Frances Moore Lappé

Frances Moore Lappé (born February 10, 1944) is an American researcher and author in the area of food and democracy policy. She authorizes 19 books, including the three-million-copy-selling 1971 book Diet for a Small Planet, which the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History describes as "one of the most influential political tracts of the times." She has co-founded three organizations that explore the roots of hunger, poverty, and environmental crises and 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."

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 the University of California at Berkeley for graduate studies in social work.

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 access 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 artificial scarcity of the essentials for sustainable living.

Lappé argues that what she calls "living democracy," i.e., democracy understood as a way of life, is not merely a structure of government. The three conditions essential for democracy, she writes in Daring Democracy and elsewhere, is 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 what we do in the voting booth and 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 nine-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. 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-founded 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 is 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.