by Anna Lappé for Al Jazeera America Humans can survive weeks without food, but only days without water — in some conditions, only hours. It may sound clichéd, but it’s no hyperbole: Water is life. So what happens when private companies control the spigot? Evidence from water privatization projects around the world paints a pretty […]
by Anna Lappé for Civil Eats The just-released synthesis report on global warming from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has prompted some to start name-dropping Thomas Malthus. Malthus, you may remember, was the 19th Century British economist and demographer who warned that population growth would inevitably lead to global food shortages. In […]
by Anna Lappé for Al Jazeera America While my sister-in-law put the finishing touches on Thanksgiving dinner, I listened to her friend recount the losing battle her husband, a Vietnam veteran, fought with lung cancer. She explained her husband’s illness was caused by his wartime exposure to the toxic defoliant Agent Orange, produced primarily by […]
by Anna Lappé for Edible Feast BERKELEY, CA—On a foggy hillside in the state of Hidalgo, Mexico, farmers prepare a traditional goat dish in a fire pit—and add plenty of oregano. The spice is the heart of this small-scale cooperative’s business that grows the sturdy herb for sale in Mexico and beyond. “In my own […]
by Anna Lappé for Huffington Post Last fall, when I launched the first-ever Real Food Media short films contest with project partners around the country, I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. I just knew that there were incredible stories of people farming, growing, cooking, and sharing food as well as fighting […]
by Anna Lappé for Civil Eats What do beekeepers, oregano farmers, and poetic seed savers have in common? They’re just some of the amazing people profiled in the first Real Food Media Contest’s top 10 films. I launched the Contest last year along with a coalition of amazing food and farming organizations—from Real […]
by Anna Lappé for Al Jazeera America Let’s say you are a waitress or waiter. Let’s say you worked the night of Jan. 28. And let’s imagine that somewhere in your restaurant a big-screen television beamed President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address while you were taking orders, delivering food and busing dishes. Like […]
by Anna Lappé for Civil Eats If you’ve been reading the running commentary over at Grist for the past six months, journalist Nathanael Johnson has been opining about genetic engineering in agriculture, diving into the debate and surfacing now with a final “what I learned” piece. His column has gotten a lot of attention […]
by Anna Lappé for Al Jazeera America In 1982, my father, the late toxicologist and medical ethicist Dr. Marc Lappé, published “Germs That Won’t Die,” raising the alarm about the overuse of antibiotics and the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. He would have no idea that nearly four decades later, the crisis has only gotten worse. […]
by Anna Lappé for Civil Eats In 1993, six farmworkers gathered in a local Catholic church in Immokalee, Florida, two hours northwest of Miami. Seated in a circle of folding chairs, they began to recount the human rights abuses they had suffered and witnessed while working in the tomato fields of Florida. One of the farmworkers […]