Fifty years ago, while experts published scary tomes about imminent world famine, my mother was a 26-year-old researcher curious about exactly why there was so much hunger around the globe. She buried herself in the stacks at the Giannini Library on UC Berkeley’s campus. What she discovered was so shocking, she felt she had to share the news with the world: There was actually enough food (there is still today). We humans were actually creating scarcity through then-just-emergent grain-fed, industrial livestock production systems. 

She turned her insight into a pamphlet, which became a longer essay, which became the book, Diet for a Small Planet.   

Last year, as Covid-19 kept our family thousands of miles from each other, I set out to help my mom celebrate the 50th anniversary of this seminal book with a new, special edition.  

This edition includes a new opening chapter by my mom—trying to distill her life’s work into just 15,000 words! And, with the expert hand of the wonderful and talented recipe developer, Wendy Lopez—and loads of Zoom calls and dirty dishes—we also refreshed the recipe section. No more soy grits and margarine! The 85+ recipes include more than a dozen from some of our very favorite cookbook authors and chefs, including several beloved Real Food Reads authors!  

You can pre-order your book today at www.dietforasmallplanet.org and please join us with friends and family for one or both of our book launches: 

• Monday, September 20th Frances Moore Lappé in conversation with Bryant Terry at 5:30pm PST / 8:30pm EST
• Thursday, September 30th Frances Moore Lappé in conversation with Raj Patel at 4:00pm PST / 7:00pm EST

The post Diet for a Small Planet — 50 Years Later appeared first on Real Food Media.

It was the early 1970s. With books like Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb captivating readers across the country, fears were growing that the world faced imminent, widespread famine. My mother, Frances (at the time a 26-year-old grad school dropout), wanted to understand why. As she sought out the answer in the stacks of UC Berkeley’s Giannini Agricultural Library, she realized she was asking the wrong question: there was more than enough food to feed the world. Yet she was also alarmed to discover the vast resources going to raise livestock in industrial operations—and creating such waste at the same time.

As she dug deeper, her animating question became: Why does hunger persist in a world of plenty? That question would lead her on her life’s path and the answer she uncovered would become one of her most-quoted mantras: Hunger is not caused by a scarcity of food, but a scarcity of democracy.

She shared her insights in what would evolve from a one-page handout into her 1971 book, Diet for a Small Planet. In its pages, she would help readers connect the dots between the then-emergent industrial animal agriculture system and injustice in the food system. It also gave people a tasty way to buck that system with more than 100 plant-based recipes.

Fifty years later, my mother’s book still feels so relevant. Today, a whopping 80 percent of global agricultural land is used to feed livestock while providing less than 20 percent of our calories. Compared with 1970, we’ve increased our meat intake—with the average American now eating twice as much protein as their bodies can even use. And our food system, including environmentally destructive factory farming, has an enormous climate toll as well: as much as 37 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions come from the sector.

With a new opening chapter that shares lessons my mother has learned over these past five decades, the 50th Anniversary Edition of Diet for a Small Planet includes a fully revamped recipe section showcasing some of our favorite plant- and planet-centered chefs, including Real Food Reads stars like Yasmin Khan, Chef Sean Sherman, Bryant Terry, Mark Bittman, and Luz Calvo and Catriona Esquibel (made possible thanks to the careful curation of recipe developer Wendy Lopez).

We at Real Food Media are thrilled to share this book with all of you as the work is a reminder of the power of going deep on big questions about the world around us. We love it when those questions bring us to the delightful tastes and textures of the abundant, delicious, and diverse world of plant-centered eating.

In community and solidarity,

Anna on behalf of the Real Food Media hive

P.S. Join us at one of the book’s launch events. And don’t forget to pre-order the book and dive into the website to learn more!

Read the full issue of the Real Food Scoop
 

Photo credit: Paige Green for Diet for a Small Planet

The post Real Food Scoop | No. 47 appeared first on Real Food Media.

The World Food Programme’s Nobel prize is timely – but food security depends on radically transforming our food systems

During the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic, as lockdown restrictions scrambled supply chains, the national peasant movement Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas set up an online farmers’ market and delivery system on Facebook, so urban dwellers in Manila could access locally grown grain, fruits, and vegetables. 

In Argentina, as thousands lost their jobs and homes, the grassroots organization Union de Trabajadores de la Tierra (Union of Land Workers), supplied vulnerable communities with fresh food. These “sovereign food canteens”, said UTT’s Lucas Tedesco, are powerful reminders that small producers “are the ones who feed our fellow citizens.” 

In Zimbabwe, when markets shuttered and farmers’ crops were left to rot in their fields, the farmers’ organization Pelum Zimbabwe mapped farmers, transporters, processors, and other vendors, to connect them to consumers and demonstrate to Zimbabwean policymakers that better access to locally-grown healthy foods reduces hunger, and strengthens community resilience. 

With the pandemic leaving so many families uncertain about their next meal, the Nobel Peace Prize award to the United Nations’ World Food Programme is timely. COVID-19 has plunged millions around the world into poverty; global hunger is likely to double. By the end of 2020, the number of people facing acute food insecurity could swell to a quarter of a billion. 

But let’s be clear: We’ll never be truly food secure without radically transforming our food systems. 

Even as it acknowledged the honour, the UN agency, which provides food assistance to almost 100 million people worldwide, noted that aid is not a long-term solution. Gernot Laganda, head of climate and disaster risk reduction at the WFP, stated clearly: “You won’t get to zero hunger with humanitarian aid alone.”

As food systems funders supporting agroecology, we have seen that food handouts are not an effective antidote to hunger.

Agroecology goes beyond tackling the incidence of hunger to uproot its structural causes. In recent months, we have seen clearly how movements for agroecology fostered networks of producers—in the Philippines, Zimbabwe, and beyond— able to feed themselves and their communities in this moment of crisis. 

By farming in sync with nature, agroecological farmers grow abundant and diverse foods, regenerate natural ecosystems, strengthen resilience to health and climate shocks, and bring healthy food to local markets.

More than a set of farming techniques, agroecology is a movement for social justice, improving nutrition without compromising food sovereignty—the right of peoples to determine what they eat and how it is produced. 

Agroecology resists the misguided Western policies that have impoverished smallholders worldwide, policies like promoting synthetic fertilizers, pesticides and hybrid seeds through the Green Revolution historically, and the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa today.

By directly empowering family farmers, agroecology diminishes the need for imported food aid – too often ultra-processed foods, surplus commodity crops, and GMO grains that are a boon to agribusiness while undermining small farmer livelihoods. 

In the past few years, agencies within the United Nations have publicly recognized the importance of agroecology to end hunger. In 2018, former U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization Director General José Graziano da Silva issued an urgent challenge to the global community: “It’s time to scale up the implementation of agroecology.” 

We’ve been pleased to see that initiatives such as the World Food Programme’s Home Grown School Feeding Initiative link “school feeding programmes with local smallholder farmers” in 46 countries including Kenya, Honduras, and Haiti. But the agency must do far more to strengthen local food economies.

In 2018, only one third of the 3.6 million metric tons of WFP’s total food purchases were characterized as “locally grown commodities,” and less than 4% of the organization’s food aid ($31 million) was purchased directly from smallholder farmers. (WFP data does not report what percentage may have been agroecologically produced.)

This year’s Nobel Peace Prize is a powerful recognition of just how urgent food security is. We urge the WFP to seize this moment to embrace agroecology, and address the roots of hunger, learning lessons from the food leaders we’re funding in the Philippines, Argentina, Zimbabwe, and beyond. 

Private philanthropy alone cannot offer sufficient support to the vibrant, global agroecology movement. We need the WFP to play a lead role, deploying public resources to support innovative civil society organizations and government agencies.

When we support humanitarian relief that builds lasting change, we ensure our dollars don’t just deliver one-time handouts, but drive a fundamental transformation of our food systems. Only then will we yank up the roots of hunger and seed a more peaceful, equitable, and resilient world. 

Header photo: Romeo Ranoco/Reuters

The post Food Security Can Bring Peace—But Agroecology Makes It Last appeared first on Real Food Media.

If you are able, consider donating all or part of your stimulus check to an organization that is working to address immediate needs and build long-term power around the US. Support a group in your community or check out our suggestions below: 

Alianza Nacional de Campesinas

The first national, women-led, farmworker women’s organization is working closely with member organizations and farmworker advocacy groups to address the challenges and needs specific to farmworker women around the nation. 

DONATE

First Nations Development Institute’s COVID-19 Emergency Response Fund

The Navajo Nation has the third-highest coronavirus infection rate. Native communities that have been consistently divested from are suffering from a lack of access to resources as basic as clean water. 

DONATE

Food Chain Workers Alliance

People who work all along the food chain have lacked access to paid sick leave, living wages, job security, and other foundations of safe, dignified work. The Food Chain Workers Alliance works with grassroots labor organizations across the US to fight for fair working conditions.

DONATE

National Domestic Workers Alliance Coronavirus Care Fund

Caregivers across the spectrum, from in-home caretakers to house cleaners—many of whom are immigrants and most of whom are women of color—are without a safety net during this time. 

DONATE

National Black Food & Justice Alliance Mutual Aid Fund

This mutual aid fund will re-grant money to Black farmers and land stewards ramping up food production for communities across the country. 

DONATE

One Fair Wage Emergency Fund

With many workers earning only the federally mandated minimum wage of $2.13 for tipped workers, tipped workers were struggling before COVID-19—and things have only gotten worse. This fund provides cash assistance to those who need it most.  

DONATE

Restaurant Opportunities Center United Disaster Relief Fund

By one estimate, 75 percent of restaurants could go out of business during this crisis. ROC United put together a disaster relief fund to support restaurant workers in danger of losing their jobs.

DONATE

Soul Fire Farm

Soul Fire Farm has been inspiring BIack, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) farmers around the world by decentering whiteness in agrarianism (check out the Real Food Reads book and podcast episode, Farming While Black). During the crisis, they’ve held regular virtual convenings to assess needs and build solidarity, as well as provide food for members of their community.

DONATE

The post Use Your Stimulus Check to Support Farmers & Food Workers appeared first on Real Food Media.

Most of the world, Wise reveals, is fed by hundreds of millions of small-scale farmers, people with few resources and simple tools but a keen understanding of what to grow and how. These same farmers—who already grow more than 70 percent of the food eaten in developing countries—can show the way forward. Wise takes readers to remote villages to see how farmers are rebuilding soils with ecologically sound practices and nourishing a diversity of native crops without chemicals or imported seeds. They are growing more and healthier food; in the process, they are not just victims of the climate crisis, but rather protagonists whose solutions can show us the way forward.

The post Eating Tomorrow: Agribusiness, Family Farmers, and the Battle for the Future of Food appeared first on Real Food Media.

Find this discussion at ClimateOne’s website. 

Photo by ClimateOne.

The post ClimateOne: Plate to Planet with Anna Lappé and Mark Kurlansky appeared first on Real Food Media.

The post Beginning to End Hunger: Food and the Environment in Belo Horizon, Brazil, and Beyond appeared first on Real Food Media.

Blending personal narrative and investigative journalism, Jayaraman shows us that the quality of the food that arrives at our restaurant tables depends not only on the sourcing of the ingredients. Our meals benefit from the attention and skill of the people who chop, grill, sauté, and serve. Behind the Kitchen Door is a groundbreaking exploration of the political, economic, and moral implications of dining out. Jayaraman focuses on the stories of individuals, like Daniel, who grew up on a farm in Ecuador and sought to improve the conditions for employees at Del Posto; the treatment of workers behind the scenes belied the high-toned Slow Food ethic on display in the front of the house.

Increasingly, Americans are choosing to dine at restaurants that offer organic, fair-trade, and free-range ingredients for reasons of both health and ethics. Yet few of these diners are aware of the working conditions at the restaurants themselves. But whether you eat haute cuisine or fast food, the well-being of restaurant workers is a pressing concern, affecting our health and safety, local economies, and the life of our communities. Highlighting the roles of the 10 million people, many immigrants, many people of color, who bring their passion, tenacity, and vision to the American dining experience, Jayaraman sets out a bold agenda to raise the living standards of the nation’s second-largest private sector workforce―and ensure that dining out is a positive experience on both sides of the kitchen door.

The post Behind the Kitchen Door appeared first on Real Food Media.

Journalist and infant health advocate Kimberly Seals Allers breaks breastfeeding out of the realm of “personal choice” and shows our broader connection to an industrialized food system that begins at birth, the fallout of feminist ideals, and the federal policies that are far from family friendly. The Big Letdown uncovers the multibillion-dollar forces battling to replace mothers’ milk and the failure of the medical establishment to protect infant health. Weaving together research and personal stories with original reporting on medicine, big pharma, and hospitals, Kimberly Seals Allers shows how mothers and babies have been abandoned by all the forces that should be supporting families from the start–and what we can do to help.

The post The Big Letdown: How Medicine, Big Business, and Feminism Undermine Breastfeeding appeared first on Real Food Media.

Fisher lays out a vision that encompasses a broader definition of hunger characterized by a focus on public health, economic justice, and economic democracy. He points to the work of numerous grassroots organizations that are leading the way in these fields as models for the rest of the anti-hunger sector. It is only through approaches like these that we can hope to end hunger, not just manage it.

The post Big Hunger: The Unholy Alliance Between Corporate America and Anti-Hunger Groups appeared first on Real Food Media.