Thirty years ago, Frances Moore Lappe’s Diet for a Small Planet became a touchstone for a generation. Selling more than three million copies (and still counting), it helped us see how we’re generating the very food scarcity that we say we fear. It showed how each of us can choose the opposite: a diet best for our bodies and also best for our planet. Now Frances and her daughter, Anna pick up where that book left off.
In a personal journey of discovery on five continents, the Lappes explore the most puzzling questions of our time: Why, as societies, do we create the very inequalities and devastation of nature that, as individuals, we abhor? Are there paths we each can walk that will, in practical ways, heal our lives and help the planet?
Searching for answers, the Lappes challenge promoters of corporate globalization who claim that theirs is the only path. Frances and Anna take us with them into the worlds beneath the radar of the global media. There we meet poor villagers in Kenya who are tying to turn back the encroaching desert; we eat with landless peasants in Brazil who are facing down big landowners to create vibrant communities; we celebrate the efforts of village women in Bangladesh incurring huge risks to lift their families out of poverty; and we admire renegade farmers in Wisconsin, undeterred by widespread hardship, who are learning to thrive while caring for the land. As we walk with trailblazers who transform their fear into creative action, we can see possibilities for change in our own lives that before were invisible.
“Absolutely one of the most important books as we move further into the twenty-first century.”
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Dorothy Day—who took it upon themselves to pump life into basic truths. Frances Moore Lappe is among them.”
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