Liberal Arts Sympsium
Frances Moore Lappé at the Berklee College of Music (2008)
by Victor Wallis
The keynote speaker for this year’s annual Liberal Arts Symposium (Berklee’s 14th ) was Frances Moore Lappé. Lappé is a longtime social activist whose principal focus has been the issue of world hunger. Her Berklee topic, evoking one of her recent book-titles, was “Getting a Grip: Creativity and Courage in a World Gone Mad.”
Before she spoke, we heard several original songs inspired by struggles for social justice. First came the trio of Mark Simos, Keppie Coutts and Lisa Forkish (faculty, alumna, and current student, respectively), whose lyrics gave artistic expression to the feelings provoked by ongoing outrages - racism, torture, climate catastrophe - which so many of us are otherwise soothed into ignoring. Then came Bob Bradshaw with his prizewinning song, written especially for this occasion, voicing with a mix of grit and humor Lappé’s urgent admonition to “get a grip.”
Lappé herself was introduced by Berklee President Roger Brown, who recalled his intense reading - years ago in East Africa - of her classic work, Diet for a Small Planet , in which she called worldwide attention to the enormous waste of agricultural resources arising from over-reliance on meat-consumption.
Lappé’s Symposium appearance coincided with a sudden spike in starvation in a number of poor countries, following upon a dramatic increase in the price of basic foods. People’s vulnerability to the world market has been a theme of Lappé’s analysis for many years. Free trade policies imposed by powerful commercial interests have largely destroyed subsistence farming, driving rural producers into vast cities, where, living hand-to-mouth, they have no protection against exorbitant prices.
This process, as Lappé has shown, reflects a multiplicity of market-based decisions in which the power of concentrated wealth weighs more heavily than do the nutritional requirements of the world’s population. This has long been exemplified in the export of agricultural products from countries where people are starving. Now the effect has been aggravated as rising oil prices have swollen the cost of factory farming and as more and more agricultural land has been taken out of food production altogether, in favor of producing biofuels.
In her Berklee talk, Lappé called on the audience to challenge a number of widespread assumptions. Just as the impact of the market is not necessarily beneficial, so the impact of government is not necessarily harmful. Power has negative effects only to the extent that it remains concentrated. If democracy is taken seriously - or, in her own terms, if we practice “living” democracy rather than “thin” (narrowly electoral) democracy - then people can get the policies they need. What this means in practice is that the majority has to be organized.
Lappé offered numerous examples of grassroots organizing; you can read about them in her 2007 book, Getting a Grip . Most were straightforward local actions in response to immediately felt community needs - like consumer cooperatives, farmers’ markets, etc. Insofar as policies at a broader level came into focus, her key emphasis was on the importance of steps - some of which have been implemented at the state-level - to reduce the role of money in politics.
All such activity requires, at the same time, an in-depth understanding of the issues. Lappé has contributed to this in her major systematic (co-authored) writings: Food First (1978), which offers a panoramic yet reader-friendly introduction to the global economy, and World Hunger: Twelve Myths (2nd ed., 1998), which shows how the problem of hunger is above all a problem of power, reflecting insufficient control by poor people over their own surroundings.
Cutting across all such analyses and recommendations, however, Lappé’s message to the Berklee community was above all psychological and inspirational. She projected - as much in her manner as in the examples she gave - a certain optimism which both reinforced and drew strength from the creative spirit animating the Symposium. One of her major targets, after all, is the pervasive fear which strips many potential citizens of their capacity to act. Overcoming such fear is a multi-faceted process challenging all our talents.
Victor Wallis is a professor in the Liberal Arts department.
Click to see Frances Moore Lappé’s website
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