This Saturday, a group of Rockford churches and community organizations hold “Faith at the End of Your Fork,” a day-long series of workshops on making food choices that are healthy and sustainable.
The featured speaker will be Anna Lappé. The author and educator is widely known for her work as a sustainable food advocate. Her latest book is called “Diet for a Hot Planet: The Climate Crisis at the End of Your Fork and What You Can Do About It.” She's also the co-founder (with her mother and fellow activist Frances Moore Lappé ) of the Small Planet Institute.
WNIJ’s Guy Stephens spoke to Anna Lappé recently. He asked her, when it comes to food choices, what do people need to know? Her reply? "Food matters, and it matters much more than just for your personal health. It matters in terms of our planet's health," she says. In other words, food choices have consequences-what you choose affects not just what's on your plate today, but what gets sold in the future, what gets grown to meet that demand, and how that demand is met. "We're really talking about using food to build healthy communities, to foster a healthy environment and to help grow a healthy economy," she says.
Lappé says she wants people to realize that there is a connection between something that seems so abstract, like climate change, and what you eat. The present system, she says, not only encourages unhealthy eating, but also energy-intensive, unsustainable agriculture that relies heavily on chemicals, and produces greenhouse gases that are changing our climate. The answer, she says, lies in people realizing that they can make a difference, especially if they work together. "Yes we can do something individually when we go into our farmer's market or supermarkets to make certain choices," she says, "but really it's about building power, it's communities that ensure everyone gets fed, and fed well, and has access to sustainable food."