World Ark Magazine - March/April 2008 - (Page 38) Noteworthy New & Mixed Media Food for Thought New Good Food: Essential Ingredients for Cooking and Eating Well By Margaret Wittenberg Ten Speed Press Softcover | $19.95 An update on the 1995 version, this food guide is helpful for anyone curious about how to store, cook and serve both ordinary and exotic foods. Review Getting a Grip: Clarity, Creativity and Courage in a World Gone Mad By Frances Moore Lappé Small Planet Media Softcover | $14.95 Reviewed by Austin Gelder, World Ark Associate Editor The Great Neighborhood Book: A Do-It-Yourself Guide to Placemaking by Jay Walljasper New Society Publishers Softcover | $19.95 A grassroots guide from Project for Public Spaces on how to create better neighborhoods and public spaces with inspiring success stories from around the country. Manifestos on the Future of Food & Seed Essays by Carlo Petrini, Prince Charles, Jamey Lionette and others. South End Press Softcover | $10 Experts give a number of ideas about how to make food production both socially and ecologically sustainable. Reading Getting A Grip is a lot like sitting down for an afternoon chat with the author. It’s easy to tell that Frances Moore Lappé is passionate about what she writes, and her convincing, conversational style makes the words come across as if she were sitting right there. You can almost hear her enthusiastic voice chiming in every once in a while to say, “You see what I mean? It makes perfect sense!” And it does make sense. Getting a Grip: Clarity, Creativity and Courage in a World Gone Mad is Lappé’s 16th book. In its nine short chapters, she argues that we Americans are butchering the true spirit of democracy by letting the free–market economy and the idea of scarcity rule. The premise is similar to that of her first and most famous book, Diet for a Small Planet. In the 1971 classic, Lappé argued that our planet can supply plenty of food to go around as long as we recalibrate our diets and the way we produce and distribute that food. In Getting a Grip, her argument is much the same, except that now she’s talking about not only goods, but goodwill. We are all living under a false perception of competition and scarcity, she says, keeping us so busy scurrying to secure our own well-being that we have little time or energy to look after the needs of others and build a sense of community and cooperation. But she explains now is the time to put our trust in the goodness in human nature and to begin working together. It’s time to embrace the true meaning of democracy that requires public engagement, building connections with others and fostering an economy that doesn’t automatically concentrate wealth and political power among the elite. These ideas aren’t new, but the value of this book is that it offers a new way to approach them. Lappé focuses on what she calls “frames,” or the lenses through which we view the world. She believes language helps shape those frames, so she offers up an entire chapter about how to change our vocabularies to put a more positive polish on the more people-centric system of democracy she’s calling for. Changing the words we use also highlights the drawbacks of the free–market, power-centric system we live in today. For example, she suggests ditching the term “activist,” with its connotations of rabblerousing and extremism, in favor of “engaged citizen.” Since “conventional farming” sounds benign and time-tested when in fact it often means overuse of chemicals and long-haul shipping of foods, she suggests calling it “chemically-dependent farming” or “factory farming” instead. Also useful are Lappé’s examples of people already practicing this inclusive, cooperative form of democracy and the discussion questions included at the end of the book. www.heifer.org 38 March/April 2008 | WORLD ARK http://www.heifer.org
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