Anna Blythe Lappé

Author and Sustainable Food Advocate

Anna Lappé is a national bestselling author and sought-after public speaker, respected for her work on sustainability, food politics, globalization, and social change. Named one of TIME’s “Eco-Who’s Who,” Anna has been featured in The New York Times, Gourmet, O: The Oprah Magazine, Domino, Food & Wine, Body + Soul, Natural Health, and Vibe, among many other publications.

Anna is a founding principal, with her mother Frances Moore Lappé, of 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 has raised more than $500,000 for democratic social movements worldwide, two of which have won the Nobel Peace Prize since the Fund’s founding in 2002.

Anna is a regular guest on nationally syndicated radio and appears frequently on television, from PBS to the CBC in Canada and FoxNews. Anna is currently the host for MSN’s Practical Guide to Healthy Living and is a co-host for the public television series, The Endless Feast. She can also be seen as a featured expert on Howdini.com; the Sundance Channel’s Big Ideas for a Small Planet; and the PBS documentary, Nourish: Food + Community. Anna is often called on to be an expert commentator on radio. She has been on hundreds of radio programs, including National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition, The Diane Rehm Show, Talk to America, and WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show and Leonard Lopate Show.

Since 2002, Anna has participated in more than three hundreds events, from community food festivals to university lectures. She has been a featured speaker at dozens of colleges and universities, including Boston College, Brown University, Columbia University, Dominican University, Northwestern University, University of California at Berkeley, Wellesley, Wesleyan, and Yale University, among many others.

Anna’s first book Hope’s Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet (Tarcher/Penguin 2002), co-written with her mother Frances Moore Lappé, chronicles courageous social movements around the world. Winner of the Nautilus Award for Social Change, Hope’s Edge has been published in several languages and is used in dozens of classrooms, from Telluride to Toronto to Tokyo.

Called “ingenious” by The New York Times, Anna’s second book Grub: Ideas for an Urban Organic Kitchen (Tarcher/Penguin 2006) showcases the ecological and social benefits of sustainable food and brings this diet to life with the seasonal menus of chef Bryant Terry.

Anna’s writing has been published in The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, International Herald Tribune, and Canada’s Globe and Mail. She writes a bi-monthly column on sustainability for Spirituality & Health and is a book review contributor for The San Francisco Chronicle and The New Scientist magazine. Anna is also a contributing author to a number of books, including WorldChanging: A User’s Guide to the 21st Century (Abrams 2006) and Feeding the Future: How the Battle over Food Will Change Your Life (Realize Media 2004). In 2006, Anna was the consulting editor for a special issue on food for The Nation magazine: “Wake Up America! Pay Attention to What You Eat.”

Her writing and advocacy has earned Anna numerous recognitions. She was named one of the nation’s leading environmental changemakers by Organic Style magazine and in 2006 was selected for Contribute magazine’s “21 Under 40 Making a Difference.” In 2007, Anna was chosen by the Missing Peace Project for the Compassion in Action Award.

Anna earned 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 with the WK Kellogg Foundation.

Anna travels frequently for lectures and workshops across the country and internationally. She is currently working on her third book about food, climate change, and the future of eating to be published in 2010 by Bloomsbury. Learn more at www.takeabite.cc.

Anna on the Radio

• Brian Lehrer Show, wnyc.org/shows/bl/episodes/2008/04/09
• Leonard Lopate Show, wnyc.org/shows/lopate/episodes/2006/06/13.