admin June 17th, 2008

Frances Moore Lappé
James Beard Foundation Humanitarian of the Year Award
2008, Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center
Thank you my friend Kathleen [Kennedy Townsend] for your faith in me, and thank you, the James Beard Foundation, for this great honor and for your leadership. Thank you my dear friends here with me tonight and my family, Anthony and Anna Lappé and Richard Rowe, for your sustaining love.
With this award I feel affirmed in an insight I know I share with many of you here — that food can be our great teacher, even our great liberator. With nature as our guide, we know how! We know how to grow and eat so that all are nourished — artisanal, family-scale, diverse, ecological, community-connected farming and eating.
Worldwide, an awakening to this truth extends beyond anything I could have imagined when I began this journey.
Yet, we’re moving rapidly in two directions at once. The other, centralizing control and uniformity, is actively creating scarcity and hunger from plenty.
So how to maintain honest hope?
By going even deeper, by really, really absorbing the lessons of ecology — that all life exists in relational networks, and that change is the constant.
So, it is not possible to know what’s possible. And, since this is true, we are free. We are free to choose the world we want, knowing we each have power — that our every act makes ripples, creating our world moment to moment.
So, I toast you, food liberators. Our planet so desperately needs you.