As a journalist, you get to meet people from all walks of life. Over the years I’ve met some wonderful souls, been welcomed into people’s lives in the name of a story, learned many things and questioned much.
In the 15 years I’ve been doing this, there have been a few incredible people who have, just by their very nature, etched their message into my heart—some, albeit few, have even influenced me to change my life.
Once such interview was about five years ago: “Come along and meet this guy, he’s amazing,” the publicist promised. She was talking about Don Tolman, a guy from Utah known fondly by many as the Indiana Jones of Wholefoods. I’d never heard of him, or his message.
His message, I soon learned, is simple: live with nature, by nature and from nature. Understand what foods benefit particular body functions and eat them. Stop putting chemical pills and potions into your mouth. Drink fresh spring water. Stop brushing your teeth with fluoride. Listen to your great grandmother and use her natural remedies. Know that your body’s symptoms are your body’s cures. Eating meat causes putrification and dis-ease. Question everything.
A 30-minute meeting with the Stetson-wearing cowboy felt like five minutes. His message spoke directly to me, as if what he was saying I already knew on some deep level. I’d already been following some of his recommendations, purely on instinct, such as never taking a pill to relieve a headache or antibiotics to fix an ill, and no longer eating red meat.
If you haven’t had a chance to hear Don Tolman speak, below is an interview he did with Samantha Backman. I hope you enjoy hearing his message, as much as I always do.
Why it’s great: Packed with a gold mine of information that will change the way you look at your body and the food you put in it, forever. Tolman also talks about how every wholefood has a signature that corresponds to parts of the body, such as an avocado, which looks like a pregnant woman and takes nine months from blossom to ripened fruit. If a woman eats just one avocado per week, she is helping prevent cervical cancer.
Who’s watching it: Health care professionals, university lecturers and doctors who are realising the Western way of healing with pharmaceuticals doesn’t work. Also anyone who is interested in honest-to-goodness nutrition and how it greatly improves life through diet and exercise.
What you’ll learn: How your body actually works, why disease is not a mystery and how wholefoods, water, sunshine and clean air can prevent just about any disease.
Want to know more? See www.dontolmaninternational.com
Photo by Wheeloflife.tv
Hungry? Before you head to the refrigerator, check out these tips:
1. Clean out your refrigerator and kitchen cupboards. Read the labels of every product in your home that you deem edible. If you can’t pronounce it, or it has more ingredients than words in the bible, chances are your body isn’t meant to digest it. Are there foods in your cupboards you feel guilty just looking at? Guilt is the greatest destroyer of emotional energy—therefore you don’t need it, or the Snickers bar in your life. Nature provides some of the most delectable treats you could ever imagine. Head to nutritional expert David Wolfe’s website www.davidwolfe.com, for the low-down on one of nature’s most incredible gifts: raw cacao. The cacao bean is nature’s number one weight loss and high-energy food.
2. Clean out toxins and old waste with a cleansing detox. According to nutritional expert and Tree of Life founder, Dr Gabriel Cousens, research shows when intestinal toxemia is removed, symptoms such as fatigue, nervousness, gastrointestinal conditions, impaired nutrition, skin manifestations, endocrine disturbances, headaches, sciatica, low back pain, allergy, eye, ear, nose and throat congestion—and even cardiac irregularities—have been healed in hundreds of cases. Find out more at www.treeoflife.nu.
3. Download the Honest Food Guide from Mike Adams’ Naturalnews.com. This indispensable free guide was developed with you in mind, not big business. Unlike the traditional food pyramid (which is sponsored by major food corporations) you’ll find honest nutritional information, “not watered-down information designed to boost the sale of milk, beef and grains,” says Adams. Print out and post to your refrigerator for easy referral (and email the link to all of your friends!).
4. Make weekly trips to your local farmer’s market. Buying local is a great way to ensure your food is fresh, organic and free from scientific tampering. That is, anything genetically modified (genetically modified food is not as nature intended, therefore does not contain adequate nutrients and is considered by some to be unstable). The American Academy of Environmental Medicine recently issued a warning urging the public to avoid genetically modified foods. They also called for a suspension on GMOs until long-term, independent studies can prove their safety. Shopping at your local farmer’s market is also a way to become more connected to the food you eat, as you’re buying directly from the person who put their hard work, love and energy into growing the produce. There’s also an added bonus of upping your essential Vitamin D intake as you wander (without wearing chemical-laden sunscreen!) from stall to stall. See www.localharvest.org (US), www.farmersmarkets.net (UK) or www.farmersmarkets.org.au (Aus), www.farmersmarket.org.nz (NZ) to find a market near you.
Five fun ways to be very, very vegan (and romantic) on Valentines Day…
1) Make your favourite person (or yourself) a delish vegan breakfast in bed. Pancakes and Valentines Day just seem to go together. Check out these delectables from one of my fave foodie blogs, VeganYumYum (I like to replace ingredients such as soy milk with freshly made nut milk, sugar with raw agave nectar, and salt with Celtic sea salt etc). Even if you’re your own valentine, it’s still great to whip up a gourmet breakfast and head back to bed to eat it! Also, check out Vegan Yum Yum’s new recipe book: Decadent (But Doable) Animal-free Recipes for Entertaining and Every Day for more romantic brekky and dinner recipes.
SLOW RISE PANCAKES
Makes 8 thick 5″ pancakes
2 Cups All-Purpose Flour
2 1/4 tsp Active Dry Yeast (one packet)
1 tsp Salt
2 tsp Sugar
1 1/2 Cup Soymilk (or other non-dairy milk)
2 Tbs Oil
1 Ener-g Egg, prepared (1.5 tsp mixed with 2 Tbs water)
1/3 Cup Soymilk, for thinning the next morning, if desired
Whisk all the dry ingredients together until well combined. Add the rest of the ingredients (except the 1/3 cup of soymilk) and mix well. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate overnight. Use batter anytime the next day.
Once you’re ready to make pancakes, remove the batter from the fridge and stir in up to 1/3 cup of soymilk to thin it if needed/desired. Let the batter sit out on the counter for 20-30 minutes. Heat a non-stick pan over medium heat. Spray with spray oil and wipe out the pan.
Using a 1/3 cup measure, begin making pancakes. I added apple slices to the batter before it set:
You can add anything you fancy: blueberries, chocolate chips, bananas, strawberries, etc.
Once the top is bubbly and the edges are set, check to make sure the bottom is brown. Flip:
Cook on the other side for another few minutes until browned. Stack pancakes in a low oven to keep warm, serve with earth balance margarine and maple syrup.
2) A card (of course!). Recycling anything from cardboard to fabric can make for a gorgeous love token. See this how-to guide from About.com. For those who love a little graphic design in their Valentines Day, check out this sweet duo from Jeannie and Jewell.
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Even though I eat a mostly plant-based and raw diet, I still enjoy cooking up a warm meal every now and again. Sautéing a little tempeh, onion, garlic and miso is always a delicious addition to a kale salad.
But what happens if the pan you’re using to make your healthy masterpiece is doing you more harm than good? Case in point: Non-stick fry pans and the solid research that shows they’re detrimental to human health.
I cleaned out my kitchen cupboards long ago from chemical-coated cookware, after I did some research and found those fancy non-stick fry pans produce highly toxic fumes that leach into food causing cancer and other illnesses.
According to the Environmental Working Group (EWG), after just two to five minutes of heating, coated cookware can exceed the point where the coating breaks apart and emits toxic particles and gases. At varying temps the coatings can give off at least six toxic gases, including, you guessed it, two carcinogens.
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I’ve always loved old Hollywood. There was always certain glamorous innocence that appealed to me, even as a child.
I still love the music, the actors and the acting. I’m all for stars bursting out in song or dance mid sentence. Girls with perfectly set hair, men treating women like ladies.
As I thought about watching one of my favourite oldies today, I wondered if there were any old Hollywood stars who used their star power back then to actively promote not eating animals. An olden day Alicia Silverstone. A Casey Affleck in black and white.
My never-fail Google search lead me to 1920s glamour girl Gloria Swanson, who became vegetarian in 1928. She was known as an early advocate of healthy eating—to the extent she even brought her own meals to functions in a paper bag. She had also recommended a macrobiotic diet to actor Dirk Benedict, after he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. Benedict had refused conventional therapies and later said his recovery was due to his healthy diet.
Swanson also used her Hollywood connections and her natural health know-how to help promote the classic health book, Sugar Blues, written by her husband William Dufty.
She only bought organically grown food and tap water wasn’t acceptable. In 1976, she told People magazine: “If you looked at it (water) under a microscope, you’d be horrified.” Instead of refined sugar, Swanson recommended natural sugar boiled off from organically grown raisins.
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A bottle of Pom Wonderful landed on my desk the other day. A cute little rotund ball of juice, promising to bolster the body with antioxidants, relieve digestion issues, lower cholesterol and the like.
The first thing I always do, of course, is flip any product over and read the ingredient list. While many drinks are marketed as healthy, a considerable amount on supermarket shelves are loaded with all sorts of undesirable (and oft-unpronounceable) ingredients.
I was pleasantly surprised to learn Pom Wonderful is actually pomegranate juice, albeit made from a concentrate. It also tastes pretty great.
While I think it’s an option for those who lead a busy life and don’t have time to make fresh juice, I’m personally not a fan of the pasturisation process, which is typically used to extend shelf life. However, the Pom Wonderful peeps use a flash method. My question is, is flash any better than the traditional process?
According Sally Fallon, nutrition researcher, chef, journalist and author of Nourishing Traditions – The Cookbook That Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and Diet Dictocrats the jury is still out: “flash pasteurization heats (the product) very rapidly and only holds it for a few seconds. So it’s unclear which is worse (pasturisation or flash pasturisation), whether there’s any advantage, nutritional advantage to one or the other. Both of the methods get rid of the enzymes and that is the test for successful pasteurisation.”
I had some questions for the Pom Wonderful company, which they were more than happy to answer…
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Before I became vegan, I didn’t really give much thought as to what was organic and what wasn’t. Fast forward a couple of years and I won’t eat anything else. I know it’s the best thing for my own health and the health of the planet (not to mention the farmers who aren’t spraying toxic chemicals).
Since leaving the US, I’ve been astounded at how tricky it is to buy organics. Big chain supermarkets in New Zealand only offer a very limited selection — hardly enough to fill a dinner plate. I won’t even talk about how astronomically expensive they are.
So the question remains, how do we bring real, affordable organics to the masses while keeping the big corporations honest? It’s the big businesses that threaten the future of organics, because they come at it from a money-making point of view—not from what’s best for the consumer. Get it out quick at as little cost as possible to them. If it looks like an apple, it’ll sell as an apple. Who cares what the nutrient content is.
Science has helped these corporations meddle with nature, with genetically modified produce on supermarket shelves just about everywhere. Studies have shown such meddling is at a huge cost to human health. Big corp organics could be mutant potatoes that resist anything nature throws at it. It may have grown without pesticides and without a scratch, but it won’t mean it’s healthy to eat.
Organic Nation TV caught up with The Environmental Working Group’s President Ken Cook (see video below) to chat about the potential issue of big corporations hijacking organics, threatening its quality and the current standards.
Host Dorothee Royal-Hedinger asked Ken to talk about the anxiety some consumers and activists feel about the trend of big corporations taking over organic brands as well as the tension between making organic food affordable and maintaining the standards on which organics were founded.
He was interviewed at Kickapoo Country Fair held by Organic Valley, a farmer-owned cooperative of more than 1,300 organic family farmers nationwide, in LaFarge, Wisconsin.
Courtesy of organic.org, I’ve included a top 10 list of reasons to grow and buy organics, as well as why we all can benefit from supporting the organic industry, regardless of where you live in the world.
1. Reduce The Toxic Load: Keep Chemicals Out of the Air, Water, Soil and our Bodies
Buying organic food promotes a less toxic environment for all living things. With only 0.5 percent of crop and pasture land in organic, according to USDA that leaves 99.5 percent of farm acres in the U.S. at risk of exposure to noxious agricultural chemicals. Our bodies are the environment so supporting organic agriculture doesn’t just benefit your family, it helps all families live less toxically.
2. Reduce if Not Eliminate Off Farm Pollution
Industrial agriculture doesn’t singularly pollute farmland and farm workers; it also wreaks havoc on the environment downstream. Pesticide drift affects non-farm communities with odorless and invisible poisons. Synthetic fertilizer drifting downstream is the main culprit for dead zones in delicate ocean environments, such as the Gulf of Mexico, where its dead zone is now larger than 22,000 square kilometers, an area larger than New Jersey, according to Science magazine, August, 2002.
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I’ve been spending loads of time in front of the computer screen (and reading books), which has resulted in some nasty eye strain. While I’m none too pleased about limiting my time on my beloved Mac and reading less, I’m looking at it as an opportunity to up my intake of foods that are über good for eye health.
Carrots are at the top of my list to put my eyes back on track. Why? Besides the fact they look like an eye—nature’s signature to show they’re good for eyes (see below)—they’re also loaded with antioxidant compounds and are rich in pro-vitamin A carotenes. Beta-carotene helps to protect vision, especially at night.
Carrots also protect against macular degeneration and the development of senile cataracts, which is the number one cause of blindness in the elderly.
Some other great foods that are said to be super beneficial to eye health, thanks to their A, C and E vitamins, include:
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Eating out of a can has never appealed to me. Besides the fact that the food inside is dead, it has always seemed just not quite right on some level. Perhaps great if you’re stranded in the desert (hopefully with a can opener in your pocket), but for every day living I just don’t do it.
I know there has been some talk over the years of aluminium leaching into the foods inside the cans. Whether that’s true, I can’t say. However, new research is suggesting it’s the plastic that lines cans these days that’s doing the harm.
Dr Fredrick vom Saal, PhD, who is an endocrinologist at the University of Missouri, specialises in studying the effects of bisphenol-A (BPA), the toxic chemical that comes from plastics that wrap just about everything we buy in supermarkets. He says the number one canned food to steer clear of is tomatoes. The following info may well make you re-think your mother’s famous spaghetti sauce.
Dr vom Saal says bisphenol-A is a synthetic estrogen that is linked to all sorts of dis-eases from reproductive problems to heart disease, diabetes and obesity. It’s the acidity in the tomatoes that reacts with the BPA that causes the chemical to leach into the food. Appetising huh?
What’s the solution? Learning to live like your great grandmother perhaps, and only eating organic food that looks how it’s supposed to. Freshly picked. Oh and speak to your local grocer about supplying more organic, non-packaged foods. The greater demand, the more supply.
While I’m on the subject of stuff to avoid, here are some other foods, as published in a story on Shine.com, that you may want to re-think.
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Elite ultra-endurance athlete Harley Johnstone is giving Aussie livestock producers something to worry about, according to a story on ABC Rural News.
What’s making the meat industry quake in their bloody boots? The fact that Harley has ridden more than 160,000 kilometres in the past 10 years on a diet of fruit and water. No meat. No dairy. Just a good ol’ helping hand from Mother Nature.
“He could be every fruit grower’s best mate, and every livestock producer’s worst nightmare,” the reporter quipped.
The Aussie vegan has founded a raw food vegan group, 30 Bananas A Day, and says he’s the country’s biggest fruit lover.
“A typical day, well I’m quite active so I need a lot of calories. So that’s typically 35-40 large bananas, or if I’m not eating bananas that could be 20 or 30 mangoes, or a couple of kilos of dates from California,” he said.
“A lot of people say, are you nuts? And I say, no, I’m bananas.”
Harley’s fruit of choice, the banana
…they sell it on supermarket shelves.
Check out this video below from StoptheRobbery.com if you’ve ever thought cancer (and many other dis-eases such as alzheimers) were a mysteries to be cured by a man in a white coat.
It’s just another example of how important it is to be your own doctor—and that starts with what we put in our shopping carts. Much of what’s offered on supermarket shelves these days are poisons disguised as foods and personal care products (think toothpaste, deodorant, sunscreens etc). It’s little wonder one in three people are diagnosed with some form of cancer in the US alone. In 1908, that number was one in 8,000.
Once these poisons have taken hold, the people in white coats proceed to offer greater doses of poisons in the form of chemotherapy and radiotherapy.
It’s time to stop looking for a “cure” and funding societies that masquerade as our would-be saviours, yet do nothing but line their own pockets. While governments may never conform to the side of what’s right and moral, in the best interests of the populations they “serve”, it ultimately doesn’t matter. We all have the choice of what we willingly put into our bodies. We have the power to prevent diseases from manifesting. It’s just a matter of waking up to what’s going on. Oh, and getting really good at reading product labels.
That said, have a healthful weekend!
Rushing around during the holidays isn’t always conducive to eating healthy meals. I’ll often take snacks such as nuts and raisins with me just in case, but there are times when I’ll just plain old forget (beware the friend or relative who accompanies me on those journeys!).
But there are some great products on the market that are a) vegan and b) healthy. It’s just knowing where to look. Sometimes that means ordering online if something’s not available in your own city (or country for that matter).
One of my on-the-run faves is Probar, a super healthy, organic food bar that comes in all sorts of (delish) flavours.
I caught up with the Probar founder, Art Eggertson, in LA earlier this year to chat about the state of food (specifically in America, but much of what we talked about is relevant to other countries such as New Zealand, Australia and the UK).
Art has been vegan for many years and founded Probar while snowboarding in Utah in the late 90s. Looking for a healthy snack to sustain him while on the slopes, he soon realized there were no nutritious alternatives to “bland-tasting, rock-hard” energy bars on the market—or the next option of “greasy slope-side-fare of cheeseburgers, fries and soda”.
Here is an excerpt from our interview:
VG: What is your mission?
AE: To co-create the new world centered on principles of truth and birth the lives of others into it.
VG: You’re one person making a big difference to the world. What advice could you give to someone who doesn’t think they, as one person, could possibly make a difference?
AE: I would encourage them to do some self-examination and learn what it is to be a human being. The awesome power that is inside each of us is greater than standing armies. The single most powerful thing in this world is the individual.
VG: What advice would you give to someone who does think they can make a difference?
AE: We must stick to our guns! Be on the side of truth and love. Pick our issue or issues and stand by them no matter what. Give our lives to it and the Universe will provide the details and organize itself around us in its own time and in the BEST possible way, we must trust it.
VG: What’s wrong with the food in America? Who has the power to fix it?
AE: The food in America has been industrialized, modified, manipulated, pasteurized, homogenized, corporatized, processed, reprocessed, preserved, shipped, stored, condensed, evaporated, distilled, enriched, enrobed, freeze dried, flash-fried, irradiated, dyed, stabilized, subsidized and just plain messed with in every way. We eat Frankenfood!!
The power to fix this mess is in our hands; we are the ones making the purchases. We must demand better! We need to know what our food is, where it is coming from and who is growing it. Supporting the right producers is critical; independent, family owned, cooperative and sustainable players need our support. Ideally we need to be producing our food locally. From local bakeries and breweries to roadside produce stands and individual vendors who craft real home made preserves and other items; the choices are all around us.
We can network into community gardens if we are urban dwellers. We can have backyard gardens if we live in suburbia. Combining our efforts with our friends and neighbors nets huge returns as well. Tear up a flowerbed and grow tomatoes and other veggies instead. Plant fruit trees instead of decorative trees. Whatever the steps are required to end industrial food systems are the steps we must take. Wall Street agribusiness and global markets must shift to Main Street and the neighborhood farmer’s market.
VG: Your definition of real food?
AE: My definition of real food is twofold. Real food is from nature, the tree, the vine or the field with nothing added or taken away. Real food is also specie specific and must be right for the organism consuming it; termites eat wood and not cotton candy, for example.
VG: What is one thing people may not know about the food in their kitchen?
AE: Something most people don’t know about the food in their kitchens is that it is responsible for over 1.5 million preventable American deaths every year. This includes deaths from obesity related conditions like heart disease, diabetes, cancer and stroke. The number of Americans suffering from these and other chronic conditions is staggering, as is the amount of money we pay to relieve our symptoms. This is the key to unlocking our health care disaster.
VG: Who are the people you admire for making a difference?
AE: I am blessed; one of my heroes is a family member. My Aunt Esther is not only one of my heroes she is also a mentor. Among her many accomplishments is the Consumer’s Bill of Rights which she co authored with JFK. She also wrote the Equal Pay for Equal Work Act for women. She is known as the Mother of Consumerism.
I also admire Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, Vandana Shiva, John Robbins, Dorothy Day, Thich Nhat Hanh, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Nelson Mandela and countless others who inspire me with their fearless lives.
VG: How long have you been vegan? For someone isn’t familiar with why someone might choose to live a vegan lifestyle, can you explain the benefits and misconceptions?
AE: I have been vegan for over 15 years and I really believe that the biggest misconception that people hold about it is that somehow it is a diet of deprivation. Nothing could be further from the truth! Plant foods are what we season our meats with, without them most people would never enjoy animal flesh. The flavors, textures, and variety of vegetables, fruits, grains, seeds, nuts, beans and lentils, herbs and spices is staggering and endless. A plant-based diet can be just as decadent and delicious as any other diet. Only on this road we end up feeling great physically, mentally and emotionally. Food is no longer the enemy.
Food becomes a powerful solution to our health and well-being. It becomes a powerful tool against water pollution (over 60% of the water pollution comes from animal waste, more than all other polluters COMBINED). It becomes a powerful force against global warming (animal agriculture produces more greenhouse gasses than all transportation combined) and it helps us side-step our own suffering from poor health! It does require change and most of us resist any form of it, but we also manage and get through it when it comes!
This is no different, the question is will we wait for the invitation to come in the form of disease and suffering or make it proactively before we end up having it forced upon us? 1 in 3 women in this country will have a heart attack and be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetime and one in two men, respectively. This is a painful invitation to receive and many of us are getting it! Global warming is also an invitation, only to all of us.
VG: What makes up a Probar? Why are the ingredients so good for us?
AE: Probars are made with organic whole food ingredients, a lot of them! Nuts, seeds, dried fruit, rolled grains, malted grains, natural nut butters, in other words it is food. We do not cook our bars; that means the nutrient quality is as good as it gets! Healthy organic soil produces nutrient rich foods; left unprocessed those foods deliver optimal nutrition and flavor.
Today is day three of my planned 7-day nutritional fast, which means loads of fresh fruit and veges smoothies (and water). It’s a great way to introduce yourself to fasting, because you’re still getting the fibre of the fruit and vegetables, which can be a lot more satisfying that just water or juice. I’m also a big believer of needing the whole fruit or vegetable to reap all of the nutritional benefits.
Fasting (or juice feasting) is a great way to give your digestion a break, while giving your body an opportunity to dump all built-up those toxins from your organs, including your skin. Plus it’s a fabulous way to ring in the new year—physically rejuvenated and mentally clear.
While I’m going with instinct and my own knowledge to put together a plan, there are plenty of books and websites that can help guide you on a fast/feast that suits you.
Here are some of my faves:
The Blending Book
JuiceFeasting.com
GreenSmoothieRevolution.com
Green For Life
GreenSmoothieGirl.com
GreenSmoothieBlog.com
How Green Smoothies Saved My Life
If you’re tempted to get blending and need a recipe, here’s my organic breakfast smoothie:
• 1 banana
• 3-4 silverbeet leaves
• Big handful of spinach
• 1 apple
• 1/2 small cucumber
• 2 teaspoons Kal’s Nutritional Yeast
• 1 teaspoon of Nutrex Hawaiian Spirulina
• Fresh parsley to taste
• Add water for desired consistency
Also check out Rhonda Lee’s 7 Ways to Make Green Smoothies on The Green Dove.
Hot tip: Be sure to “chew” each mouthful of your green smoothie, to ensure the digestive juices do their work. This allows the body to absorb all of the nutrients.
I overheard a mother telling her son yesterday to “eat that apple or you’re not going anywhere”. It made me think about the relationship with food that we develop from an early age.
Being told to sit at the table until there isn’t a pea left on the plate. Gagging as gluey strings of pumpkin tormented the back of your throat. Thinking defiantly how you’d rather sit there forever than eat those brussel sprouts.
It prompted me to turn to Dr Gabriel Cousens and one of my favourite books written by him, Conscious Eating. How, I wondered, is the body affected when you’re eating something you’re having a physical aversion to, regardless whether it’s nutritious or not?
Dr Cousens says avoid eating when you’re sad, angry or under stress, as those emotions are assimilated into your food. “Eating when you’re calm and able to focus on your food is a way to love yourself,” he says. “Remember, food is love and life is love.” I wish someone had mentioned that little golden nugget of information to my well-meaning mother.
I also wonder if being forced to eat certain foods as a child means you’re less likely to try those foods as an adult, or at least take longer to develop a liking for those peas. While I’ve mended my relationship with pumpkin, the prior is still a point of contention.
While I continue to ponder, I’ll leave you with an excerpt from Conscious Eating.
A primary, ongoing way that we all consciously or unconsciously relate to nature is through our food. Eating is an intimate way to extract life-sustaining energy from Mother Nature. In the process of digestive assimilation, the food, as part of Mother Nature, gives up its identity and takes on the identity of the one who has ingested it. We are actually assimilating the forces of nature—stored in our food—whenever we eat. Each bite we take brings us the experience of our loving connection with Mother Nature.
Food is a love note from God. Its letters are written by the rays of the sun. It says I love you and I shall take care of you and sustain you with the offerings of my earth. If we take time to read the love letter, by chewing carefully and feeling the messages that are stored in food by the sun, earth, wind, water, and even by those who have grown, harvested and prepared the food, its assimilation takes on a whole new meaning. This is a specific way of receiving God’s grace, a holy sacrament to be experienced slowly, carefully and consciously.
"The physical and energetic forces of food interact with us on physical, emotional, mental and spiritual levels."—Dr Gabriel Cousens
It seems this is my week to write about actress Natalie Portman. Since penning the article about the protein myth and how being famous doesn’t make you an expert, I’ve noticed there’s a lot of debate about whether Nat is a vegan or vegetarian.
From here, I got to wondering why we vegans care so deeply about celebrity diet choices, particularly once they’ve mentioned they’re one of “us”. And why we want to let meat eaters know their diet choices aren’t optimal for their own health, the health of animals and the planet.
My reasoning came down to this: it’s because we have learned and lived what it means to be animal-flesh-and-product free. It’s like finding the buried treasure, the golden ring, the never-seen-before episodes of Seinfeld. It’s so damn exciting that we want to let the world know, wake up the sleepy and declare our new found clarity and meaning to anyone who’ll listen. And we also want celebrities on our side. They have a bigger reach, they can influence more people. People actually listen to them.
But I also believe the every day person (like little ol’ me) can reach millions too, through tolerance and understanding, but also more importantly leading by example. Everyday actions that come from a kind place add up to be big actions of positive influence. Look at Oprah. She took one step at a time, doing what she believed in while practicing tolerance and understanding. Her little steps added up to be a worldwide phenomenon. Her success, it seems to me, came out of a deep desire to help others and her willingness to let others see her faults. To show that she is human, just like you and me. Most of us vegans were meat eaters and dairy drinkers too at some point in our lives, unless, of course, we were lucky enough to have vegan parents ourselves.
So that’s just it. Just because I’m vegan doesn’t mean I’m right about everything, or have the answers to the world’s diet woes (although I’m certain I could guide and greatly help those who ask for it). And just because Natalie Portman is on her journey between vegetarianism and veganism doesn’t really matter either. It’s the kind actions we take, every day, that add up to make a big difference. If we all lead by positive example, who knows, eating animals could be a habit of the past sooner than we think.
But for the record, in Natalie’s words herself, and thanks to Jonathan Safran Foer’s book Eating Animals, she is indeed vegan.
It’s so great to know this information is getting more exposure in all the right places. Viva la vegan! (And thanks to Cynthia Morgan for sharing).
As I was pondering what to write about today, I received an email from San Francisco’s Cafe Gratitude, a wonderful little eatery in the city’s Mission District, where being grateful—and expressing it—is as common as their communal tables.
With menu items such as “I am Beautiful”, “I am Eternally Blessed” and “I am Berry Awesome” (with the waiter yelling across the room to you: “Vegan Girl, You are Beautiful” when serving up your order), it’s little wonder this place has become a must-visit, and sanctuary, for raw food vegans and the curious alike.
But just when I thought the cafe’s mission, service and food couldn’t get any better. I just learned it can. Each year, for the past five years, Cafe Gratitude hosts a FREE Thanksgiving dinner for vegans (between 11am and 3pm), with ingredients supplied by local vendors.
It made me think about what I’m doing to give back and how I can do more to brighten someone’s day, even just once a week. So now I’m off to research some volunteer opportunities, and grateful to Cafe Gratitude for giving me the nudge.
Check out some of these volunteer organisations near you:
New Zealand
Volunteer Now
Volunteer Service Abroad
Australia
Volunteering Australia
Australian Volunteer Search
UK
USA
Photo courtesy of Taniamarie.com
