page_title: Frances Moore Lappé
section_title: Biography
hierarchical_section_title: Frances Moore Lappé / Biography
caption_attribution_description: English: Frances Moore Lappé receiving the 2008 Humanitarian Award from the James Beard Foundation
context_page_description: Frances Moore Lappé is an American researcher and author in the area of food and democracy policy. She is the author of 19 books including the three-million-copy selling, 1971 Diet for a Small Planet that the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History describes as “one of the most influential political tracts of the times." She is the co-founder of three national organizations that explore the roots of hunger, poverty and environmental crises, as well as solutions now emerging worldwide through what she calls Living Democracy. Her most recent books include Daring Democracy: Igniting Power, Meaning, and Connection for the America We Want, coauthored with Adam Eichen, and World Hunger: 10 Myths. with Joseph Collins. In 1987, she was awarded the Right Livelihood Award for "revealing the political and economic causes of world hunger and how citizens can help to remedy them."
context_section_description: Lappé was born in 1944 in Pendleton, Oregon, to John and Ina Moore and grew up in Fort Worth, Texas. After graduating from Earlham College in 1966, she married toxicologist and environmentalist Dr. Marc Lappé in 1967. They had two children, Anthony and Anna Lappé. She briefly attended University of California at Berkeley for graduate studies in social work.
  Lappé has received 19 honorary doctorates from distinguished institutions, including the University of Michigan, Kenyon College, Allegheny College, Lewis and Clark College, Grinnell College and University of San Francisco.  In 1987 in Sweden, Lappé became the fourth American to receive the Right Livelihood Award. In 2003, she received the Rachel Carson Award from the National Nutritional Foods Association. She was selected as one of twelve living "women whose words have changed the world" by the Women's National Book Association.
  Throughout her works Lappé has argued that world hunger is caused not by the lack of food but rather by the inability of hungry people to gain access to the abundance of food that exists in the world and/or food-producing resources because they are simply too poor.  She has posited that our current "thin democracy"  creates a mal-distribution of power and resources that inevitably creates waste and an artificial scarcity of the essentials for sustainable living.
  Lappé makes the argument that what she calls "living democracy," i.e. democracy understood as a way of life, not merely a structure of government. The three conditions essential for democracy, she writes in Daring Democracy and elsewhere, are the wide dispersion of power, transparency, and a culture of mutual accountability, not blaming. These three conditions enable humans to experience a sense of agency, meaning, and connection, which she describes as the essence of human dignity. Democracy is not only what we do in the voting booth but involves our daily choices of what we buy and how we live. She believes that only by "living democracy" can we effectively solve today's social and environmental crisis.
  Lappé began her writing career early in life. She first gained prominence in the early 1970s with the publication of her book Diet for a Small Planet, which has sold several million copies.
  In 1975, with Joseph Collins, she launched the California-based Institute for Food and Development Policy (Food First) to educate Americans about the causes of world hunger.  In 1990, Lappé co-founded the Center for Living Democracy, a 9-year initiative to accelerate the spread of democratic innovations in which regular citizens contribute to problem-solving. She served as founding editor of the Center's American News Service (1995–2000), which placed stories of citizen problem-solving in nearly half the nation's largest newspapers.
  Frances Moore Lappé's works have been translated into 15 languages, the most recent of which is a Chinese publication of Hope’s Edge.
  In 2002, Lappé and her daughter Anna established the Small Planet Institute  based in Cambridge, Massachusetts a collaborative network for research and popular education to bring democracy to life. With her daughter, she traveled the world and wrote Hope's Edge.The two also co-founder of the Small Planet Fund, channeling resources to democratic social movements worldwide.
  In 2006 she was chosen as a founding councilor of the Hamburg-based World Future Council. She is also a member of the International Commission on the Future of Food and Agriculture and the National Advisory Board of the Union of Concerned Scientists. She serves as an advisor to the Calgary Centre for Global Community and on the board of David Korten’s People-Centered Development Forum. In 2009 she joined the advisory board of Corporate Accountability International's Value the Meal campaign. 
  Lappé is a Contributing Editor to YES! Magazine. Her articles and opinion pieces have appeared in publications as diverse as The New York Times, O Magazine, and Christian Century. Her television and radio appearances have included a PBS special with Bill Moyers, the Today Show, CBS 
caption: Lappé receiving the 2008 James Beard Foundation Humanitarian of the Year Award
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