Anna Lappé: Sustainable Farming Can Feed the World

“What a disorganized mess,” said the man seated to my left. I thought he was referring to the discursive non-question that had just been put forward by a member of the audience, and so I was about to agree wholeheartedly. But then he said, “Michael Pollan said the same thing in fewer words: Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.”

We were gathered on the third floor of Powell’s Bookstore in the sustainable food bastion of Portland, Oregon, to hear Anna Lappé talk about her new book, Diet for a Hot Planet: The Climate Crisis at the End of Your Fork and What You Can Do about It (The play on her mother’s 1971 book Diet for a Small Planet is, of course, intentional.)

Now I’m probably one of the biggest Michael Pollan fans there is, but Anna Lappé’s engrossing new book “Diet for a Hot Planet” is a very different book than “the Omnivore’s Dilemma” and I told this disaffected man so.  (Neither book is prescriptive, which is seemingly what this dude wanted. For that, he could just buy Michael Pollan’s slender “Food Rules.”) An investigative look at how the industrial food system contributes a full third of all global emissions, “Diet for a Hot Planet,” also takes a hard look at some of the most common and intransigent critiques leveled at the sustainable food movement. Ms. Lappé rejects them one by one, backing them up with reams of evidence.

I, for one, found a lot to think about after Ms. Lappé’s talk. Here are a few of the main points she made last night at Powell’s.

• Over the past decade we’ve heard a lot about how man-made carbon dioxide emissions cause climate change but very little about two other potent greenhouse gases: methane and nitrous oxide. These two, potentially more damaging to the atmosphere, are primarily a result of livestock production.

• The entire global food system—emissions from the production and distribution of farm chemicals as well as energy for factory farms and food processing—may account for one third of what’s heating our planet.

• This will not come as a surprise, but it’s the rare food multinational that actually creates positive change when it comes to “being green” and reducing its carbon footprint. Lappé gave just a few examples of greenwashing: at an industry conference she attended, the CEO of Unilever boasted, “sustainability is in our DNA”; McDonald’s rolled out a series of “endangered animals” Happy Meals. (For more, see the second section of her book, entitled “Spin.”)

• As regular readers of this column well know, there’s a huge movement afoot to re-regionalize our food systems, which can dramatically decrease the emissions that come from food. Partner this reality with the success stories (which Lappé documents in her book in a chapter entitled “Beyond the Fork”) of citizens putting pressure on companies and getting concrete results, and you realize that changing the nation’s relationship with food, though not easy, is within the realm of possibility.

• Ms. Lappé firmly rejects the notion that organic crops can’t feed the world. “This has become such a dominant frame that even journalists have bought this messaging—they don’t even question its premise,” she said. She cited an article by a journalist at Canada’s Globe and Mail that concludes organic farming is a “land-gobbling luxury” and then quotes the CEO of Nestle—not exactly an unbiased source on this issue. (This journalist’s other source was the head of business development for Syngenta, one of the largest agricultural-chemical companies in the world.) Her point?  This journalist could’ve interviewed an array of experts, including one of the 400 scientists behind the 2008 IAASTD report, “Agriculture at a Crossroads.” (The IAASTD is the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science, and Technology for Development, a series of reports that’s considered to be the most authoritative and credible research-based assessment of global agriculture.)  The report condemns industrial agriculture and urges a transition to “biological substitutes for agrochemicals,” especially in the developing world. (For more on the report, see here.)

During the Q&A, Ms. Lappé made a sage point. A man had asked her about the nutritional value of organic crops vs. conventional crops, but before answering she said, “What you call conventional farming I prefer to call ‘industrial farming’ or ‘factory farming.’ What is conventional? We’ve only been engaging in industrial farming for the past 50, maybe 100 years, so it’s not conventional or traditional.”