Frances Moore Lappé is the author or co-author of 19 books including the three-million copy Diet for a Small Planet. Her recent work on reframing our struggles to align with nature is EcoMind: Changing the Way We Think to Create the World We Want. Released by Nation Books in September 2011, it is the winner of a silver medal from the Independent Publisher Book Awards in the Environment/Ecology/Nature category. Jane Goodall called the book "powerful and inspiring,” saying, “EcoMind will open your eyes and change your thinking. I want everyone to read it.” Frances is the cofounder of three organizations, including Oakland based think tank Food First and, more recently, the Small Planet Institute, a collaborative network for research and popular education seeking to bring democracy to life, which she leads with her daughter Anna Lappé. Frances and her daughter have also cofounded the Small Planet Fund, which channels resources to democratic social movements worldwide.
In 1987 Frances received the Right Livelihood Award (considered an “Alternative Nobel”) “for revealing the political and economic causes of world hunger and how citizens can help to remedy them.” Her first book, Diet for a Small Planet, has sold three million copies and is considered “the blueprint for eating with a small carbon footprint since long before the term was coined,” wrote J.M. Hirsch, Associated Press. In 2008 Diet for a Small Planet was selected as one of 75 Books by Women Whose Words Have Changed the World by members of the Women’s National Book Association in observance of its 75th anniversary and was named by Gourmet Magazine as one of 25 people (including Thomas Jefferson, Upton Sinclair, and Julia Child), whose work has changed the way America eats.
In addition to EcoMind, Frances most recently released World Hunger: 10 Myths, coauthored with Joseph Collings, a complete re-write of their 1998 book to better understand hunger in a new world of climate change, GMOs, and more. In 2008, Lappé’s Getting a Grip along with Diet for a Small Planet were designated as “must reads” for the next U.S. president (by Barbara
Kingsolver and Michael Pollan, respectively) in The New York Times Sunday Review of Books. Lappé’s books have been translated into 15 languages and are used widely in university courses.
Frances has received 18 honorary doctorates from distinguished institutions including the University of Michigan. In 1985, she was a visiting scholar at the Institute for the Study of Social Change, University of California, Berkeley and from 2000 to 2001, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2008 she received the James Beard Foundation Humanitarian of the Year Award for her lifelong impact on the way people all over the world think about food, nutrition, and agriculture.
