The Secret Ingredient

“[Hope] is a key source of energy to enable us to seek solutions together.” -Frances Moore Lappé

Hope is different from faith in that we need to act in hope as opposed to just having faith that everything will be okay. But in acting, when it comes to food, we are doing so and operating in a system where we know too much about food and the pesticides in our food system, the inequity, and injustice. So how can we have hope and what is hope?

For the ancient Greeks, “Hope” was a type of self-deception; one of the evils of Pandora’s box. To the Christians, it was one of the 3 virtues. Kant asked, ‘what may I hope?’ whilst Nietzsche thought of “Hope” as the worst of all evils prolonging the torment of man. Yet even for those critical of hope like Camus, who said “hope is tantamount to resignation and to live is to not be resigned,” there was agreement that life was impossible without it. 

In the reissue of Diet For A Small Planet, 50 years on our guest today Frances Moore Lappé turns to “Hope” as an antidote to many of the ills and devastating problems we face.

In this edition of The Secret Ingredient, Raj Patel of the Lyndon Baines Johnson School of Public Affairs, Tom Phillpot of Mother Jones Magazine, and Rebecca McInroy of KUT Radio will ask her, why?

In 1971, “Diet for a Small Planet” broke new ground, revealing how our everyday acts are a form of power to create health for ourselves and our planet. This extraordinary book first exposed the needless waste built into a meat-centered diet. Now, in a special edition for its 50th anniversary, world-renowned food expert Frances Moore Lappé goes even deeper, showing us how plant-centered eating can help restore our damaged ecology, address the climate crisis, and move us toward real democracy. Sharing her personal journey and how this revolutionary book shaped her own life, Lappé offers a fascinating philosophy on changing yourself—and the world—that can start with changing the way we eat.

Frances Moore Lappé is the author or co-author of twenty books about world hunger, living democracy, and the environment, that all started with Diet for a Small Planet that has now sold over three million copies. The revised and updated version is out now from Penguin Random House and features eighty-five updated plant-centered recipes, including more than a dozen new delights from celebrity chefs including Mark Bittman, Padma Lakshmi, Alice Waters, José Andrés, Bryant Terry, Mollie Katzen, and Sean Sherman.

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“We’re fighting for a worldview. We’re fighting for a different version of what it means to be human on the planet. We’re fighting for a different version of what just relations look like between the human and non-human world.” –Julian Aguon

Guam is the secret ingredient for our conversation with indigenous human rights lawyer and author of The Properties of Perpetual Light, Julian Aguon.

In his book, Aguon takes us on a dreamlike journey past the horrors and indignation of his colonized home to illuminate the beauty, the generative ecosystem, and indigenous knowledge that can quite literally be the perpetual light that guides the way to a sustainable future.

Hosts Raj Patel, Tom Philpott, and Rebecca McInroy talk with Aguon about Guam’s unique history, ecology, and food, and about how we all must come together now to reshape what is possible.

Auntie’s Bookstore in Spokane, WA is hosting a conversation with Julian Aguon and Tommy Orange, author of There There Thursday, July 22nd at 7 pm PT.

Register here for this free event: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZIodOuvqz4rHdy9yoM–rHiXv09q0v-nrL2

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“How do we build these understandings from a decolonial, antiracist and antipatriarchal basis? How do we build real solidarity bridges that do not replicate patronising structures of power? How can we learn and build with those who have resisted and re(x)isted, in order to open new imaginaries to heal mother earth, the other, and ourselves?” Rita Valencia and Charlotte Sáenz

These are just some of the questions we explore with Rita Valencia and Charlotte Sáenz on this edition of The Secret Ingredient with Raj Patel, Tom Philpott, and Rebecca McInroy.

Rita Valencia has been working for several years with the Proceso de Liberación de la Madre Tierra movement in the Cauca region of the Nasa people in Colombia, and she along with Charlotte Sáenz talk with us about joy, the difference between translation and interpretation, reimagining liberation, time and social movements, and the paradigm shift that must take place today.

In our correspondence prior to this recording, Charlotte and Rita wrote: “It feels important for us to hear and learn from such pueblos en movimiento, that are doing things beyond the nation-state and reframing ways of doing, not only politics but also social and even ontological existence. This is particularly important because complex concepts such as Mandar Obedeciendo or Buen Vivir are being imported into English and other dominant languages and mindscapes as mere translations (bad ones for that matter), and not as grounded practices. This becomes even more urgent and necessary because extractivism, repression, and all climate change drivers are increasing and will continue to do so during the current global pandemic and economic recession.”

Read more about Rita and the Food March, the movement organized to feed the most dispossessed in the cities, in a piece published in La Jornada newspaper’s Ojarasca.

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The Secret Ingredient with KUT’s Rebecca McInroy, Raj Patel author of A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, and food and agriculture correspondent for Mother Jones, Tom Philpott welcome back Rob Wallace an evolutionary biologist for his take on the link between global outbreaks of infectious disease and global agriculture. Rob Wallace is the author of Big Farms Make Big Flu: Dispatches on Infectious Disease, Agribusiness, and the Nature of Science

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“The climate crisis is an emergency, it is a crisis and so we need to make major, major changes in our agriculture system.” Ben Lilliston is the Director of Climate Change and Rural strategies at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. He spoke with The Secret Ingredient team–Raj Patel, Tom Philpott, and Rebecca McInroy, about how the Green New Deal came about what has to happen in order for the GND to become a reality.

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“We need to change society so everybody can fit in and everyone can afford to live in a decarbonized society.” – Jim Goodman 

In this episode of The Secret Ingredient host Raj Patel plays double-duty — he is not just a host, but joins Jim Goodman as a guest. The two discuss what A Green New Deal for Agriculture could look like with the rest of  The Secret Ingredient team–Tom Philpott, and Rebecca McInroy.

Jim Goodman is an organic dairy farmer in Wisconsin and board member of Family Farm Defenders. He also blogs for the National Family Farm Coalition.

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Explore the future of the Green New Deal and what it means for Texas with Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez. Tzintzún is challenging John Cornyn for the 2020 US Senate seat for the State of Texas. She is the Co-founder of the Workers Defense Project and Jolt, and she talked with The Secret Ingredient team–Raj Patel, Tom Philpott, and Rebecca McInroy, about what a GND could mean for oil and agricultural workers in Texas, what running for Senate means to her as a woman of color, and much more.

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The Secret Ingredient with KUT’s Rebecca McInroy, Raj Patel, author of A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, and food and agriculture correspondent for Mother Jones, Tom Philpott explore the future of the Green New Deal with  Naomi Klein, author of “On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal.”

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The Secret Ingredient with KUT’s Rebecca McInroy, Raj Patel, author of A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, and food and agriculture correspondent for Mother Jones, Tom Philpott to talk about what the Green New Deal is, what it could mean for the future of agriculture, and what it will take to revive this plan in an effort to save the planet.

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Season 3 of The Secret Ingredient will focus on The Green New Deal (GND). Listen this season as Raj Patel, Tom Philpott and Rebecca McInroy discuss the future of agriculture, climate change, economic inequality and what it will take to create The Green New Deal in an effort to save the planet!

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