Hope's Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet

Thirty years ago, Frances Moore Lappé, then a 26 year-old college student in Berkeley, wrote the groundbreaking Diet for a Small Planet — a book that started a revolution in the way Americans think about food and hunger (and has since gone on to sell 3 million copies and counting!). Lappé challenged the notion that world hunger is caused by nature's scarcity and went on to prove that the world crisis is not a scarcity of food but a scarcity of democracy. She helped us see how we are generating the very food scarcity that we say we most fear and, most importantly, she showed how each of us has the power to choose the opposite: a diet best for our bodies and also best for our planet.

Now, for the 30th anniversary sequel to her revolutionary classic, Frances Moore Lappé has teamed up with her 27 year-old daughter, Anna, to offer the perspective of two generations — wisdom and youth — in creating what is destined to be another groundbreaker, Hope's Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet

Featuring nearly seventy recipes from vegetarian, organic, and whole-foods culinary pioneers such as Mollie Katzen (The Moosewood Cookbook), Anna Thomas (The Vegetarian Epicure), and Alice Waters as well as mouth-watering menus from some our country's most celebrated natural foods restaurants including Angelica's Kitchen (New York City), The Millennium Restaurant (San Francisco), and Chez Panisse (Berkeley, CA). Hope's Edge highlights these true trailblazers engaged in social, environmental, and economic transformations, bringing us back to the sensual pleasure of eating fresh, whole foods and reconnecting us to the earth and to those who tend it.

"As they chronicle these smart, inspiring efforts and consider the concept of "food security" as a human right, the Lappes drive home their crucial theme: what's best for our bodies is best for our communities and for the earth itself." Donna Seaman, Booklist

"Some of the twentieth century's most vibrant activist thinkers have been American women — Margaret Mead, Jeanette Rankin, Barbara Ward, Dorothy Day — who took it upon themselves to pump life into basic truths. Frances Moore Lappé is among them." The Washington Post

Includes bibliographical references (p. 415-419) and index.

The author of the classic Diet for a Small Planet and her daughter travel the world, discovering practical visionaries who are making a difference in world hunger, sometimes one village at a time.

Thirty years ago Frances Moore Lappé started a revolution in the way Americans think about food and hunger. Now Frances and her daughter, Anna, pick up where Diet for a Small Planet left off. Together, they set out on an around-the-world journey to explore the greatest challenges we face at the new millennium. Traveling to Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe, they discovered answers to the most urgent issue of our time: Whether we are able to transcend today's consumerism and the isolation of "me-first" capitalism and find the paths that each of us can follow to heal our lives and the planet. Featuring nearly seventy recipes from celebrated vegetarian culinary pioneers-including Alice Waters, Mollie Katzen, Laurel Robertson, Nora Pouillon, and Anna Thomas-Hope's Edge highlights true trailblazers engaged in social, environmental, and economic transformations.

Anna Blythe Lappé began developing a passion for understanding the world with a global perspective at the ripe young age of three when she accompanied her mother on a research trip to Guatemala. In partnership with her mother, Anna has helped bring to life Hope's Edge, a sequel as much for her generation as for her mother's.

Now 28, Anna has traveled to more than 20 countries and worked and lived on four continents. After graduating in 1995 with a B.A. in educational policy and history from Brown University, she was awarded a fellowship to teach at a high school in South Africa.

She has since worked for several non-profit organizations including a youth development program in the United Kingdom and an advocacy and training organization for low-income women in New York City. She recently completed her Masters degree at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs.

Anna is co-founder, with Frances, of the Small Planet Fund, and maintains the website, www.dietforasmallplanet.com