Through their food choices, Americans can work toward a kind of "living democracy," in which consumers can reintroduce their values into the marketplace, author Francis Moore Lappé said in a talk Sept. 20 in G10 Biotech Building on campus.

Lappé, the acclaimed author of the 1971 best seller "Diet for a Small Planet," said, "We have a national food crisis today. Every one in nine dollars spent on food goes into food-related disease treatment. Every one in three babies is going to develop diabetes in their lifetime." She asserted that "40 percent of Americans don't eat [any] whole grain whatsoever" and "food processing takes all the good stuff out of food and puts all the bad stuff into food."

Through her work with the Small Planet Institute, Lappé, who has authored or co-authored 15 books, continues to lecture and write about world hunger and the power of everyday choices. She has received 17 honorary doctorate degrees and was the 1987 recipient of the Right Livelihood Award, sometimes called the Alternative Nobel.

Lappé was on campus to kick off Cornell's Fall Harvest Celebration that included a dinner composed of 100 percent local foods and sponsored by Cornell Dining's new "Farm-to-You" program that seeks to promote locally grown produce.

She argued that what people choose to eat has far-reaching implications for supporting the system behind the choices. People who buy organic food, for example, do not necessarily act against the market economy, but they simply do not believe in the mass-market economy in which "10 big companies own most of the 35,000 brands you see in supermarkets." Organic food buyers simply act as powerful consumers who have real choices. A "living democracy" is a culture of values, she said, where people challenge the concentration of power and ubiquitous advertising and connect with local growers, emphasizing fairness and mutual accountability -- "getting money out of the system and getting the public into the system."

Lappé called the U.S. food economy a wasteful system that takes abundance and creates scarcity by "reducing mountains of green into tiny amount of nutrients" while creating large amounts of waste. "We are the first people in the world to create the capacity to reduce," Lappé said.

In addition to Cornell Dining, the event was also sponsored by Ithaca College Office of the Provost, Mann Library, Small Farms Program, Department of Development Sociology and Slow Food Cornell, and was funded in part by the Graduate and Professional Student Assembly Finance Commission.

Graduate student Zheng Yang is a writer intern at the Cornell Chronicle.