Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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Anna Lappé: The Real Food Revolution

Renowned author and food activist Anna Lappé has spent most of her adult life 
working to bring about a badly needed change in our industrial food system.

Her mother, Frances Moore Lappé, is the author of 17 books including the 
bestseller Diet for a Small Planet, and Anna herself is now a national 
best-selling author and sought-after public speaker, respected for her work 
on sustainability, food politics, globalization and social change. Listed in 
Time magazine’s “Who’s Who: The Eco-Guide,” Anna has been featured in the New 
York Times, Gourmet, O: The Oprah Magazine, Domino, Food & Wine, Body + Soul, 
Natural Health and Vibe, as well as many other publications.

In 2002, Anna and her mother founded the Small Planet Institute, an 
international network for research and popular education about the root 
causes of hunger and poverty. The Lappés are also co-founders of the Small 
Planet Fund, which has raised more than $750,000 for democratic social 
movements worldwide, two of which have won the Nobel Peace Prize since the 
fund’s founding.

In her continuing efforts, Anna has seen much to give her—and the rest of 
us—a great deal of hope for a sustainable food system in the years ahead. She 
recently sat down with Organic Connections to share her thoughts on the 
makeup of our food system and what is really needed to bring about change.

The Three Pillars

In helping give direction to a revolution in what we eat and how we grow it, 
Anna has recently boiled down the sometimes disparate factors of the crusade 
into three basic core values. “When I talk about the three pillars of a 
sustainable food system,” she said, “what I’m really suggesting is that we 
ask ourselves, what are the core values we bring to our food?”

Ecology

The first of these pillars is ecology. “Ecology emphasizes 
interrelationships,” Anna explained. “Everything is connected. An ecological 
food system means one that has a fundamental respect for nature and natural 
systems. At its heart, this kind of food system works with nature to produce 
abundance; it’s not an attack against nature with toxic pesticides or raising 
livestock using highly unnatural methods, such as feedlots. An ecological 
food system would raise livestock on the diet they evolved with and provide a 
life that allows them to fully embody their nature.”

Community

“A sustainable food system also has at its core the health and vibrancy of 
communities,” Anna continued. “It’s particularly important to look at this 
value in the context of the dominant food system, which is governed largely 
by market forces. Currently these forces are focused on maximizing profit for 
multinational food companies that bring us most of the food we eat. What many 
of my colleagues and I talk about is how we can use the market to help us 
organize our food system while having that market operate within a set of 
community values. For example, if some people are shut out from being able to 
have access to foods because of market forces, how can we have a set of 
community values that are overarching, ensuring that everyone has access to 
good healthy food? And how can we ensure that deep-pocketed food companies 
aren’t lobbying for policies that benefit their bottom line instead of our 
health?”

Fairness

“The third value is one of fairness, that everyone along the food chain—all 
the workers and farmers and food producers—has been treated fairly and is 
getting a fair wage,” Anna said. “Just like the community pillar, the value 
of fairness means trying to create a food system in which every one of us, no 
matter where we live or what our tax bracket is, can afford sustainably 
raised real food.”

Interconnectivity

As Anna points out, these three pillars are all connected—and 
interconnectivity is essential to the entire vision.

“For me the interconnectivity goes to the heart of it all,” she said. “When 
most people think about eating food—and polling and focus-group data has 
borne this out—they tend to think of it as an individual act that you and I 
do often in the privacy of our own homes, hidden from the rest of us. We 
typically don’t think about the food system. Yes, eating is one of the most 
personal things we do, but we tend to forget that the choices you and I make 
about food have ripple effects that ultimately, I argue, connect us to the 
whole globe. We’ve all heard the maxim ‘You are what you eat,’ but I like to 
think of it slightly differently: I am what you eat; you are what I eat. We 
are what each other eats. When my family and I make choices to support 
organic farmers, we add our weight to the movement shifting us away from 
chemical agriculture. Chemicals in the environment affect all of us, whether 
we choose to eat organic food or not. They affect us through the runoff that 
ends up creating a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico; they affect us by 
leaching into our waterways. They affect our neighbors and the farm workers 
and the farmers.

“Interconnectivity is really at the core of the food system, but because food 
is so personal and individual, I think that interconnectivity can sometimes 
be invisible to many of us.”

The Good News

>From the microcosm of her current hometown, New York City, Anna has been 
>watching the food revolution take hold in numerous exciting ways—and expand 
>outward.

“Just in the past few years I’ve seen a lot of innovation coming out of city 
agencies. A couple of years ago, the Mayor’s Office created the city’s first 
food policy coordinator. Among other efforts, the city has launched the 
Healthy Bodegas Program, working with bodega owners to bring healthier food 
into their stores. It has also created the Green Carts Program, using both 
public and private funding, to introduce one thousand green carts into 
neighborhoods identified as those with the least access to healthy fresh 
produce. These green carts provide fruits and vegetables at relatively 
affordable prices, and the city is monitoring their impact.

“Another program New York City has launched that I think is excellent is 
Health Bucks, a collaboration of different city agencies. This program is one 
strategy to encourage people to consume more fruits and vegetables, while 
supporting those people with less income in doing so: Spend five dollars at a 
farmers’ market using food stamps and get a Health Buck coupon worth two 
dollars to spend at the farmers’ market. It’s an incentive for people who are 
on food stamps to go to farmers’ markets, where they’ll get the freshest, 
healthiest fruits and vegetables, and it also provides additional financial 
support for farmers.

“This is a very exciting time across the country in terms of this kind of 
city-level innovation in food policy. New York City started the food policy 
coordinator position two and a half years ago, and Baltimore just announced a 
food policy director. Kansas City has a food policy coordinator, and Boston 
announced that it also is beginning to develop a food policy coordinator 
position. There are additional cities that have created this position as 
well, while a lot of states have developed food policy councils. There’s 
plenty of energy emerging, and I think it’s partly the result of the growing 
awareness that we have a fundamental crisis on our hands—we have a broken 
food system that needs urgent repair. One of the ways we are going to get 
there is through changing our policies. We can and should be looking at 
national policy, but there’s also activity that can happen at the local level 
that can make a difference.”

The Critics

Of course, while all the positive change is occurring, detractors—with a big 
stake in the status quo—continue to play down the value of a sustainable food 
system. As Anna indicates, though, their arguments crumble under the 
slightest of scrutiny.

“The strongest criticism of sustainable agriculture I hear—and have heard 
year after year since I started working on these issues a decade ago—is the 
myth that we can’t feed the world with sustainably grown foods, that we 
couldn’t possibly feed the world if we shifted away from a 
fossil-fuel-dependent agriculture. I think the most powerful response to 
their claim that we need their technology is, first of all, how successful 
has industrial agriculture been in feeding the planet? Today there are enough 
calories produced globally to feed every single one of us—in fact, to make 
every person on the planet overweight with too much calorie consumption. Yet 
about one-sixth of the world’s population is going hungry. Clearly there is 
something else operating here on a planet that is producing enough food yet 
has persistent hunger. One way I tend to engage with the myth is to say, 
‘Look, in order to feed the world we’re going to have to talk about a lot of 
other things besides food production. We’re going to have to talk about 
power, and power in the food system. We’re going to have to talk about 
access. We’re going to have to talk about who has a say in what foods get 
grown and where.

“Secondly, we’ve known for a long time that sustainable methods can produce 
the same amount of food as, if not more than, industrial agriculture—without 
the detriments to our environment of pollution, excessive energy used, or 
depletion of fossil fuel reserves. What is particularly positive about 
engaging with this debate now is that there is even more research supporting 
this argument. In addition, sustainable methods tend to create healthier 
soils that are more able to retain water and withstand heavy flooding. We’re 
talking about farms that not only produce abundant foods but also are more 
resilient.”

Looking Forward and Connecting

With everything that’s occurring, Anna sees us going very much in the right 
direction.

“Interest in a sustainable food system today compared to ten years ago is 
phenomenal,” she concluded. “I just did an event in Portland, Maine, on a 
Wednesday in the middle of the summer, and the local bookstore was packed, 
with standing room only. For the past ten years I’ve traveled to cities 
around the country, and everywhere I have gone I’ve discovered programs 
working to address these issues. In another example, I just went to the 
annual gathering of the National Cooperative Grocers Association, which was 
attended by representatives from food co-ops all over America that are 
working to bring healthy local food into their communities. I was struck 
afterwards that many of the co-ops had only started in the last five years.

“Overall, I see energy blooming across the country to work on policy—food 
policy that connects the dots between urban planning, public health, 
childhood nutrition, energy use and environmental sustainability. What is 
most encouraging is observing these connections being made. In order to truly 
transform the food system, it can only happen this way, when we are forging 
these relationships and thinking in terms of the whole picture.”

For the latest news from Anna, visit her websites at www.smallplanet.org and 
www.takeabite.cc.

Source: Organic Connections Magazine (http://s.tt/12xu6)