Frances Moore Lappé became popular in the early 1970s with her book about the global food crisis 'Diet for a Small Planet'. She recalls: "At the age of 26, I began to wonder how my every-day actions were connected with the suffering in the world. On the basis of my youthful intuition I started to focus on something very practical: On food. During this time, the 1960s, both the media and experts taught us about food scarcity, which was based on having reached the earth’s limits. It didn’t take long for me to find out that those experts were wrong. My finding was that there was and is enough food for everyone. What turned my life then upside down was the insight that I was part of this Western world with its political and economical system, which required this abundance and thus created a situation of global scarcity."

Frances Moore Lappé, author and co-author of 165 books about world nutrition and living democracy: “Some of my many questions were:´Why is there hunger in a world of abundance?´ ´Why do we create scarcity?´and many books later, in the 1990s, they resulted into this question: ‘How is it possible that societies create a world which they would never choose as individuals?’ Nobody raises his voice saying: ‘I want a hundred children to die daily!’ And still, the WHO reports that today, 15.000 – 30.000 children die from hunger. Also, no one gets up in the morning planning to destroy the planet and the species. So we need to ask ourselves: Why do we, as a society, create a world that acts totally against our common sense and our inner sensitivity?"

Frances Moore Lappé is a member of the World Future Council, founded in 2007: “The only real problem is that humans feel too powerless in order to use their common sense. Most people think that all these problems have to be solved by the ones with more power. I think this is wrong.”