Fifteen years after the book’s original publication in 2002, Luis Medina, a graduate Food Studies student at New York University, hopes to bring these stories to the screen by traveling through four continents to discover people who find solutions to hunger, poverty, and landlessness in their communities.

“These stories need to be shared now more than ever. At this point in history, people fear for their democracy. Film has the power to engage our senses and compel us to act in ways a book does not,” says the director. “I believe all people want to make a positive difference in the world, to be of something bigger and life serving, but so often we are afraid and feel powerless. “Hope’s Edge” seeks to inspire us to take action by showing regular people around the world doing what we never thought possible.”

The book itself was a follow-up to Frances Moore Lappé’s 1971 bestseller, Diet for a Small Planet, which challenged the idea that society needs to produce more food to feed the world.

According to the Friends of the Earth report Farming for the Future, we produce enough food to feed 10 billion people. Still, as consequence of a model of food production which significantly contributes to climate change, environmental degradation, and poor diets, around 800 million people suffer from chronic hunger.

Hunger is not caused by a scarcity in food, it’s caused by a scarcity in democracy and unequal access to land, water, credit, and fair markets, preventing people from acquiring the resources necessary to feed themselves.

“Hope’s Edge” finds new spaces for people to find the courage to take action by showing others effecting change, challenging inequalities, and finding solutions to hunger, poverty, and landlessness around the world.

Originally published in Food Tank

Click here for the “Hope’s Edge” Kickstarter campaign.

Hope’s Edge

Read more on the Hope’s Edge website.

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Listen to this inspiring interview and the wonderful summary Allison Aubrey shares of the conversation.

When Frances Moore Lappé wrote the best-selling Diet For A Small Planet back in 1971, she helped start a conversation about the social and environmental impacts of the foods we choose.

And, back then, what she had to say was revolutionary. Her idea that a plant-centered diet could be better for the planet — and our health — than a meat-centered diet was considered radical. “It was heresy,” Lappé told me during a recent interview.

Read the full interview here.

Originally published on NPR’s Morning Edition series Boundbreakers: People Who Make A Difference

Photo by Rainforest Action Network/Flickr

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Becoming a food author and educator was kind of like going into the family business: My mother, Frances Moore Lappé, wrote her 3.5-million copy bestselling book, Diet for a Small Planet, more than 40 years ago when she was 26 and has been a leading voice in addressing the root causes of hunger ever since. I never thought this would be my career, though. In fact, I had graduated from Brown and was getting a masters at Columbia on a path to work in public education and economic development, when I leapt at the chance to help my mom write a sequel to Diet. The process ultimately led to my first book, Hope’s Edge, and a journey around the world with my mother that sparked a lifelong passion for promoting food justice, sustainable food systems and a world where everyone everywhere has access to life-supporting foods.

How do you define good food?

Good food is healthy; it supports local economies; it’s raised in ways that promote environmental sustainability, biodiversity and animal welfare alongside worker well being. Not so coincidentally these are the five values at the heart of the Good Food Purchasing Policy, which I am working to help expand from the city of Los Angeles… to the rest of the country!

We just launched our second #NoFoodWaste campaign. What are some #NoFoodWaste practices that you incorporate into your daily life?

On a weekly basis, I try to make “dinners from the back of the fridge,” incorporating leftovers or wilting produce into some delicious dish. Luckily, there are countless ways to do so: revive old veggies in a pot of risotto; make a fresh stock with old onions; cook a soup with yesterday’s broccoli. The list goes on. In addition, we try as much as possible to cook from whole foods: packaging is one of the biggest forms of “food” waste we can kick out of our home.

Your book Diet For A Hot Planet addresses the climate crisis in relation to our food system. What’s one aspect of our diet that really needs to change?

By “our” if you mean the average American, the one aspect of our diet that could stand to change—and it would be a boon to both our waistline and the environment—is the amount of meat and dairy we consume. Americans consume three times more meat and dairy than the global average, with over half of that coming from red meat. (Check out this white paper from the Culinary Institute of America and their new project called The Protein Flip.) From the environmental impact of industrial meat production to the inhumane treatment of the workers in the industry, there are countless reasons to reduce our consumption. Thankfully, there is a growing market of sustainably produced meat and dairy, so consumers can choose, should they want to, less but better meat.

Find the rest of this interview in the Behind the Plate series by Foodstand.

Photo by Paige Green

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