Anna Lappé is the co-founder, along with her mother Frances Lappé, of the Cambridge-based Small Planet Institute, an international network for research and popular education about the root causes of hunger and poverty. They have also founded the Small Planet Fund which has raised more than $500,000 for democratic social movements worldwide.
Anna’s first book Hope’s Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet, co-written with her mother Frances Lappé, chronicles courageous social movements around the world. It won the Nautilus Award for Social Change. Anna’s second book Grub: Ideas for an Urban Organic Kitchen showcases the ecological and social benefits of sustainable food and brings this diet to life with the seasonal menus of chef Bryant Terry. In her latest book, Diet for a Hot Planet: The Climate Crisis at the End of Your Fork and What Your Can Do About It, Anna explores how our diet affects the climate and expounds her seven principles for a climate friendly diet.
[FPA Q1] In your book, “Diet for a Hot Planet”, you describe seven principles for a climate friendly diet. What are they and are they something that everyone can apply to their daily lives?
[AL] Reach for Real Food. Processed foods are chock full of ingredients that add a big emissions toll to our food, and they usually aren’t too healthy either!
Put Plants on Your Plate. Here are some of the reasons why putting plants in the center of your plate makes eco-sense:
Don’t Panic, Go Organic. Support farmers who are getting off the chemical and fossil-fuel treadmill.
Lean towards Local. Support your regional food economy by visiting your locally stocked supermarkets, checking out your nearest farmers market, or becoming a member of a farm through community-supported agriculture (CSA).
Cut Out Food Waste. In the United States, 25 to 50 percent of all food that could be eaten never even makes it to our plates. A typical restaurant, for instance, wastes between 40 and 50 percent of its food. This food waste adds up big-time to landfills, another way the food has a climate impact.
Send Packaging Packing. Every year, Americans toss out as many as forty billion plastic water bottles, roughly 130 bottles for every single one of us. Our food and drink’s paper and plastic, cardboard and bottles, cans and Styrofoam play a starring role in the impact the food system has upon global warming, from the emissions related to the production of packaging to those from the landfills which are clogged with their waste.
Got to get ourselves back to the kitchen. The best way to bring climate-friendly fare into your life is to reclaim your own power to cook, grow, and create your own food.
[FPA Q2] In the current economic climate, is there a way to eat sustainable and climate friendly food at a reasonable cost?
[AL] Definitely. Following most of the seven principles of a climate-friendly diet would mean saving money, not spending more of it. Let me offer a few examples:
[FPA Q3] Since farmers are ultimately businessmen, how can they be convinced to adopt more environmentally friendly agricultural practices if they are not economically beneficial?
[AL] First, let’s be clear that the typical American farmer is not making a killing. More than 80 percent of American farmers, in fact, must seek off-farm sources of income. Indeed, all but 11 of the 200 poorest counties in the country are non-metropolitan, rural counties. And although the federal government pays out billions in farm subsidies every year, three-quarters of them go to the top 10 percent of producers, based on size.
This skewed subsidy system helps to ensure that it makes financial sense for farmers to pursue commodities and chemical farming, not agroecological practices and biodiverse production.
Environmentally friendly practices certainly could be economical, but that would require getting our agricultural policy in line with our stated commitments to help address global warming and improve the environment.
[FPA Q4] Have policymakers in Washington or in other countries done enough to address the relationship between the food we eat and climate change?
[AL] Unfortunately, policy makers in Washington have been dragging their feet on taking serious action on climate change, let alone the connection between the climate crisis and the food chain. Worse, what farm-state representatives succeeded in getting written into the stalled climate-legislation, Waxman-Markey, was actually exemption from emissions regulations for agribusiness as well as a continuation of business-as-usual for corn-based ethanol production level mandates, despite the solid evidence that this ethanol production leads to overall emissions increase, not reduction.
[FPA Q5] You co-founded the Small Planet Institute with your mother in 2001, to further the idea of a “Living Democracy.” Could you explain this idea and how food security factors into the idea of achieving Living Democracy?
[AL] My new book “Diet for a Hot Planet” carries on a conversation my mother started nearly forty years ago with her book, “Diet for a Small Planet”. A core theme of our work is that the existence of hunger amidst plenty provides evidence of the lack of democracy. According to United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization figures, calorie availability per person today is sufficient for all humans to eat well. If democracy is defined as everyone having a voice – and few among us would choose to go hungry or make others go hungry – then the presence of hunger reveals a deep democracy deficit.
1. Pachauri, “Global Warming – The impact of meat production and consumption on climate change”. The USDA has slightly different figures, claiming at least half of all corn and 80 percent of soy is now diverted from human consumption to the livestock industry. United States Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service, “Feed Grains Database: Yearbook Tables.”
2. Steinfield et al., Livestock’s Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options
3. Steinfield et al., Livestock’s Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options
Posted by Hallam Lyall Grant
