Anna was featured on a KQED special segment, The Power of Mothers, talking about the 50th Edition of Diet for a Small Planet and how she is continuing and evolving her mother’s critical work. Watch the whole segment here (Anna’s segment starts at 10:03).

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It was my first in-person event since the start of Covid, and I was delighted to be with my mom and my dear friend Davia Nelson of Kitchen Sisters. If you catch me smiling at folks in the audience it might be my husband, my daughter, my brother, my 4th grade English teacher, my kids’ school principal… it truly was a family affair. My mother and I got to talk about the anniversary edition and all the fun we had pulling it together. You can learn more about Diet for a Small Planet at 50 and get yourself a copy at our website here.

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In 1971, Diet for a Small Planet broke new ground, revealing how our everyday acts are a form of power to create health for ourselves and our planet. This extraordinary book first exposed the needless waste built into a meat-centered diet. Now, in a special edition for its 50th anniversary, world-renowned food expert Frances Moore Lappé goes even deeper, showing us how plant-centered eating can help restore our damaged ecology, address the climate crisis, and move us toward real democracy. Sharing her personal journey and how this revolutionary book shaped her own life, Lappé offers a fascinating philosophy on changing yourself—and the world—that can start with changing the way we eat.

This new edition features eighty-five updated plant-centered recipes, including more than a dozen new delights from celebrity chefs including Mark Bittman, Padma Lakshmi, Alice Waters, José Andrés, Bryant Terry, Mollie Katzen, and Sean Sherman.

For all press inquiries, please contact Maya Franson: mfranson@penguinrandomhouse.com

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Anna was thrilled to be a keynote speaker at the 2020 50×40 Global Summit—the global network committed to reducing industrial animal agriculture 50 percent by 2040. Anna talked about the incredible toll of factor farming, from squandering land and other natural resources to huge greenhouse gas emissions and the exploitation of workers and abuse of animals. She shared the staggering rates of meatpacking workers contracting Covid-19, with over 50,000 workers infected as of January 20, 2021. 

We believe this conflux of crises offers us the opportunity to upend the global industrial meat model, but as Anna mentioned in her talk, only if we make it so: 

“The pandemic is an opportunity only if we make it one… When it comes to fighting for a more moral food system—one that protects workers and farmers alike, one that is humane to all the world’s creatures—we must act now and act boldly.”

How do we do that? We do it together. 

Here are four ways to harness our collective power:
 

1. Be bold. Our role as organizers and advocates is to show what is possible—the policies will follow. 
2. Be confident in communicating complexity. Silver bullet solutions won’t do the job here. We have to get to the root causes to create real, radical change. 
3. Think globally. Focusing attention on our individual locales only creates the opportunity for agribusiness to move the problem elsewhere.
4. Celebrate our very big tent. Issues such as the industrial meat model touch on so much that people care about. As we develop strategies, communications, and policy asks, this big tent can be our biggest asset, but only if we consciously nurture these connections. 

Watch the full speech here and make sure to check out out some additional resources:

• Food Mythbusters video: Do We Need Industrial Agriculture to Feed the World?
• Real Food Reads podcast episode 44,  Bite Back: People Taking On Corporate Food and Winning featuring Jose Oliva 
• Foodtopias podcast episode 1, Laboring in a Pandemic, featuring Christina Spach and Axel Fuentes
• Tackling Climate Change Through Food, an organizing toolkit

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Tune in here! 

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The New York Times Retro Report—a series I’ve always loved—pays tribute to my mother’s influence on the plant-based meat alternatives taking off today. I appear late in the nearly 14-minute video, emphasizing that the core message of my mother’s seminal 1971 book, Diet for a Small Planet, wasn’t actually about food, per se, it was about democracy—about who has the power to decide how land is used, what food is grown, how animals are raised. I try to stress what my mother has always been interested in not what she would love our plates to look like, but what our world should look like. Nearly fifty years ago, my mom was trying to expose the political and economic forces driving the industrial agriculture revolution that spawned the highly inefficient, inhumane, environmentally disastrous system of factory farming. In other words, her message was a much more nuanced story than meat vs. no-meat. With these new products in the marketplace, I think this message is as important as ever: We should remember that what we’re fighting for is real food, produced in a way that’s good for the planet and good for the people raising it—whether it’s from the plant kingdom, or not. I’m glad we got some of that story into this segment—along with a nice shot of my garden office.

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By Tanya Kerssen

Journalist George Monbiot threw down the gauntlet in his recent Guardian oped, “Lab-grown food will soon destroy farming – and save the planet.” You read that right: enviros should celebrate the demise of farming and rise of food “neither from animals nor plants, but from unicellular life.” In this techno-utopia, “farmfree foods” will relieve the planet of soil eroding, water-guzzling, carbon-emitting agriculture. 

Civil Eats contributing editor Twilight Greenaway penned this important intervention writing, “Agriculture isn’t something to dismiss; it’s one of the most important ways that humans interact with the natural world.” Indeed, the world’s more than 500 million sustainably-scaled farms produce more than just calories, they contribute to employment, culture, rural economic vitality, stewardship of forests and wildlife, carbon sequestration, water filtration, dietary diversity, preservation of seed genetic material, and the list goes on.

Monbiot “booed to the rafters” by farmers in the UK.

GM Watch also wrote this detailed response to Monbiot, concluding, “We all know what’s needed to start to mend the damage we’ve caused—and it cannot entail turning our backs on the land that feeds us.” Our own Anna Lappé gave Jeff Goldblum’s Jurassic Park character the last word in her piece about tech solutions to agricultural challenges: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

The big problem, though, is when lab-based food begins to dominate the narrative, suck up resources, and eclipse tried-and-true solutions. We should be looking to the world’s best agricultural problem-solvers who are already modeling climate-resilient food production: mainly, Indigenous people, women, and people of color. While their daily practice may not make for such grabby headlines, substance, not flash, is the stuff food sovereignty is made of.

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The book is organized by ingredient, making it easy to create simple dishes or showstopping meals based on what’s fresh at the market. Bryant also covers the basics of vegan cooking, explaining the fundamentals of assembling flavorful salads, cooking filling soups and stews, and making tasty grains and legumes. With beautiful imagery and classic design, Vegetable Kingdom is an invaluable tool for plant-based cooking today.

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In his debut cookbook, Laz offers up more than 100 recipe hits with new takes on classic dishes like Brown Butter Candy Yam Mash with Goat Cheese Brülée, Shrimp and Crazy Creamy Cheddar Grits, and Dulce de Leche Banana Pudding. Packed with splashy color photography that pops off the page, this cookbook blends fashion, food, and storytelling to get readers into the kitchen. It’s a Southern cookbook like you’ve never seen before.

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As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock by Dina GIlio-Whitaker 

The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen by Sean Sherman 

Decolonize Your Diet: Mexican-American Plant-Based Recipes for Health and Healing by Luz Calvo and Catriona Rueda Esquibel

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Join the Real Food Reads book club for monthly book selections, related news & events, and author interviews on the Real Food Reads podcast. Listen on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, GooglePlay, or Stitcher.  

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