Hope's Edge

In April, I mentioned how I read Diet for a Hot Planet in anticipation for seeing Anna Lappé at at food workshop/conference. I didn't know then what an interesting person Anna is and what kind of fascinating stories she can tell. She gave two talks and after her second someone in the audience asked if she was drawing from her new book for the talks. I knew the second talk was all Diet for a Hot Planet, and she explained the first talk was derived from the book she wrote with her mother, Frances Moore Lappé, Hope's Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet. 

Hope's Edge tells stories of food revolutions around the world. Frances and Anna visited the San Francisco Bay Area to see how prison and school programs incorporating vegetable gardening improved the life of their participants, Brazil to see the Landless Workers' Movement, Bangladesh to learn more about the Grameen (microcredit) Bank, India to witness food scarcity, Kenya to learn about the Green Belt Movement, France and back to America. One of the themes is the true cost of cheap food and the issues of fair trade. It is an incredible book full of inspiring stories about people who have faced hopeless situations and yet rose up and did what seemed impossible-- for example, a woman who was told she could not help plant trees in Kenya turning around and training a force of women who would go on to plant 20 million. This book reiterates the idea that there is no such thing as a shortage of food, but shortage of democracy. The earth can produce enough food to feed the world, the problem lies in the allocation of the earth's resources. But the book goes a step forward and shows what people are able to accomplish when they are pushed to hope's edge.