Small (and inspiring) Planet

When I was growing up, meat played a pretty prominent role in our diet, but occasionally, my mom would go through surges of vegetarianism, in which Lentils Monastery Style, from Diet for a Small Planet by Frances Moore Lappé, played a starring role. And now, while the majority of my parents’ meals, and mine, are vegetarian, Diet for a Small Planet-inspired lentil soup is still my mom’s top go-to recipe.  

One day last week I went into Book City, looking for the perfect book to convince a friend that if he changed his diet he would solve his sinus problems. I didn’t find it, but instead found EcoMind: Changing the Way We Think, to Create the World We Want, by Frances Moore Lappé. I bought the book (a big deal for me - I usually borrow a book from the library before taking the plunge) and took it home, and have since been enraptured by how Moore Lappé turns around so many of my environmentalist assumptions. She presents a more hopeful way of looking at both the problems and the solutions - of not just climate change, but our overall relationship with each other and the natural world.

As I left the book store that day, my mom phoned me. I mentioned to her Occupy Toronto’s need for cooked food, soup, and other things. And an hour later, she called to say that Frances Moore Lappé’s classic lentil soup was simmering on the stove, and ask where to deliver it. Now, a weekly Occupy hot food donation seems to be in the works.

And this, engaging people in the capacity that works for them, and inspiring their own spirit of resistance, is what the Occupy movement is about to me. Even more, as I and others at Occupy TO talked about last week as we worked on a food sourcing policy, it has the potential to do what Moore Lappé (and others like Rob Hopkins of the Transition Handbook and Transition movement) say we need: on the ground actions that represent real change.

That’s why it is so important that the Occupy movement be its own change – that it fully supports local, sustainable, healthy food systems; and a sustainable economy generally (e.g., no more handing out dollar-store umbrellas); that it facilitates healthy, equitable relationships among all participants. And that it supports real growth in the things that matter.

While I have been using the language of the end of growth, and I still think this is valuable, as I read Moore Lappé’s thoughtful discussion of growth, I just shifted my image of growth a few degrees - for Moore Lappé questions whether what we’ve been experiencing in the past fifty years or so has been growth at all, or rather an economy of waste and inequity – what if, as the Occupy movement calls for, we can restore genuine growth in quality of life for the 99%? What if?   

More on Frances Moore Lappé’s EcoMind coming soon – if there’s one book you read, I hope it will be this one.