Living Democracy, Feeding Hope
ANNA BLYTHE LAPPÉ
Check out Anna's current work at realfoodmedia.org and pantarhea.org
Anna Lappé is a national bestselling author, a respected advocate for sustainability and justice along the food chain and an advisor to funders investing in food system transformation. A recipient of the James Beard Leadership Award, Anna is the co-author or author of three books and the contributing author to more than a dozen others. Anna’s work has been translated internationally and featured in The Washington Post, The New York Times, Gourmet, Oprah Magazine, among many other outlets.
Named one of TIME’s “eco” Who’s-Who, Anna is the founder or co-founder of three national organizations, including the Small Planet Institute and the Small Planet Fund, which she launched with her mother, Frances Moore Lappé. She currently leads Real Food Media, based at Corporate Accountability International, which she founded to bring together leading food and farm organizations to produce powerful communications initiatives to inspire, educate and grow the movement for sustainable food and farming. Since its founding in 2012, Real Food Media has created the world’s largest short films competition on food with pop-up festivals around the world, collaborated with the award-winning StoryCorps to elevate voices of food workers, produced powerful mythbusting videos viewed more than one million times, launched a national online book club #RealFoodReads, and helped support passage of good food purchasing policies nationwide.
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In addition to her philanthropy through the Small Planet Fund, Anna is the director of the Food & Democracy program of the Panta Rhea Foundation and is an active participant of several funder collaboratives building more just and sustainable food systems worldwide.
Anna’s most recent book, Diet for a Hot Planet: The Climate Crisis at the End of Your Fork and What You Can Do About It (Bloomsbury), was named by Booklist and Kirkus as one of the best environmental books of the year. Anna is also the co-author of Grub: Ideas for an Urban Organic Kitchen (Penguin) and Hope’s Edge (Penguin), which chronicles grassroots solutions to hunger around the world. In addition to her books, Anna’s opinion writing has appeared in publications around the world, including The Guardian, The International Herald Tribune, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Washington Post, The New York Times and more. She has written a regular column for Al Jazeera America and Earth Island Journal and has been a guest editor for special editions on food for The Nation.
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Anna is a frequent guest on nationally syndicated radio shows and has appeared on dozens of radio programs and podcasts, including National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition, All Things Considered, and The Diane Rehm Show. Anna was the co-host of the public television series, The Endless Feast and has been a featured expert on PBS’s Need to Know and Nourish and the Sundance Channel’s Big Ideas for a Small Planet.
In 2001, with her mother Frances Moore Lappé, Anna co-founded the Cambridge-based 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 and given away more than $1 million for democratic social movements worldwide, two of which have won the Nobel Peace Prize since the Fund’s founding in 2002.
A frequent public speaker and event emcee, in the past fifteen years Anna has participated in more than 600 events, from keynoting community food festivals to delivering guest lectures at universities to hosting a food-focused fundraiser at Sotheby’s. She has been a guest lecturer at dozens of colleges and universities, including Boston College, Brown University, Columbia University, New York University, Northwestern University, Wesleyan, Vassar, the University of California at Berkeley, and Yale University.
Anna’s writing and advocacy have earned her numerous accolades. In addition to her James Beard Foundation Leadership Award, Anna has been featured as a food fighter in The New York Times and received the Compassion in Action Award from the Missing Peace Project.
Anna holds an M.A. in Economic and Political Development from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and graduated with honors from Brown University. From 2004 to 2006, she was a Food and Society Policy Fellow, a national program of the WK Kellogg Foundation. She is an active board member of Rainforest Action Network and the Mesa Refuge, a writer’s retreat in Point Reyes, California.
Based in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and two daughters, Anna has conducted research on food and sustainability across the United States and in more than 20 countries worldwide, including South Korea, China, Bangladesh, India, France, Poland, Italy, Mali, Kenya, Brazil and Turkey.
You can see Anna talk about food and empathy in her TEDxBerkeley presentation and about the dangers of marketing junk food to children in her TEDxManhattan speech.
Hear from Anna at TEDxBerkeley on "The Empathy of Food"
Hear from Anna at TEDxManhattan on "Marketing Food to Children"