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Diet for a Small Planet Articles

The Long Fight for a Just Food System

Updated: Aug 12, 2021

Fifty years ago, my mother exposed the damage caused by our energy-intensive, environmentally devastating food production system. The struggle to change it continues.


Published in Earth Island Journal / By Anna Lappé / Winter 2021


Anna Lappé and her brother cook with Frances Moore Lappé in their San Francisco home kitchen in the 1980s. “More than the particulars of my mother’s cooking, I remember the details of her political activism,” the author writes. Photo by Nick Allen / Frances Moore Lappé family archives.



Nearly every day since March, I’ve been waking up before the sun rises to get some quiet time before my daughters — third and sixth graders now — stumble out of bed. Another school day filled with Zoom, another weekend in semi-lockdown. In these morning hours, I’ve been thinking a lot about my childhood. I close my eyes and picture our pale blue house on a windy street at the base of San Francisco’s Bernal Heights; the mural of The Beatles on a neighbor’s garage, John Lennon a blur as I whizzed by on roller skates; the glass jars of beans and rice and spices that lined our kitchen shelves.


I’ve been thinking about those early years not just because I’m home so much more with my own kids but because over these past few months I’ve been helping my mother on a project: the 50th anniversary edition of her Diet for a Small Planet, a book she published just before I was born. A book that has shaped my life.


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