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
ABOUT SMALL PLANET INSTITUTE
At the Small Planet Institute, we believe that ideas have 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 Magazine- Talk
She Changed the Way We Eat. She Wants to Fix Our Democracy, Too.
With the publication of her best-selling book, “Diet for a Small Planet,” in 1971, Lappé argued for the health and ecological benefits of a plant-based diet and surfaced the harmful links among meat production, increased societal consumption and environmental degradation — all of which is now widely taken as common wisdom. Lappé, a recipient of the prestigious Right Livelihood Award, often referred to as the alternative Nobel Prize, has also long been focused on the equally fundamental subject of how to make our democracy work better for more people. “I want to shift people away from thinking: Democracy, that’s for somebody else. That’s policy, wonky stuff,”
December 21, 2019