admin September 19th, 2008
They’ll all be together on one stage at this year’s sold-out FarmAid at the Comcast Center in Mansfield, MA, at 11 am, this Saturday. The group will be assembled for a pre-show press event to put into context the show, its goals, and the implications of local and sustainable farming for our economy, our health, and our democracy. If you don’t have tickets, you can watch the show live in HD on DIRECTV’s The 101 Network. FarmAid.org will also feature a free live webcast of the entire concert starting at 4pm.
admin August 29th, 2008
A new profile on Frances has been posted on Voice of America. The piece, titled “American Activist Promotes Democracy Worldwide,” can be read — or downloaded as an audio file — here.
See below for other recent VoA coverage of Frances and her work.
admin July 21st, 2008
In her latest piece, “A Shortage of Democracy, Not Food”, Frances revisits her Diet for a Small Planet’s days and the revelation that the root of world hunger is not a lack of food but a lack of democracy. “Because no human being chooses hunger, hunger is proof that a person has been denied a voice in meeting survival needs. And, since a say in one’s future is the very essence of democracy, the existence of hunger belies democracy.”
Read the article here.
admin June 17th, 2008
It’s been quite a month for Frances. If you’ve been following this blog, then you know she won the James Beard Foundation’s Humanitarian of the Year Award, and has a done a good deal of high-profile and wonderful indy press. In addition, her latest book, Getting a Grip, has been named the winner of the Gold/”Best in Small Press” Nautilus Award this year.
Frances shares the honor with some fine company. You’ll find a list of the other honorees here.
And to see more of the recent coverage of Frances, Getting a Grip, and her ongoing work as an author, food and world-hunger expert, and “Living Democracy” advocate, just scroll down — and keep coming back.
admin June 2nd, 2008
In this new piece from the New York Times‘ Sunday Book Review, Frances’s first book Diet for a Small Planet, and her latest, Getting a Grip, have been recommended (by Michael Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver, no less) as must-reads for the next US president.
Writing about Diet (as well as of Wendell Berry’s Unsettling of America, Pollan writes: “In Diet for a Small Planet, Frances Moore Lappé shone a light on the wastefulness and environmental costs of meat-eating, predicting that humanity’s growing appetite for meat would lead to hunger for the world’s poor. Together these two visionary writers — who fell out of favor during the cheap-food and cheap-energy years that began in the ’80s and are just now coming to a calamitous close — still have much to say about the way out of our current predicament.”
About Getting a Grip, Kingsolver writes: “Forget the personality claptrap: our next president will need to know how to restructure the carbon-based economy, pronto. I assume all the candidates have read An Inconvenient Truth, by Al Gore, so they understand that anything they promise will have to be delivered without cheap fossil fuels. For further reading, Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy and Frances Moore Lappé’s Getting a Grip offer new definitions of progress and economy with an eye toward the human aptitudes for resourcefulness and community.”
