This month, I'm pleased and proud to bring you a personal interview with Frances Moore Lappè (known to her friends and co-workers as "Frankie"). Frankie and I have been close personal friends for years, and I have always been deeply inspired by her work, and also by her as a person.

Frankie is best-known as the author of the groundbreaking bestseller, Diet for a Small Planet, first published in 1971 (and revised in 1975, 1982 and 1991 as her understanding of the issues has deepened and grown). That book inspired millions to become more conscious of the relationship between their personal food and lifestyle choices and the health of the environment. It also gave us revolutionary, new tools for understanding the issue of world hunger, laying the foundation for a dialogue that is still vital and expanding as we approach the new millenium.

In 1975, Frankie was the co-founder of the Institute for Food and Development Policy ("Food First"), a California-based research and education center devoted to studying and addressing global patterns of economic injustice and now a leading institution in the movement for sustainable agriculture. Since then, Frankie has written numerous other books pursuing the compelling questions of our times, delving deeply into issues about American values and the meaning of democracy. In 1990, she co-founded The Center for Living Democracy, an organization devoted to encouraging and documenting active, participatory democracy at all levels (especially personal and local) in communities around the country.

A recipient of the Right Livelihood Award (the alternative Nobel Prize), Frankie now lives in rural Vermont, where she is the president of the center and editor of The American News Service.

MK: What have you been doing in the almost-30 years since the first publication of Diet for a Small Planet?

FML: Mollie, Im still at the same task: peeling away layer after layer of the same onion! When I was 27, I asked, "Why hunger in a world of plenty?". Thats what compelled me to write Diet for a Small Planet. That question got me to the first layer...I learned that hunger is not caused by a scarcity of food, but by a scarcity of democracy. By that I mean that more and more of us have less and less say over our common future, over our most basic needs. I spent years writing books and traveling abroad to understand how the scarcity of democracy generates hunger. But ultimately I was unsatisfied. I concluded that preaching about how unfair it all was, how destructive of life and the earth our food system is, was not enough. Lots of people saw the same thing I did: they just didnt know what to do; they felt powerless. So I helped found The Center for Living Democracy to further the emergence of a more active, inclusive practice of democracy in which people are discovering the power they do have.

MK: In both your writing and speaking over the years, you've referred to food as the "window" through which we can see and understand many global issues. Could you please explain what you mean by this?

FML: I mean that to grasp why people are hungry, or why farmland is being lost daily, is to pry to open the invisible rulebook that shapes our reality--mostly without our conscious awareness. We all have to eat. We all love to eat. Through food we link to each other and to all life. If we focus on understanding, truly grasping, the irrationality of our food system, and then choose to act outside the standard rulebook--to act instead according to our own knowledge of the world we want to live in-- that consciousness, that act can affect every aspect of our lives.

MK: What are you working on currently?

FML: I am maniacally focused on one goal. I want to help bring democracy to life--to draw more and more people to the knowledge, deep in their bones, that they can be part of creating the world they want. So, I've helped found a new national news service, The American News Service, to create a social multiplier effect. To make visible the invisible. To tell stories through the mainstream media of regular people letting go of despair and tackling our society's toughest problems. ANS has released 850 stories, and our stories have so far appeared in 300 newspapers. We want millions of Americans to have access to our stories directly, which are all on-line on our web site, www.americannews.com.

MK: Where do you see your work heading in the near future?

FML: My dream is to return to Diet for a Small Planet to create a 30th anniversary edition. My children have volunteered to help me. (My son was born 27 years ago, the summer that Diet for a Small Planet was published.) I want to return to the book, not simply to rewrite it but to invite others, like you, to join me in celebrating the distance we've all traveled -- to create a living history and invite a whole new generation, my children's generation, to discover the food window that can give them meaning and power.