Anna Lappé, the author of Diet for a Hot Planet and the cofounder of Small Planet Institute, was in town this weekend. At a dinner last night, she spoke to a small group of movers and shakers in the Bay Area food world about how food choices influence climate change.
The daughter of author Frances Moore Lappé of Diet for a Small Planet fame, Anna Lappé’s book, which just came out in paperback, has the tagline “The Climate Crisis at the End of Your Fork and What You Can Do About It.” It focuses on the role of food production in climate change, said to be responsible for as much as one-third of greenhouse gas emissions.
Some of the issues she raised last night were about education, saying that a recent poll demonstrated that a large percentage of Americans lack basic knowledge about climate change, and a concern that the big players in the American food industry are out to squash the sustainable food movement.
Lappé pointed to the Alliance to Feed the Future, an industry group that launched last month to “tell the real story of modern food production” in response to “misperceptions about modern food production and technology.” Its web site lists members like the Frozen Pizza Institute and the Frozen Potato Product Institute—as well academic entities such as the California Institute for Food and Agricultural Research at UC Davis.
When the alliance launched, Sustainable Food News reported the alliance wanted to respond to messages in recent books and movies as well as in social media that “large-scale food production is bad.”
On a different scale, the host of last night’s event, Bon Appetit Management Co., is also out to counter the idea that large-scale food production has to have a negative impact on the environment.
The foodservice provider for over 400 locations at universities, museums, companies and at AT&T Park, the company has had a low-carbon focus for several years and a sustainable focus since 1999. In the first year of its Low Carbon Diet program, the company reduced the amount of beef it served by a third, “And no one noticed,” said Maisie Greenawalt, the company’s vice president of strategy.
