"frances moore lappe" news and stories

Author Anna Lappe says that food production -- particularly Western society's love of meat packaged in Styrofoam and cellophane from the local supermarket -- is a major climate-warming offender. Forget about those stretch limos with the little hot tub in the back; turns out a double cheeseburger is a lot more harmful to the environment.

Lappe's new book called, Diet for a Hot Planet: The Climate Crisis at the End of Your Fork and What You Can Do about It, evokes the title of her mother's 1971 classic, Diet for a Small Planet. One of Time magazine's 'eco' who's-who, Lappe is a founding principal (along with her mother, Frances Moore Lappe), of the Cambridge based Small Planet Institute, an organization that does research and education on the root causes of hunger and poverty.

We've got an oldie but a goodie in the spotlight today. Diet for a Small Planet was written by Frances Moore Lappé and was first published in 1971. It was controversial back then, in large part because it promoted a vegetarian diet at a time when most people in the US were still eating bacon for breakfast, a meat-packed sandwich for lunch and a steak and potato for dinner. Some of the nutritional claims that Lappé made in the original version were revised and altered in later editions, so your mileage may vary depending on with incarnation of the book you have in your possession.

I have a copy from the 1973 printing, so it is the original text without any alteration. However, that doesn't concern me, because I don't have it for the nutritional claims as much as I keep it on the shelf for the recipes. This was one of my mother's first cookbooks (she was something of a hippie) and so it informed many of the dishes I grew up eating. So I connect with it on a nostalgic level, occasionally throwing together the Roman Rice and Beans or the Leafy Chinese Tofu.

If you're interesting in incorporating more vegetarian dishes into your diet, consider getting yourself a copy of this book, as it has lots of good ones. It's also an interesting read, as Lappé was talking about issues of resources and food sustainability long before anyone else was starting that conversation.

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