Frances Moore Lappé Quotes

14 Sourced Quotes

In exporting the Great American Steak Religion we are exporting a desire for the impossible. The earth could never provide the majority of its people with the grain-fed-meat-centered diet that Americans take for granted.

Frances Moore Lappé
There is no formula. We all must become spirited inventors. There's no single answer - not even a single starting point. Even the 'teachers'... don't offer us the answer. They do offer us approaches, ways of thinking, possibilities we can adapt, and hope that might generate in us wholly new ideas.

Frances Moore Lappé
For every 16 pounds of grain and soy fed to beef cattle in the United States we only get 1 pound back in meat on our plates. The other 15 pounds are inaccessible to us, either used by the animal to produce energy or to make some part of its own body that we do not eat (like hair or bones) or excreted.

Frances Moore Lappé
This is the first generation to know that the choices we're making have ultimate consequences. It's a time when you either choose life or you choose death... Going along with the current order means that you're choosing death.

Frances Moore Lappé
In a world where only a minor portion of the land is really well suited to agriculture, man is using much of the best land with dubious efficiency.

Frances Moore Lappé
Much agricultural land which might be growing food is being used instead to 'grow' money (in the form of coffee, tea, etc.).

Frances Moore Lappé
Our heavily meat-centered culture is at the very heart of our waste of the earth's productivity.

Frances Moore Lappé
Yet many Americans who have reluctantly given up their gas-guzzling cars would never think of questioning the resource costs of their grain-fed-meat diet. So let me try to give you some sense of the enormity of the resources flowing into livestock production in the United States. The consequences of a grain-fed-meat diet may be as severe as those of a nation of Cadillac drivers.

Frances Moore Lappé
The act of putting into your mouth what the earth has grown is perhaps your most direct interaction with the earth.

Frances Moore Lappé
We got hooked on grain-fed meat just as we got hooked on gas-guzzling automobiles. Big cars made sense only when oil was cheap; grain-fed meat makes sense only because the true costs of producing it are not counted.

Frances Moore Lappé
I've grown certain that the root of all fear is that we've been forced to deny who we are.

Frances Moore Lappé
Honest hope has an edge. It's messy. It requires that we let go of all pat answers, all preconceived formulas, all confidence that our sailing will be smooth. It's not a resting point. Honest hope is movement.

Frances Moore Lappé
Even the fear of death is nothing compared to the fear of not having lived authentically and fully.

Frances Moore Lappé
Each of us carries within us a worldview, a set of assumptions about how the world works - what some call a paradigm - that forms the very questions we allow ourselves to ask, and determines our view of future possibilities.

Frances Moore Lappé