Food activist Anna Lappé discusses her new book

April 10, 2006

Food activist Anna Lappé discusses her new book April 17

If Santa Cruz is the heart of the alternative foods movement, it will welcome one of its own on April 17 when author Anna Lappé comes to town.

Anna Lappé will talk about her new book, Grub: Ideas for an Urban Organic Kitchen, coauthored with Bryant Terry

Lappé, daughter of "small planet" food guru Frances Moore Lappé, will give a free public talk on Monday, April 17, at 7 p.m. in Classroom Unit 2 at UCSC. Her visit, part of the Education for Sustainable Living Program's Spring Lecture Series, is being sponsored in part by the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems.

Lappé is coauthor with chef Bryant Terry of the new book, Grub: Ideas for an Urban Organic Kitchen (Tarcher/Penguin 2006), which offers readers ideas and hands-on tools and menus to create healthy lives for themselves and their communities.

Lappé's first book Hope's Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet (Tarcher/Penguin 2002), cowritten with her mother, chronicles social movements around the world that are addressing the root causes of hunger and poverty. Winner of the Nautilus Award for Social Change, Hope's Edge has been published in several languages and is used in classrooms across the country.

Lappé and her mother, author of the groundbreaking book Diet for a Small Planet, lead the Cambridge-based Small Planet Institute, a collaborative network for research and popular education, and the Small Planet Fund, which has raised more than $250,000 for democratic social movements worldwide since 2002.

Lappé has contributed to a number of books, including Feeding the Future: How the Battle Over Food Will Change Your Life. She is a board member of the Center for Media and Democracy and was named one of the country's leading environmental changemakers by Organic Style magazine. She holds an M.A. in economic and political development from Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs. She is currently a Food and Society Policy Fellow, a national program of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. She lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.