THE POLITICS OF FOOD
by Roxanne Claire
I was first drawn to reading Frances Moore Lappe's Diet for a Small Planet several years ago by a growing interest in nutrition. What 1 came away with, however, was my first
notion (later to be broadened and deepened through working at ISIS) of the political nature of food. And Frances Moore Lappe in the recently released, tenth anniversary edition of Diet makes it clear: this book is about power.
Lappe's original work on food issues grew out of her horror at the widespread — and, as she discovered, needless - hunger in the world. Diet was written out of her conviction that "food experts" were asking the wrong questions. Emphasis on greater production, says Lappe, is not an answer. Needless hunger is based not on simple
physical limits of the Earth, but on the economic and political forces which determine what is planted and who eats it.
Food production, she stresses, is an international system and one which produces "food for profit, not according to need". For certain people in the world, this means that food becomes prohibitively expensive. For others, the food they eat is riddled with pesticides or carcinogenic additives. It also means that as the food industry becomes concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer multinational corporations, these companies gain poUtical power — power which they are demonstratedly not hesitant to use. Lappe cites as one example the pineapple growers' flight from Hawaii (and organised labor) to the Philippines where a circle of back scratching keeps the repressive Philippine government in power, who in turn aids in preventing the people from revolting against their exploitation.
Lappe goes oil to describe our food production system as a system which not only wastes and reduces our food resources by feeding grain to animals (thereby losing the majority of the grain's protein value since it takes roughly 16 pounds of grain to produce 1 pound of meat), but destroys them by undermining the natural cycle of
renewal (through monoculture agriculture). In terms of long term security, she says, the cost of a method of food production so heavily reliant on chemical fertilizers — water costs. erosion, energy costs (all of which are presently treated as free and limitless) — is too high.
She also points out that it is a nutritional myth (and the invested interest of meat producers) that dictates heavy meat consumption — there are alternate sources of protein that are adequate, delicious, and healthier.
Diet for a Small Planet is not an explicitly feminist book. But Lappe's contentions 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" and that "solutions will come only when ordinary people, Hke me and like you,
decide to take responsibility for changing the economic order" are clearly connected to feminist principles. Thus, the politics of food — and this book — merit the serious attention of Western feminists.
(Diet is also a valuable resource book. It contains not only reading lists and addresses of support groups and groups where one can "plug in" to food issues work, but roughly onethird of the book is a cookbook whose recipes — based on (plant) protein complementarity - are actually quite good.)