A review by nrajtak
Diet for a Hot Planet: The Climate Crisis at the End of Your Fork and What You Can Do about It by Anna Lappé

2.0

I read Diet for a Hot Planet by Anna Lappé for a Chemistry of Food class at my university. The book’s purpose is to raise awareness on how intertwined our dietary habits are with climate change and what we can do to mitigate this. Unfortunately, I had a very hard time taking the book seriously. Firstly, to get it out of the way, the book is written in such a manner that even I (a soon to be sophomore STEM major) found even the most basic chemistry and biology topics incomprehensible. I found myself unable to contribute to our class discussion because I simply didn’t understand what she was saying. Secondly, the author seems to be very heavily biased, particularly on the topics of veganism and genetically modified food. While I myself am a vegetarian, I strongly disagreed with how she promoted it. It seemed very much like a guilt trip and it was presented the same way you would expect a stereotypical militant vegan to do it. She additionally didn’t mention (or if she did, it was a fleeting sentence) any of the downsides of being vegan such as cost. When it came to GMO’s, she seemed to present all the same things I have learned in my class but come to the opposite conclusion that GMOs should be avoided at all costs. I’m not sure I would recommend this book and I give it 2.5 stars. Points given because I really enjoyed her two chapters describing alternative farming methods.