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Book Review

Hope's Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet

by Frances Moore Lappe and Anna Lappe

A wonderful, insightful, eye-opening read. Ms. Lappe and her daughter Anna revisit and expand themes from the original book, "Diet For a Small Planet" discussing globalization and the consolidation of food systems, the staggering loss of plant diversity, the continuing farm crisis, dwindling water and soil resources, and genetic modification of our food crops, limiting plant diversity even further.

The question, 'is hunger really driven by scarcity,' is reexamined in new light while agribusiness continues its apologetic stance, or could it be an outgrowth of the lack of a "living democracy" throughout the world as the authors suggest?

The book challenges our notion of what the real problems are and takes us to places where ordinary people are taking extraordinary measures to regain control over their food and their lives. For many in the world, the results are improved health, stronger communities, and conservation of earth's resources. All this in the face of businesses caring more for profit than people, the environment, equality or human rights, “profit over all else.”

“Hope's Edge” takes the reader on a tour of the world, from India where Vandana Shiva's "Navdanya" Movement has helped thousands of farmers, to Bangladesh, the Grameen Bank's micro-loans have enabled thousands of women to lift themselves out of poverty and onto Brazil, where The Landless Workers Movement, has taken over idle land. In Kenya, the greenbelt movement has planted millions of trees, Berkeley, California, children are learning the benefits of organic gardening and cooking natural foods in their middle school. The book brings hope, but only when people act together for the benefit of everyone, unlike corporations which most often act for the benefit of a few.

From the book, “I still believe food has this unique power. With food as a starting point, we can choose to meet people and to encounter events so powerful that they jar us out of our ordinary way of seeing the world, and open us to new, uplifting and empowering possibilities. They call us to travel ‘hopes edge.’” Maybe everyone in the U.S. needs to stop thinking of food as a source of energy or just something we have to do to stay alive and see it as something far more personal that can divide us or bring us together as humans, sharing in a commonality of life. Food can either destroy us or bring us a truer sense of democracy, justice and equality. It's up to us and the book gives us hopeful direction.

Buy a copy of: Hope's Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet

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