (which had begun in the 1930s), these initiatives were democratically managed with the goal of providing quality “whole” foods at lower cost than the supermarket. These co-ops were aware of the larger, political implications of the diet they were promoting and the service they were providing.
    These initiatives were not centrally coordinated but represented an embryonic movement. Many people, working on many different projects related to food and farming, were becoming aware of and taking encouragement from one another.
    What was missing was an independent research and education center to provide ongoing analysis of the roots of needless hunger to these varied projects. This was the gap we set out to fill. At the time, information and analysis came overwhelmingly from agencies funded by corporations, governments, or churches. Each of these sources, we felt, had a vested interest in maintaining the “hunger myths”—the first