Living Democracy, Feeding Hope
"HOPE HAS POWER,
So we reframe hope-defeating ideas -- about scarcity, power, and democracy -- freeing citizens to create a living democracy TOWARD LIFE"
Frances Moore Lappé
CHECK OUT OUR LATEST WORK
At Small Planet Institute, we are always busy working toward a more democratic society.
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ABOUT SMALL PLANET INSTITUTE
At the Small Planet Institute, we believe that hope has enormous power. So we seek to identify core, often unspoken, assumptions—economic, political, and psychological—now driving humanity to take our planet in directions that none of us individually would ever choose. In addressing this tragedy, Small Planet focuses on solutions: From the crisis of needless hunger to that of democracy itself, we offer evidence-based, life-serving frames of understanding and stories of possibility to enable all of us to perceive and join in solutions emerging everywhere.
“Every aspect of our lives is, in a sense, a vote for the kind of world we want to live in.” - Frances Moore Lappé
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Discover the book that revolutionized the meaning of our food choices and sold more than 3 million copies—now in a 50th-anniversary edition with a timely introduction plus new and updated plant-centered recipes
This new edition features eighty-five updated plant-centered recipes, including more than a dozen new delights from celebrity chefs including Mark Bittman, Padma Lakshmi, Alice Waters, José Andrés, Bryant Terry, Mollie Katzen, and Sean Sherman.
OUR MISSION
Small Planet Institute spreads an empowering understanding of democracy as the wide dispersion of power, transparency in public affairs, and a culture of mutual accountability. We call it Living Democracy, enabling each of us to act effectively on emerging solutions from electoral politics and economic life to the environment, hunger, agriculture, and beyond.
Our goal is thus a future where all communities are thriving with dignity as Living Democracies, fulfilling our essential needs for personal power, meaning, and connection.
The Godmother of ‘Plant-Based’ Living
"On a recent afternoon, Ms. Lappé welcomed a reporter into her home in a leafy town outside Boston to talk about the way we eat, then and now. Despite her success — “Diet” has sold more than three million copies, and she was named a recipient of the Right Livelihood Award, a kind of alternative Nobel Prize — Ms. Lappé, or Frankie to her friends, is a down-to-earth, cheerful woman of 77. She greeted her guest with a warm bowl of Comforting Carrot and Onion Soup, one of the recipes included in “Diet,” which she specially prepared that morning..." Read More
The New York Times Style Magazine
The 25 Most Influential Cookbooks From the Last 100 Years.
It was intended to be a wake-up call, not a cookbook. In 1969, after studying crop reports and nutritional tables, Frances Moore Lappé, then a socially minded 25-year-old former community organizer in Berkeley, Calif., came to the conclusion that America had the power to cure the world’s hunger crisis if farmers focused on feeding humans rather than on fattening up livestock. Determined to share this knowledge with her peers, she wrote a 70-page booklet laying out her premise, which the publisher Ballantine offered to distribute, asking Lappé to add recipes showing readers how to get enough protein without meat. Shaped by the counterculture’s whole-grain, internationally influenced tastes, the dishes she came up with alongside recipe developer Ellen Buchman Ewald, including crusty soybean casserole and peanut-sesame loaf supreme, weren’t exactly a culinary step forward. But when “Diet for a Small Planet” was released in 1971, selling 500,000 copies in its first two years, it introduced a new generation to the idea of eating as a political act, galvanizing them to reduce meat consumption and seek out food co-ops. For the latest edition — the 2021 release honoring the book’s 50th anniversary — Lappé and her daughter, Anna, recruited chefs to revamp and brighten the recipes (Padma Lakshmi contributed her yellow velvet lentil soup). Still, in the author’s mind, flavor has always been merely a vehicle for ideas, and her critiques — of the illusion of scarcity and the environmental impact of meat production, in particular — are just as resonant today.
November 20, 2024
