Diet for a Hot Planet

 

Diet for a Hot Planet

By Anna Lappé
Bloomsbury USA, 2010, 336 pages, $24
Support YES! when you buy here from an independent bookstore.

 

By now most of us know to choose healthy foods and eat locally, but how often do we think about how our daily food choices contribute to climate change? Food activist Anna Lappé (daughter of author Frances Moore Lappé) connects global warming to the way we eat in Diet for a Hot Planet.

Extensively researched and written in a conversational tone, the book outlines, for example, why eating factory-farmed meat and palm-oil-saturated junk food may be worse for the planet than leaving your lights on at home while rumbling around town in an SUV. Agriculture and livestock-industry emissions are even higher than those in the transportation sector. And the demand for palm oil leads to plantations that destroy millions of acres of rainforests and peatlands, releasing massive amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

In the end, Lappé gives you a taste of everything, but you’ll have to stay at the table to truly get full. To borrow a phrase from its pages, this book is a “resolution to start a revolution.” Get informed. Get angry. Get inspired. Figuring out the actual costs of what you’re putting into your body is a great place to start.

---

Kathleen Yale wrote this review for A Resilient Community, the Fall 2010 issue of YES! Magazine. Kathleen is the reviews editor at Orion Magazine.

 

Interested?

• 3 Pillars of a Food Revolution: As marketers learn to fake climate-friendly food, Anna Lappe tells us how to spot the real thing. 
• UN Calls for Climate Friendly Diet: Frances Moore Lappé welcomes the report
• 8 Ways to Join the Local Food Movement