For more than two decades, I’ve been using my writing, public speaking, philanthropy, organizing, and initiatives like Real Food Media, to promote the simple idea that our food system should protect the environment and biodiversity, promote health and wellness, and provide quality jobs with dignity. I’ve spent my career focused on working toward a world in which the food we eat is good for our bodies, for the planet, and for all those who work along the food chain. I welcome your collaboration.
ABOUT ANNA LAPPÉ
Anna Lappé is a national bestselling author, a respected advocate for food justice and sustainability, 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 fourteen 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. A frequent public speaker, her popular TEDx talks and Food MythBuster videos have been viewed nearly 2 million times.
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 and has been optioned for a television series. 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 can be found in The New York Times, The International Herald Tribune, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Guardian, among other outlets. She has contributed 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 magazine.
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. In 2012, she founded Real Food Media, which uses storytelling, media strategy, and communications collaborations to reveal the true cost of industrial agriculture and the power of sustainable food systems to create healthy, thriving communities. Among its projects, Real Food Media has created the world’s largest short films competition on food, collaborated with the award-winning StoryCorps, launched an international online book club, and helped support passage of Good Food Purchasing Program across the United States.
Anna has been a featured expert on PBS’s Retro Report, Need to Know, and Nourish and the Sundance Channel’s Big Ideas for a Small Planet as well as co-hosting the public television series, The Endless Feast. Anna is also a frequent guest on nationally syndicated radio shows and has appeared on dozens of radio programs and podcasts, including NPR’s Weekend Edition, All Things Considered, and The Diane Rehm Show.
A sought-after public speaker and event emcee, in the past twenty years Anna has participated in more than 600 events, from keynoting the largest natural foods trade show in the United States to hosting a food-focused fundraiser at Sotheby’s. She has also 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, among many others.
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 supports democratic social movements worldwide, two of which have won the Nobel Peace Prize since the Fund’s founding. In addition to her philanthropy through the Small Planet Fund, Anna launched and runs the Food Sovereignty Fund of the Panta Rhea Foundation and is an active participant in several funder collaboratives building more just and sustainable food systems worldwide, including the Agroecology Fund.
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 the Rainforest Action Network, the Food and Farm Communications Fund, the Castanea Fellowship, and the Mesa Refuge, a writer’s retreat in Point Reyes, California. She is also an advisor to Herbicide-Free Campus and the Food Chain Workers Alliance.
Based in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and daughters, Anna has conducted research on food and sustainability across the United States and in dozens of 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.