by Anna Lappé, The Nation When Scott Pruitt took over the top spot at the Environmental Protection Agency last year, one of his first formal actions was to reject the recommendation of his agency’s own scientists and refuse to ban the brain-damaging pesticide chlorpyrifos. The move came just 20 days after Pruitt had met with the CEO […]
by Anna Lappé As the daughter of an epidemiologist who took on some of the biggest chemical companies in the world, I had a ringside seat to an industry causing global harm and shirking its responsibility for doing so. Through Real Food Media and in my writing and public speaking, I’ve spent nearly two decades uncovering food system solutions […]
by Anna Lappé for Al Jazeera America At the turn of the last century, the father of public relations, Edward Bernays, launched the Celiac Project, whose medical professionals recommended bananas to benefit celiac disease sufferers. Those pitched on the sweet fruit’s miraculous properties didn’t know the project was actually created for the United Fruit Co., […]
By Anna Lappé for EARTH ISLAND JOURNAL On March 20, scientists from 11 countries convened by the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer released their unanimous conclusions about the world’s most used herbicide, glyphosate. In a paper that would be published in The Lancet Oncology, the experts concluded that the herbicide […]
REAL FOOD READS WITH AUTHOR TED GENOWAYS In this month’s #realfoodreads selection, The Chain: Farm, Factory and the Fate of our Food, Ted Genoways offers a powerful and important work of investigative journalism that explores the runaway growth of the American meatpacking industry and its dangerous consequences. I sat down with Ted to ask him some questions about the book, […]
by Anna Lappé for Earth Island Journal In the fall of 1962, a group of chemical companies including Monsanto – at the time the largest producer of the cancer-causing chemical compound, PCB – launched a full-throttle public relations campaign against Silent Spring and its author, biologist Rachel Carson. In Silent Spring, Carson dared […]
by Anna Lappé with the University of California for Slate California’s 90-mile-long Salinas Valley, with its mild climate and rich soil, is known for abundant agriculture. Often called the “salad bowl of the world,” this fertile valley two hours south of the San Francisco Bay Area produces 70 percent of the nation’s lettuce, along with bountiful strawberries, […]
by Anna Lappé for Al Jazeera America Forty-four years ago my mother, Frances Moore Lappé, published “Diet for a Small Planet,” a book that dared to suggest human beings could survive, even thrive, on a plant-centered diet and that doing so would be good for our bodies and the planet. Part meatless cookbook, part treatise […]
Letter to the Editor in the Washington Post The Feb. 25 Food article “Pastures or feedlots? The big beef conundrum,” ignored a central reason well-managed, grass-finished beef is better for us: Much of the beef in this country is finished in feedlots on a diet of chemically grown corn and soy and a daily dose […]
Great reporting over at Civil Eats today on an important new study looking at pesticide residues in the diets of people consuming organic and non-organic foods. Its described as the “largest study to look at organophosphate exposure in humans.” The study found that people consuming diets of chemically grown produce had higher concentrations of chemicals […]