Donate to WERU Today!Producer: Pepin Mittelhauser
Frances Moore Lappé
Author, Activist and Co-Founder of Small Planet Institute and Food First
“Connecting our Food Choices to Humanity’s Biggest Challenges”
Frances Moore Lappé is the author or coauthor of 20 books, many focusing on themes of “living democracy” — suggesting a government accountable to citizens and a way of living aligned with the deep human need for connection, meaning and power.
Her first book, “Diet for a Small Planet” published in 1971, has now sold three million copies. Lappé’s latest work is the 50th anniversary edition of “Diet for a Small Planet,” released in 2021. In this book Lappé integrates her life’s work of connecting food to freedom, including timely material from her 2017 book co-authored with Adam Eichen, “Daring Democracy: Igniting Power, Meaning, and Connection for the America We Want.” Lappé is co-founder of Oakland-based Food First and the Cambridge-based Small Planet Institute, which she leads with her daughter, Anna Lappé. The recipient of 20 honorary degrees, she has been a visiting scholar at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and University of California, Berkeley, and in 1987 received the Right Livelihood Award, often called the “Alternative Nobel.”
She says, “In my keynote address to the Common Ground Country Fair I will talk about how the food choices we make each day connect us to humanity’s biggest challenges, from needless hunger to diet-related disease to the climate crisis and the undermining of democracy. Making these connections, we can fight despair and discover our power. I’ll share my journey of discovery — from my first ‘ah-ha’ that scarcity is not the cause of hunger to stories of self-empowered communities that have overcome hunger as they align with the Earth via regenerative practices. I will bring these lessons home, exploring solutions via what I call ‘living democracy.’”
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