Closing Forum: Anna Lappé’s Speech

posted by brooklynfoodconference, on May 21, 2009

It’s so fabulous and so inspiring to be here. As all my friends in the audience know, I tend to get very nervous before I give talks. I don’t know whether it’s the pregnancy hormones or just that I feel that we’re all family and such a community spirit here—I can’t say I don’t feel nervous at all—but I don’t feel as nervous as I usually do!

I want to share a few closing thoughts.

As Nancy said, before I could walk I was probably stuffing envelopes for my mother’s fundraising drives for her nonprofit, the Institute for Food and Development Policy/Food First, so I definitely was brought up in a family and community that talked a lot about food. But when I found out last October that I was pregnant, all these thoughts about food became really personal. I went to all the pregnancy books. I wanted to hear what they had to say about how my body would change, what would be happening to the baby as the baby grew. I was curious to see what they said about food.

If any of you have ever read pregnancy books, they all tend to say the same things about diet. Basically a bunch of No’s: like don’t eat certain fish because of high levels of mercury. Don’t eat deli meats, if you’re going to eat meat, because of potential food-borne illnesses. Some mentioned the importance of seeking out organic food.

But in all the books, all the conversation about food was totally framed around what I as a pregnant woman should do as an individual. They’re very specific about this. What was noticeably missing from every single one of these books was outrage. Why was it that I as an individual have to find the fish that is mercury-free? Shouldn’t we be asking: Why is there mercury in our fish? How does that simple fact connect to everything from climate change and coal-fired power plants to a whole set of choices in our society that are leading to high levels of mercury accumulating in the fish we eat? Why is it that we have to worry about our meat harboring scary, even life-threatening, food-borne illnesses? Why is it that we have to seek out food that hasn’t been grown with chemicals? And what about those of us who have no choice? The mothers who read in the book, “You should be eating organic food,” and then they go to the store and can’t find a single piece of produce that hasn’t been raised with chemicals?

But even worse than the missing outrage was the total miss of connection. There were all these No’s about what I should do as an individual, but they were never connected to a food system, never linked to the broader system out there and certainly never linked to what I could do to try to improve this food system.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot today, since the morning, looking at all the workshops and thinking about all the people who participated in the workshops. Part of the power of an event like this is about making these connections so visible and so felt to all of us.

We see that this is a food system, and we’re all part of it.

This morning we heard LaDonna talk about what it’s been like for her to think about the food system in her community and how in her community it’s easier to find fried chicken, potato chips, and even an automatic weapon, than it is to find an organic tomato. That’s a failure of a system.

Raj talked about how the swine flu could also really be considered a NAFTA flu, the spread of illness connected to the push toward industrial agriculture all connected to the North American Free Trade Agreement, which affects us all. That’s a failure of a system.

For me this conference is about making all these connections visible so we can really see our strength—the strength we get when we start thinking about food and the choices we make about food in terms of a system.

Our choices are not individual acts. I do not act solely as an isolated mother on my own, though that certainly is part of it. These choices we make about food are political acts, and as poet-farmer Wendell Berry would say, these choices are agricultural acts as well. [See Berry's The Pleasures of Eating]

But it’s not just about connection to each other. It’s also about our connection to the next generation. Sustainability isn’t some abstract theoretical idea. It’s the reality of changing the food system. As Nancy said, I’m definitely part of generations of people who have been fighting this fight.

This is so no abstract idea for me. My daughter, who is now 32 weeks old inside me, has already developed her four-chambered heart and lungs, her fingers and her toes. She also has all the eggs she will ever produce in her entire life. So literally inside me are the eggs of my grandchildren, just as inside my grandmother was the seed of me.

As we head out, I think of this connection across communities and the continuity across generations that we are creating at conferences like this one and continuing in the community meetings Nancy talked about. I remember that the power to shift this food system comes not just from our interacting with it as individuals, but our interacting with it as communities. And as communities it’s our role, our responsibility, and our power to shift this food system into one that will be sustainable for us, for our kids, for our grandchildren, and for all the generations that come out of us.

About Anna Lappé
Anna Lappé is a food justice activist and co-author of the national best-selling Hope’s Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet. While writing the book, she traversed five continents with her mother and co-author Frances Moore Lappé, looking for what they call the “invisible revolution”—people creating change by reconnecting with the earth. Her latest book, Diet for a Hot Planet, out in March 2010 from Bloomsbury, will trace the connections between food and climate change and what we can do about it. Anna is a co-founder of Small Planet Institute, an international network that promotes research and popular education on the root causes of hunger and poverty and raises funds for democratic social movements worldwide. She lives in Brooklyn, is a member of the Park Slope Food Coop, and was part of the initial committee that developed the Brooklyn Food Conference.

Other Speeches So Far
Patel | Redmond | Prof. Louie | D. Jackson

—Transcribed by Paige Churchman

Photo of Anna © 2008 Bart Nagel