REAL Radio

Interviews with Rip Esselstyn and Kathy Stevens, 5/14/2013

5/14/2013:

Part I – Rip Esselstyn
My Beef With Meat

Rip Esselstyn was born in upstate New York, raised in Cleveland, Ohio, and educated at the University of Texas at Austin, where he was a three-time All-American swimmer. After graduation Rip spent a decade as one of the premier triathletes in the world. He then joined the Austin Fire Department, where he introduced his passion for a whole-food, plant-based diet to Austin’s Engine 2 Firehouse in order to rescue a firefighting brother’s health. To document his success he wrote the national best-selling book The Engine 2 Diet, which shows the irrefutable connection between a plant-based diet and good health.

Recently Rip left his job as a firefighter to team up with Whole Foods Market as one of their Healthy Eating Partners to raise awareness for Whole Foods employees, customers, and communities about the benefits of eating a plant-strong diet. He has appeared on hundreds of radio shows as well as national television shows including the Today show, the CBS Sunday Morning show, Good Morning America and The Dr. Oz Show.

Rip lives in Austin, Texas with his wife, Jill Kolasinski, and their two beautiful children, Kole and Sophie.

5/14/2013:

Part II – Kathy Stevens
Animal Camp: Reflections on a Decade of Love, Hope, and Veganism at Catskill Animal Sanctuary.

Kathy Stevens, Founder and Director of CAS, spent her childhood on a Virginia horse farm. Kathy moved to Boston for graduate school, and after a decade of teaching high school English, she was asked to head a charter school. Instead, one year later, she opened Catskill Animal Sanctuary, one of the country’s leading havens for farm animals and a center for raising public awareness of their sentience and their suffering. She is the author of two critically and popularly-acclaimed books, Where the Blind Horse Sings and Animal Camp, a blogger on farm animal issues for the Huffington Post, and a frequent contributor to books and articles on farm animals, vegan living, and related issues. Kathy is an avid reader, loves to hike, swim, and bike, and spends rare quiet time with her close friends.

TRANSCRIPTION PART I:

Hello, hello Everybody. I’m Caryn Hartglass and you’re listening to It’s All About Food. Today is the May 14^th, 2013 episode of It’s All About Food. You know, when I hear that opening to It’s All About Food, it just makes me happy and I hope it makes you happy too. I get to talk about all these things that I love to talk about in a short amount of time. There are a few things that I really want to talk about before we get started with my first guest today. I’ve been talking about The Swingin’ Gourmets. You’ve heard about The Swingin’ Gourmets, my partner Gary De Mattei and I are making musical theatre look really fun and healthy, singing about plant-powerful foods and why they’re so great to eat and how much fun you can have getting healthy and doing the right thing for the environment and certainly being gentle on the animals. Well, we just got a pay-it-forward loan from The Pollination Project. Check out thepollinationproject.org. They are seeding projects that change the world. It’s springtime and what a better time than to seed projects that change the world. If you have a concept or idea and you need a little financial help, The Pollination Project may be something for you because they’re really helping a lot of people with small loans but things with grants actually. Most of their assistance is with grants that they’re giving away to people with really great ideas. I’ve been a recipient two times so I’m really grateful to The Pollination Project. Another thing I wanted to mention, here in the greatest city in the world, New York City, in one of the boroughs, Queens, the borough that I live in, the very first public school, Public School 244 is offering vegetarian meals—only vegetarian meals—for breakfast and lunch. It’s in conjunction with the New York Coalition for Healthy School Food. This is a really, really exciting project and it’s happening in my hometown. Things to be excited about, definitely. Now we’re going to continue with my first guest today, Rip Esselstyn. He’s a native of Cleveland, Ohio. He attended the University of Texas where he was an All-American swimmer. After spending ten years as one of the world’s top professional tri-athletes, Rip became a firefighter at Station 2 in Austin, Texas. In 2009 he joined Whole Foods Market as a healthy eating partner. Today he travels year round telling the world about the benefits of eating plant strong with the Engine 2 Diet. He lives in Austin, Texas with his wife and two children and he has a new book, My Beef with Meat.

Caryn Hartglass: Welcome to It’s All About Food, Rip.

Rip Esselstyn: Thanks very much for having me. It’s an absolute pleasure.

Caryn Hartglass: Yes. How are you today?

Rip Esselstyn: I’m doing great. I’m in New York City right now getting ready to launch the book, which actually officially comes out tomorrow.

Caryn Hartglass: Which is actually today because this show is airing tomorrow.

Rip Esselstyn: There you go.

Caryn Hartglass: But in the world of cyberspace, time has no meaning. And you have a book signing at Whole Foods down in Tribeca.

Rip Esselstyn: I do. I have a book signing at Tribeca tomorrow night…

Caryn Hartglass: …May 14^th, Tuesday…

Rip Esselstyn: Yes. And then I’ve got another book signing at another Whole Foods in New Jersey on Wednesday. I just got done doing the Don Imus Show this morning, which was quite an experience.

Caryn Hartglass: I remember listening to Don when I was a tiny tot. He’s still kicking and so am I.

Rip Esselstyn: Did you know that Don Imus is all plant-based?

Caryn Hartglass: You know, I heard that. Has it affected his style at all?

Rip Esselstyn: No. Not one iota.

Caryn Hartglass: Broadcasting style. I remember “Imus in the Morning.” I would wake up and go up to junior high school with “Imus in the Morning.” That was a long time ago. Anyway, let’s talk about you. We don’t want to talk about Imus anymore. You’re changing the world, Rip, and I thank you for that.

Rip Esselstyn: Well, we’re all helping to change the world.

Caryn Hartglass: Well, I’ve been doing this almost about as long…maybe longer, maybe shorter, I don’t know. I started on this path around 1973 when I didn’t want to eat meat and then in ’84 I went complete vegetarian, eliminating fish. Of course I didn’t realize that scaly vegetable wasn’t a vegetable until around 1984. Then in 1988 I went completely vegan. So it’s been a quarter century for me. Seeing a lot of great changes, some frustrating things happening, but something I keep repeating to myself and reminding myself: the questions have not changed and you just have to keep answering them with a fresh, happy spirit no matter how frustrating it can seem from time to time.

Rip Esselstyn: That’s exactly why I wrote this book because my first book, The Engine 2 Diet book came out about four years ago and since then I’ve been touring around the country talking and giving presentations and talking to people about eating a whole food, plant-strong diet. It’s amazing how the same questions just kept popping up. So I wrote this book to be really, in some ways, the definitive guide that busts all the myths and answers all the questions in a very kind of friendly way that will basically give people courage to not only own their health but also to stand up for this lifestyle.

Caryn Hartglass: It’s important. And it’s important for this information to come out in lots of different forms. Yours is coming out in a bright, fire engine red form and it probably appeals to a certain demographic. But to change the world we need this message told over and over and over and over and over and over in many different sizes, shapes, and colors and a lot of people need to hear it over and over again. One time unfortunately isn’t it. I have some friends of my parents. They’ve been coming to lectures that I’ve been organizing for decades and finally the husband of the couple just fell upon The China Study even though he had heard Dr. Campbell speak, he had heard your dad, Dr. Esselstyn speak, and it took a long time but then all of a sudden: click. And he is eating great, never looked better. He’s approaching 80 and looks fabulous. So it’s great that you’re out there talking all over the place. The question is: How do you do that? How do you travel and talk?

Rip Esselstyn: Well I’m really fortunate in that one of the things that happened after my book came out in 2007 I got approached by the CEO of Whole Foods Market, John Mackey, to partner with Whole Foods Market as part of their Healthy Eating initiative that they launched in 2010 to educate not only their 70,000 team member base but also their millions of customers about what they could do for optimal health. I actually retired from firefighting a little over three and a half years ago to partner with Whole Foods Market and now I go around to Whole Foods Market stores all over the United States, Canada, and the UK talking to team members and customers about eating a whole foods, plant-strong diet.

Caryn Hartglass: What do you eat on the road?

Rip Esselstyn: Fortunately wherever I go there’s a Whole Foods Market so it’s pretty easy. But whenever I pack my bags I’m prepared. So I always have cereal, I always have fruit, I always have a sandwich or two. I find that one of the things that travels really well are tacos or wraps or burritos. Just put them in some foil but I can make it work anywhere. I honestly can. You just have to ask for what you want and you have to look at the menu and figure out what you can make work. Then be nice and say, “Listen, is there any way you can do this pizza on a whole grain crust without cheese and just throw on extra veggies and extra marinara sauce?” Typically they are happy to do it. I find that’s the least of my worries, how to do it on the road. But for a lot of people it can be a stumbling block but they just have to learn a couple little tricks of the trade and they’re good to go.

Caryn Hartglass: I could call it an excuse. People look for excuses. But I like your answer and I think it’s something that applies to most things in life. Be nice and polite and you can get very far.

Rip Esselstyn: Like this morning. I’m in this hotel in New York and I went down and I got the oatmeal. I made sure it was made with water and not milk and on the side I got one and a half bananas and strawberries and blueberries and that was it and it was great.

Caryn Hartglass: You have to know what questions to ask, though, because some people wouldn’t even realize that some oatmeal is prepared with milk. Although I think in most hotels in the United States, oatmeal is prepared with water unless it’s from one of those mixes. But I remember…I’ve traveled all over the world and you cannot be shy but you have to be polite. I was in Seoul, Korea and they had this beautiful spread at a Ritz-Carlton of foods and they had oatmeal made with milk and I had to explain to them it’s better to make it with water.

Rip Esselstyn: It is amazing. Another thing I tell people is don’t be shy. So many people are like, “I’m afraid. I don’t want to make a stir. I don’t want to make waves. I don’t want to be a nuisance.” It’s like, listen, we’re talking about your health now. It’s your number one asset is your health and you need to protect it with every fiber in your being. So be polite and ask for what you want but don’t feel like you’re putting anybody out one iota because we all know that moderation doesn’t work. I mean…

Caryn Hartglass: I love that. You wrote that in your book. I had exclamation points all over the place. I can’t stand moderation.

Rip Esselstyn: Right. So I’ve got a whole chapter on moderation and how we have to lose the moderation mentality. You know, we have somewhere between ten trillion to a hundred cells in our body and when you have a little bit of chicken or a little bit of fish or a little bit of low-fat dairy, before you know it…I mean your cells don’t know moderation. Heart disease doesn’t know moderation. Cancer doesn’t know moderation. Let’s go full kale into being healthy and jump in and do it with a lot of gusto and then we’re going to see amazing results. Your body is going to respond. You’re going to have increased energy. You sleep better. You’re going to lose weight. All your numbers are going to come down. As opposed to taking the baby steps approach. And I think that, for example, what Mark Bittman is doing with vegan before six is, you know, it’s good to get more people on board but I think, unfortunately, a lot of people still aren’t going to see the transformative results that they could see if they were to throw themselves whole kale into it.

Caryn Hartglass: I really agree and I believe in the all-or-nothing approach with so many things. I think it’s easier when you say “no” to something rather than “oh, sometimes” to something. It’s just that much harder to not do it at all.

Rip Esselstyn: Yeah. And you’re also…things are very black and white. There’s no gray area. You’re not continually feeding your palette with these foods that you’re going to continue to crave. So it’s just much easier when you just decide, “OK, this is the way it’s going to be.” Right? I mean I’m not going to smoke cigarettes and you just stop, right? You just say, “Alright, I’m not going to do dairy. I’m not going to do animal products. I’m just going to stop.”

Caryn Hartglass: You’re seeing this all over the place. But in the United States where the biggest killer is heart disease and we know that in like 99.9—I don’t know how many nines—cases these heart disease cases are preventable and a lot of them are reversible. You’re dad wrote Preventing and Reversing Heart Disease. Is that the title of the book?

Rip Esselstyn: Yes, Preventing Heart Disease.

Caryn Hartglass: Yes. And you’ve probably heard a lot of stories where people have totally turned around. There was an article in The New York Times yesterday. I don’t know if you saw it but it’s the story of some guy who believes that heart disease is in his DNA. At the end of the story they talk about…OK, so he’s given up red meat but his wife is making him some sort of Tandori chicken dish—the feathered vegetable…

Rip Esselstyn: I know. I saw that. I just read it this morning and that is exactly why I’ve written the book because people just don’t know. They don’t know, for example, that chicken has just as much cholesterol as red meat and that most types of fish have more cholesterol than red meat or chicken. People don’t know that one glass of whole milk has the same amount of saturated fat as four slices of bacon. They don’t know that olive oil is the most concentrated source of calories on the planet and that it is contributing to heart disease because it’s 15% saturated fat. So people, they just unfortunately they don’t know. As a country we are nutritionally illiterate. This is what My Beef with Meat is all about. It’s about getting people, you know, up to snuff.

Caryn Hartglass: I think we’ve been nutritionally illiterate for most of our existence. It’s just recently that we’re really starting to understand what’s going on at a micro level. People have had a few buzzwords for the last 100 years but they don’t know what they’re talking about. No one knew. We’re just starting to figure it out.

Rip Esselstyn: But you know what…on the other hand, you know, all we’ve got to do…it’s a simple answer. It’s just: eat whole, plant-based foods. I mean, it doesn’t have to be more complicated than that. I think the issue is there’s so much incredible amounts of confusion and distraction right now that people don’t know what to believe.

Caryn Hartglass: Yep. They’re confused. They’re confused. And Rip is here to say to them that you just don’t save lives in the firehouse but now you’re saving lives with food.

Rip Esselstyn: Yeah, I know. Speaking of which…the second half of the book has another 140 Engine 2 plant-strong recipes.

Caryn Hartglass: Part of that confusion, the little bits that people hear are so frustrating and damaging. People will hear about soy. They’ll hear about oil. They’ll hear about nuts and they hear all different kinds of things. And you give some clarification on all of those.

Rip Esselstyn: Yes, yes. For example, with the soy, a lot of people are scared that soy is the devil incarnate. I try to let people know that, listen, if you really want to protect yourself from estrogen and what can go on with hormones then if you’re a female, the #1 thing we can do is drop dairy. A lactating cow has 30 times the estrogen levels than a cow that’s not lactating. And then, you know, a lot of women in America unfortunately are overweight and we know that when you’re overweight that increases estrogen levels. Exercise helps. Natural soy, for example, like tofu, tempeh, edamame, these are healthful. They can actually inhibit the amount of estrogen that’s absorbed. There’s just a lot of, again, confusion. I agree that the processed soy products out there are just basically a bunch of junk with fillers. They bring out what’s called the isolated soy proteins which have the potential to be harmful. So we need to be careful with the processed soy. No doubt.

Caryn Hartglass: And getting soy organic and not genetically modified. What a nightmare that is. And a lot of people don’t realize when we talk about genetically modified and when we talk about soy, most of the soy grown in this country is grown to feed animals. It’s not even grown to feed people and when people those eat animals, they’re getting those genetically modified organisms through soy and other things.

Rip Esselstyn: Right. Good point.

Caryn Hartglass: I mentioned at the beginning of this program and perhaps you’ve heard that here in Queens, NY, the first public school is going vegetarian. They’re serving breakfast and lunch vegetarian meals. If the parents want their children to have animal foods they can bring them in their lunch boxes and I think this is great. But when you mention dairy, this plan is including dairy products. And I would always say to get rid of dairy first.

Rip Esselstyn: When we hang up I’m going to go visit that school.

Caryn Hartglass: Oh, wonderful.

Rip Esselstyn: I’ll have to give them a little talk on the dairy.

Caryn Hartglass: Yeah. Lighten up on the cheese.

Rip Esselstyn: Yeah. Let them know that cheese is the number one source of saturated fat in the American diet and how we get so addicted to it. Yeah, for sure.

Caryn Hartglass: This is a great part of the world. People don’t think about Queens as much. When they think about New York City they think about Manhattan. Manhattan, of course, is an amazing place but Queens is part of what makes Manhattan tick. There is so much diversity right here. You can visit the whole world by visiting Queens, NY.

Rip Esselstyn: I look forward to it. I don’t think I’ve ever been there.

Caryn Hartglass: I could tell you where to eat. Are they going to feed you or are you going to Whole Foods?

Rip Esselstyn: I think I’m going to have lunch there.

Caryn Hartglass: Well my very favorite place is in Flushing and it’s on Main Street. It’s called the New Bodai. It’s vegan Chinese. When I’m out for a treat that’s what I like to get.

Rip Esselstyn: I’ll remember that one.

Caryn Hartglass: Now, people go a little nutty…oh, I didn’t even mean to make that pun…but when we talk about fats and they start hearing that they shouldn’t be consuming oil and they should lighten up on the nuts, what kind of reaction do you get and what do you tell them?

Rip Esselstyn: Well I tell people that the best way to get your fats are from healthy, plant-based sources. America is so overweight right now. They don’t need to be pounding the olive oil or even doing a ton of nuts. I think we talked a little bit about olive oil. With the nuts, I tell people if you’re going to have one handful that’s fine but just know that one small handful is about 200 calories and it’s about 80% fat. So if you go to Costco and you get a big drum of nuts and you have it lying around your house and you have four or five handfuls a day, all of a sudden that’s 1000 calories that you’ve just dropped down your mouth and close to 800 of those calories are coming straight from fat. Even with nuts, nuts have anywhere between 10 and 20% of their calories coming from saturated fat. That’s one of the reasons why my father with his program asks his patients not to do nuts because he doesn’t want them to put one iota of gasoline to the fire that might ignite their heart disease. But most people don’t know that kale is 10% fat, that oats are 16% fat, that soybeans are 40% fat, that strawberries are right around 6% fat and that we can get all the fat we need from whole, plant-based sources and we’re staying away from trans fats and for the most part saturated fats and we’re really concentrating on the poly-unsaturated fats. Good stuff.

Caryn Hartglass: People talk about food combing sometimes. You don’t talk about it in your book or at least I didn’t catch it. What people get confused about is all plant foods combine a protein, carbohydrate, and fat for the most part. The body knows what to do with all of them. We don’t have to eat them separately. We eat a bean, it digests the protein and it digests the carbohydrate. You eat greens, it digests the fat the protein. Our bodies are smart.

Rip Esselstyn: They’re brilliant. I have a whole chapter, I think it’s chapter 3, on how plant proteins are completely complete. For a number of reasons people think that plant proteins aren’t complete and that you have to do the combining as Frances Moore Lappe…

Caryn Hartglass: …another myth that has really stuck in our minds.

Rip Esselstyn: Plant proteins contain all of the essential amino acids and they’re at a proportion and composition that actually is very friendly on the body unlike animal proteins that leach calcium from your bones and promote systemic inflammation and are harsh on the kidneys and the liver and are tumor and cancer promoters. The protein you’re getting in plants is like a perfectly aged red wine and animal protein is like Everclear.

Caryn Hartglass: You also talk about the Mediterranean and Paleo diets, the two big diets that are getting probably more press than the one diet that should be getting press although the plant diet is definitely getting its due in the media but thank you for talking about those two diets.

Rip Esselstyn: The Mediterranean myth is just that, it’s a myth. For some reason now, Americans are under the impression that if they drink a little bit of red wine and they’re doing olive oil and Greek yogurt that they’re doing the Mediterranean diet when the reality is that the Mediterranean diet was based off of the island of Crete post-war in the 1950s and it was primarily fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and beans. And if you look at the Mediterranean Sea there are 20 different countries that border the Mediterranean and each one has a different diet. You could go there today and what you’ll find is that in Spain, Italy, and Portugal, 50% of the people are overweight or obese. And then you go to Greece, which people epitomize as the Mediterranean and they are now the 16^th fattest country on the planet and ¾ of their people are overweight or obese. So the Mediterranean diet, the original one, was back in the ‘50s and was based on what we’re doing here today.

Caryn Hartglass: And then we’re all romancing about the Paleolithic diet and we don’t even know what was going on back then. We have clues but it’s just ridiculous.

Rip Esselstyn: The thing about the Paleo is if you talk to any kind of archeological scientist today and they’ll tell you that close to 80% of Paleo people their diets were whole, plant-based foods. I think it’s time that we evolve away from meat for a number of reasons. It destroys the earth, it exploits the water. The carbon footprint that we’re laying down by eating a meat-centric diet is 4 times bigger than if we’re eating a plant-based one. If we can evolve past meat we’ll be a much kinder people to the animals that we share the planet with. Lastly, I think it’s time that we evolve past meat so that we can as a country have the health that we all deserve. It could raise this country’s standard of living to a whole other level. As you know if we keep this up we’re going to bury ourselves because of this healthcare crisis.

Caryn Hartglass: Why don’t more people care about this? I don’t know. It is definitely changing. I wanted to note that you have a website: engine2diet.com. Lots of recipes and you’ve got a blog and your events are listed there.

Rip Esselstyn: Yes. Thank you. We’ve been throwing these weekend-long Farms-to-Forks retreats. We have three more left this year. We bring in the best and the brightest in the business and we teach people. We educate people and then we teach people how to actually incorporate it into their lives.

Caryn Hartglass: And it’s fun and delicious everybody.

Rip Esselstyn: Yes it is.

Caryn Hartglass: I wanted to give a mention to my friend and yours, Gene Stone, who helped you put together My Beef with Meat. The last time I saw him, I have to say was at the Veggie Pride parade in Manhattan and he came up to my partner, Gary, and I and said we are the best vegan chefs he knew. Now I don’t know if he says that to all the vegans he knows but we appreciated that. We love making food.

Rip Esselstyn: Everything…I tell people…I don’t know if we’re done yet or not…

Caryn Hartglass: We can keep going another minute or so.

Rip Esselstyn: I have ripples of hope, though. I have so many ripples of hope for this country because I feel like we can’t get too much worse at this point. We’ve got the former fast food president, Bill Clinton, that’s eating plant-based. We have Forks Over Knives, which has now become the #1 selling and viewed documentary in this country for over two years. So that to me is very telling that these conversations are happening at dinner tables across the country. We’ve got pro athletes from the NFL, the NBA to ultra-distance runners that are learning about the benefits of a plant-based diet. We’ve got this school in Queens. We have tobacco crops that are being converted to chickpea crops because the demand for hummus is so large now.

Caryn Hartglass: I love chickpeas. Let’s give a shout out to chickpeas and garbanzo flour is particularly awesome.

Rip Esselstyn: Good ‘ol chickpeas.

Caryn Hartglass: Yes, there’s a lot of hope. Thank you for being part of it. I mean, everyone, just take a look at this man, Rip Esselstyn, and you’ll see how good this diet is. You are a stunning example.

Rip Esselstyn: I appreciate it. Thank you very much.

Caryn Hartglass: Thank you. I hope to meet you sometime. All the best with your book. Be well.

Rip Esselstyn: Thank you.

Caryn Hartglass: Thank you for joining me on It’s All About Food. OK, folks. We’re going to take a quick break and when we’re back we’re going to talk with Kathy Stevens. It will be her third time back on the show. We’ll be talking about Catskill Animal Sanctuary and some lovely stories with animals so stay with me. We’ll be right back.

Transcribed by Jennie Steinhagen, 6/3/2013

TRANSCRIPTION PART II:

Caryn Hartglass: Hey everybody, I’m Caryn Hartglass. We’re back. It is May 14, 2013 – and I want to say that it really is May 14, because it’s the first half of this show I prerecorded yesterday, so it really wasn’t May 14… But now it is! Unless you’re listening sometime in the future. But it’s a beautiful Tuesday, a spring day here in New York. And it’s good to breathe. Really nice with everything going on. How are you today? Well, let’s go on to the next part of the show – I can’t wait, really, so let’s just get started! I’m bringing back Kathy Stevens, founder and director of The Catskill Animal Sanctuary. She spent her childhood on a Virginia horse farm. She moved to Boston for graduate school, and after a decade of teaching high school English, she was asked to head a charter school. Instead, one year later, she opened Catskill Animal Sanctuary, one of the country’s leading havens for farm animals and a center for raising public awareness of their suffering. She’s the author of two critically and popularly acclaimed books, Where the Blind Horse Sings and Animal Camp, a blogger for the Huffington Post, a recent and a frequent contributor to books on farm animals, vegan living, and related issues. She’s an avid reader, loves to hike, swim, and bike, and spends rare quiet time with her close friends. Hello, Kathy.
Kathy Stevens: Hi, Caryn. I’m so happy to be back with you. How are you?
Caryn Hartglass: I’m great, and I’m glad we got everything all lined up here and everything is working. I hear you, you hear me, and everybody hears us.
Kathy Stevens: Oh, technology!
Caryn Hartglass: That’s right. I got your book after much ado and I didn’t realize this at first, but this is a revision for Animal Camp.
Kathy Stevens: This is a revision of Animal Camp; the publisher said they wanted to do a paperback a few months ago, and I responded with an enthusiastic, “Oh no!” Because it was three years old, the hardback, and a) we are having a different conversation about veganism, as you know, than we were just three years ago and b) Catskill Animal Farm is only 10 years old, and so much has happened in the last 3 years that I felt like a paperback, the same book, would just be dated and stale. So I asked if I could do a revision, and I did a very major revision. It feels like, essentially, a new book, so I’m very pleased that they let us do that.
Caryn Hartglass: Right, well, what’s important about this book, among other things, are the individual stories about so many of the animals that you’ve gotten to know – and those never get old, those never change. We need to retell those stories and reread those stories. I was happy to reread some of them because I read them when they first came out and they were lovely then, so I was glad to reread them.
Kathy Stevens: Thanks.
Caryn Hartglass: People – we throw out the numbers, we throw out all kinds of information just to get people to think about what we’re doing to animals. And a lot of it has to do with “you’ll feel so much better if you don’t eat them, if you eat plant foods, and it’s better for the environment” – and it really makes me wonder about humanity when they don’t connect the dots and they don’t realize what they’re supporting. But this book is really important, and telling stories is really the way, I think, we change people.
Kathy Stevens: Caryn, I agree. I feel like we’ve gotten really good for a whole lot of reasons, a whole lot of people working so hard at this that deserve credit – you included – but we’ve got podcasts, we’ve got blogs, we’ve got documentaries from undercover footage to people just out there with their individual flip cams. You’ve got protests and the tremendous work of organizations such as the Toronto Pig Save who are protesting and doing peaceful vigils outside slaughterhouses every day. You’ve got all the medical information out there, you’ve got all the information on global warming…so I feel like, again, far more than just three years ago, there’s so much more awareness of these three very compelling reasons to move toward a plant-based diet – human health, suffering of the animals, and the environmental reasons. But the fourth reason is not discussed, and that is who these animals are.
Caryn Hartglass: Yep.
Kathy Stevens: So I feel like that’s the important work of sanctuaries and that’s what I try, more than anything else, to have my books do.
Caryn Hartglass: Well, I think when people look in an animal’s eyes and have that opportunity to connect, I think they are moved, but I think that it’s still a part of of this human evolution, because we definitely have a long way to go. Not only do we treat animals terribly, but we treat ourselves terribly. We treat our friends and families and neighbors and countrymen and foreigners and knock ourselves all the time. We really need to evolve and come from a place of love.
Kathy Stevens: Yeah, we sure do. And yet, despite all that which you just said, which I agree with, I also believe that there is an inherent goodness in all of us, and that being among these animals draws it out. The challenges for us at CAS is to really just back up enough – people don’t need the statistics, they just need the moment with the animals, to get in touch with that humanity again, which we leave behind sometimes in our drive to succeed.
Caryn Hartglass: You know, I reread your stories and read some new ones, and I couldn’t help but thinking that all of these animal characters are so much like people I know in one way or another. And the only thing that’s really different, aside from the fact that they look different, is that they communicate in a different way. We can learn so much from being with animals and communicating with animals to learn how we really should communicate with each other.
Kathy Stevens: Oh my goodness, we have a T-shirt that says, and I use this sentence a lot when I speak: “In the ways that truly matter, we are all the same.” I don’t think that that’s true; I know that that’s true. I know that the differences between myself and a pig or myself and a chicken are about as meaningful as the differences between myself and a Latino or myself and an African American or myself and an Orthodox Jew. You know, they’re superficial differences. Absolutely, they’re communicating all the time, and the more we’re around them, the more we….
Caryn Hartglass: Learn their language.
Kathy Stevens: Yes, learn their language.
Caryn Hartglass: I keep thinking of this Dr. Doolittle song, “If I Could Talk To The Animals.”
Kathy Stevens: Yes!
Caryn Hartglass: I mentioned that because we recently included that song in our new Swingin’ Gourmets project, and it’s this ridiculous song, but I really started thinking about it.
Kathy Stevens: Well, here is the really interesting thing that I don’t think I was consciously aware of this until I started this work, and certainly, a decade into it, it’s perfectly obvious now – if you are paying attention to an animal and communicating with an animal that you want to understand what he or she is trying to say – I don’t care what the animal is, I don’t care if it’s a pig or a chicken – they figure out a way to tell you what’s on their mind. Whether it’s a sound or stepping on your foot or rubbing up against you or a growl, they’re nuanced. Sheep are remarkably communicative animals, for instance. So we just need to slow down a little and listen and watch and learn from them.
Caryn Hartglass: What you just said, what was opening this whole paragraph, was “If we pay attention, and if we really want to communicate and understand” – those are two big mouthfuls right there. We need to be mindful with everyone, human and nonhuman. If we really want to understand, we can.
Kathy Stevens: You just have to want to.
Caryn Hartglass: So three years have gone by since Animal Camp came out, and a lot of changes have been taken place at Catskill Animal Sanctuary. Can you give us a little virtual audio tour of what’ new?
Kathy Stevens: Sure! When we first opened, we had 80 acres, and we converted a very, very forlorn, neglected property, and we now have 80 beautiful acres with 30 barns or outbuildings on it, 2 big ponds, nice big, spacious pastures with lots of shade trees. The greater expansion, though, has come in our programming. In the last 3 years or so, we’ve started a day camp for children called Camp Kindness. We’ve got a wonderful certified humane educator coming up from the city to spend the summer with us, so we’re really excited to launch a new camp program this summer. We have a program called Compassionate Cuisine that wasn’t around three years ago; this is its third year. We feel like so many people, way more than 3 years ago, are willing or eager to begin or accelerate this journey, and just need to have their hands held. So our classes range from everything, literally the simplest, most basic, Veganism for Dummies, Vegan 101, I Don’t know What To Put On My Plate If I Take the Chicken Off – the most basic classes like that – to the classes for pretty accomplished vegan chefs who just want to expand their repertoire. We’re reaching out even more to the schools – I know you and Rip mentioned, so exciting, the first public school in the country to go all vegetarian, PS 234, well, they are coming here for the day.
Caryn Hartglass: Oh wow! That’s awesome! Everyone is getting involved with that school!
Kathy Stevens: I wept when I read it online and Amy Hamlin had spoken here before. I thought, these kids need to know that they…well, my dad would say…”Like they feel like a million bucks.” That would be the expression my dad would use. Because they have done something,participated in something extraordinary, and we want to make them feel that. So I just, I’m so excited, we’re busy designing the day. I’ve got four former teachers showing up to help us and it’s going to be really special.
Caryn Hartglass: I like it, I like it very much. I’m very curious to see what’s going on with that school, and I’m just hoping that it goes viral, that other schools sign up.
Kathy Stevens: I hope so too.
Caryn Hartglass: One of the things in your book, I had a little smirk on my face about. You compared statements about veal farming and you gave your commentary – and if only we could do that all the time when we see commercials and media, from the stuff that spewed out by a variety of different people.
Kathy Stevens: Right, the dairy council and all those. I don’t even know how I found out about that website, but I did find out about vealfarming.com, and they’re lying. There’s no polite way…
Caryn Hartglass: They’re lying! They’re lying! They’re lying!
Kathy Stevens: Right, I can’t even remember the specifics in my book, but my jaw dropped, and I thought, I’ve got to put this in the book, just for people to see how distorted these marketing campaigns are. I also have been thinking a lot recently about how successful that anti-veal campaign was. I don’t know if you remember, Caryn, I have the vaguest recollection of this, the Humane Farming Association too out full-page ads, playing on public sympathy because these animals are slaughtered as babies. Well, guess what? Chickens are 42 days old. They are 7 weeks old. They are babies and they still have their little baby peep they still have their blue eyes when they go to slaughter. Pigs are four or five months old. They’re babies. But the big guns, the PETAs and the HSUSs, the people who would really have the dollars to get behind a campaign like that on behalf of pigs and chickens, for whatever reason, haven’t done that. I think that’s something that needs to be exploited, for the benefit of the animals.
Caryn Hartglass: Well, any kind of clever advertising is going to sway people. I don’t remember the ad specifically for veal, but I remember it being powerful, because people still today say ,”Oh, i don’t eat veal,” because they remember, those were the babies.
Kathy Stevens: Exactly. Veal consumption has dropped by 75%.
Caryn Hartglass: I remember reading that in your book and I asked myself this question, so I’m going to ask you – and I know the dairy industry is linked to veal production because we can’t have milk unless we make a cow pregnant, unless the cow is brutally raped and artificially inseminated and made pregnant and she has a baby – so what are happening to all those babies, because we’re making a lot more milk?
Kathy Stevens: Well, people don’t know it was in part because of the success of this campaign that we assume that veal calves are grown in crates, fed a diet that makes them anemic, all the stuff that was talked about in this, probably the most successful animal welfare campaign in the history of the country – but what people don’t know is the majority of calves who are turned into veal are slaughtered almost immediately after birth, within a couple weeks of birth. For some reason, that’s not talked about or understood, but it is referred to as “bob veal.” So that’s what happens. There just hasn’t been a whole lot of attention to it.
Caryn Hartglass: Bob veal. Lovely. Calves that are slaughtered when only a few days old. Wow. Okay, let’s go back to happy stories in the book, because I can’t spend a moment there… One piece of good news I saw today was that the governor in Tennessee vetoed their “ag-gag” rule that they had there.
Kathy Stevens: Yes, good job. I saw that too. That’s heartening.
Caryn Hartglass: Yes, so we have to really celebrate those wonderful things.
Kathy Stevens: Yep, we sure do.
Caryn Hartglass: There are some celebrity characters throughout your book like Rambo and Tucker – Rambo of course is no longer with us – but who are some of the newer characters that we don’t hear about in the book? I imagine there might be some new characters that have just joined you.
Kathy Stevens: They arrived in time to be photographed for the cover, but not in enough time for me to include a chapter. There’s a little guy named Zeke who is a lap sheep. We took in 14 sheep from an illegal slaughter operation – a guy who was not licensed by the USDA and was slaughtering animals in his backyard. We took in 14 sheep and we couldn’t get within a couple hundred feet of them . They were absolutely terrified, and for good reason. They have become like golden retrievers. They follow us around, they insist on draping their heads over our shoulders, they nibble at our faces… This, I think, goes back to my strongest desire to use this place and my books to help people experience animals in a new way. And Caryn, one thing, I was talking with Kris Carr today, I’m sure you know her name -
Caryn Hartglass: Yeah, I saw the post you put up this morning, you’re busy -
Kathy Stevens: Busy days! You know, when a book is just coming out… But her audience, and I suspect the same is true in a large part about your audience – people who want to eat well are conscious people, and conscious people, I think, in general, are trying hard to be good people, to be kind people. We don’t intend for our meat and dairy-based diets to be an act of cruelty; it’s certainly a very uncomfortable way to look at eating. And yet, when we eat a meat and dairy based diet, you’re subjecting an animal who is very much more like you than different. Ten chickens are as individual as ten humans. Ten chickens will pick their friends just like we choose our friends; they play; they have a wide emotional range, pain and suffering feel the same to them as they do to us. So you go down this path in the sanctuary and you learn about these animals and the way that people – we know these animals in the way that people know their children. We’re with them every single day. So I don’t think what I just said is true, I know that what I said is true. So I encourage your conscious, educated people trying to live a life of kindness and integrity to look at what I just said and to consider that they’re subjecting animal after animal when they eat a meat and dairy based diet to a life that you wouldn’t wish upon the vilest human being you could conjure up if you tried.
Caryn Hartglass: Let’s just take that in, and think about it one more time. Yep, I’ll consider it. I’m doing it!
Kathy Stevens: You’re doing it! And you’re helping lots of other people do it, so good on you!
Caryn Hartglass: For most of us, once we’re at this place, it’s hard to imagine doing anything else. That’s part of my challenge in sharing this information with people, is that I just don’t understand why people do what they do.
Kathy Stevens: You don’t? I do!
Caryn Hartglass: You do?
Kathy Stevens: Yeah! Look – for some people, food is an addiction, and there’s big marketing dollars behind it to make sure that it is. For some people, you know, it’s part of our family knowledge, part of our traditions; it’s a lack of knowledge about how to cook differently. It’s buying into the myth that you have to have animal based protein.
Caryn Hartglass: It’s like you said earlier that there’s all this good in all of us – and I believe that there’s greatness in all of us, this great good. And that’s what akes it hard for me, because I know that every individual has this power to be spectacular and kind and compassionate.
Kathy Stevens: Yeah. And if we could just sort of stay focused on the fact that one day, all of us are going to be in our rocking chairs looking back and don’t we want to know that we gave it our best shot? Isn’t part of that being the kindest person that we can be? I always joke that, “You could have been a rock. You could have been algae; you could have been a dandelion.” The greatest gift once can receive is to receive a human body. So don’t waste it; don’t throw it away – use it to do good. Get clear about what drives you, get clear about what speaks to your heart, and do good in this life.
Caryn Hartglass: Well, that just about sums it up, Kathy; that’s the end of the show. Thank you, Kathy, for joining me. Your website, again, is…
Kathy Stevens: …Casanctuary.org. The book is available on the website, on Amazon, and it can be ordered through your independent bookstore.
Caryn Hartglass: Okay, and I hope to see you up at the sanctuary this summer!
Kathy Stevens: Caryn, please com visit! I want to talk about Swingin’ Gourmets! Thank you for your great work.
Caryn Hartglass: Okay, thank you!
Kathy Stevens: Chao!
Caryn Hartglass: Bye! You’re listening to It’s All About Food, and I am Caryn Hartglass. Thank you for joining me. Send me emails at info@realmeals.org, I’d love to hear from you. And remember, have a delicious week!

Transcribed by Sarah Brown, June 13, 2013

Interviews with Josh Tetrick and David Bedrick, 5/7/2013

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

5/7/2013:

Part I – Josh Tetrick
Beyond Eggs

Josh Tetrick is the CEO & Founder of Beyond Eggs, a sustainable food company. He’s a social entrepreneur, writer, and speaker, he has led a United Nations business initiative in Kenya, he has worked for both former President Clinton and the president of Liberia, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, and taught street children as a Fulbright Scholar in Nigeria and South Africa. Josh is a graduate of Cornell University and the University of Michigan Law School.

5/7/2013:

Part II – David Bedrick
Talking Back to Dr. Phil, Alternatives to Mainstream Psychology

In his new book Talking Back to Dr. Phil, Alternatives to Mainstream Psychology, counselor, educator and attorney David Bedrick believes there is profound meaning in our struggles, which can be healed when compassionately reframed.Using examples from the Dr. Phil TV show, the author illustrates mainstream psychology’s tendency to shame people into thinking something is wrong with them and debunks many standard protocols and “fixes.”

TRANSCRIPTION PART I:

Caryn Hartglass: Hello, everybody! I’m Caryn Hartglass and you’re listening to It’s All About Food. Hi! How are you? It is May 7, 2013. It’s a beautiful spring day in New York and I’m so glad to be here. I’ve been on this crazy whirlwind three-state tour the last few weeks. We were in California, as you know, premiering the Swingin’ Gourmets and that was so much fun a few weeks ago. And if you’re curious or want the Swingin’ Gourmets to come to you, just let me know because what we’re wanting to do is spread this message about delicious plant-based food and making it fun, and making it swing; send me an email at info@RealMeals.org. And you know, you can always send me an email at info@RealMeals.org about anything, well, related to food because that’s my favorite subject.

Okay, so then after California I was in Florida. I gave a whole bunch of talks and the thing that I realized over and over again … I’m always so excited about what’s going on in the food movement; there are so many wonderful, wonderful things happening. And then I step outside of my box, my world, and I get back into reality and I realize there’s a lot more work that needs to be done so we stick to it.

And I want to bring on my first guest who’s really making strides in this food movement; this is a major game changer. Josh Tetrick is the CEO and founder of Beyond Eggs, a sustainable food company. He’s a social entrepreneur, writer, and speaker. He has led a United Nations Business Initiative in Kenya. He has worked for both President Clinton and the President of Liberia, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and taught street children as a Fulbright scholar in Nigeria and South Africa. Josh is a graduate of Cornell University and the University of Michigan Law School.

Welcome to It’s All About Food.

Josh Tetrick: Thanks! Happy to be here.

Caryn Hartglass: Yeah. Okay. So my sound is a little funny here so I hope it gets better.

Josh Tetrick: I can hear you okay. Can you hear me okay?

Caryn Hartglass: Oh, hi! That sounds better.

Josh Tetrick: There we go.

Caryn Hartglass: There we go. All this high-tech … I love high-tech but sometimes it gets a little loopy.

Well, Josh, thank you for joining me on It’s All About Food. You are doing something amazing for the planet with Hampton Creek Foods and Beyond Eggs. And I’m so excited about the products you’re coming up with and all of the press that you’ve been getting as well.

Josh Tetrick: Thank you. I think you feel it when you get out there, that there’s a sense and this relates tot what we think about every single day, that our food system is just broken. And it’s still broken, it’s almost absurd how broken it is. Some people are aware of it. And we say, we look out there, it’s not just in the U. S. but it’s around the world too. It’s broken because of how damaging it is to our health, rising rates of diabetes and heart disease. It’s broken because of its impact on the environment. It’s broken because of how rough it is on animals. And when we look out there, our first idea is, “How do we start?”

And we decided, as a company, to start out with the egg industry because for us, it’s the epitome of invisible unsustainability. I’ll say a couple of reasons why. Number one it’s massive. About 1.8 trillion eggs are laid every single year around the world. Trillion eggs. And whether you’re in Birmingham, Alabama, where I was raised or in Beijing, China, 99% of all these eggs come from exactly the same place: these disgusting, filthy, industrial warehouses packed with egg-laying hens, crammed into cages so small they can’t flap their wings. All these hens are fed all of these feed that require all these land and water and oil and fertilizer, which is part of the reasons why it’s so environmentally inefficient. Avian flu outbreaks happen because of the confinement of the egg-laying hens. And we just look at that and honestly, we just shake our heads and think, “Is this really the 21st century? Do we really have to get our eggs from this antiquated system?” It’s like horse and buggy day. So our goal is to take the animal entirely out of the equation, to take the egg-laying hen in these cramped, filthy conditions out of the equation and replace her egg with plants, with plants that do exactly the same thing as her egg does, whether it’s binding a cookie or making a muffin rise, or hold oil or water together in mayonnaise and also pretty soon, create a plant-based scrambled eggs. And we’ve been lucky enough in the last years to be selected by Bill Gates as one of three companies shaping the future of food. And I’m really excited about all the joy that people have about what we’re doing.

Caryn Hartglass: It’s very exciting. I like to quote my dad from time to time. He likes to say, “If you can’t solve the problem, eliminate the problem” and you’ve done just that: you’ve eliminated the problem portion of this food product and that’s the chicken and everything that’s surrounding how we raise chickens for eggs today.

Josh Tetrick: Yeah. Your dad… We have a little motto that we love here by this guy named Buckminster Fuller. He was a theorist and he talks about this idea that you can fight back in an absurd system in a lot of ways but one way you can fight back on it is to create a whole new system that makes that system obsolete. Your dad has the right idea.

Caryn Hartglass: And that’s part of solving so many problems. People can’t see beyond the conflict but what they need to see is they need to take a completely different path. Now, one of the things people often say is we cannot afford to do things differently with out energy problem, with our food problem but it seems like with what you’re doing with your company is it’s actually going to be more economical to sue your products.

Josh Tetrick: Yeah, and when you think about it is part of the reasons it’s actually more economical is we’re about 18% less expensive than those battery caged eggs. So this is 18% less expensive than caged-free eggs or 18% less expensive than free-range eggs. 18% less expensive than the most unsustainable environmentally inefficient cruel, abused, unsafe eggs. And the big reason why is we don’t have the animal involved in our process. And the animal, whether you look at it because you care about the animal or you look at it because you care about economic efficiency, the animal, in this case an egg-laying hen, is getting stuffed as we’re speaking right now, with soy and corn. Right this second, hundreds of millions of egg-laying hens are gobbling up soy and corn and 70% of the cost of every single egg, comes directly from the feed that we give the chickens. And we think that’s crazy and we just say, “Just grow it instead.”

Caryn Hartglass: Exactly. It seems so obvious. I’ve watched a few videos on your company and you’ve got this great factory with a lot of wonderful scientists doing a variety of different jobs. Maybe you could talk a little bit about what’s going on Hampton Creek Foods.

Josh Tetrick: Yeah. Part of what we realized in starting this endeavor is there’s so much innovation on our iPhones. You can actually tell someone’s blood count and heart rate through iPhone applications. But when it comes to innovation of food, man, it is a stark landscape. So what we’re trying to do in bringing a team is bringing people who don’t necessarily have a deep experience in food but are amazing scientists, together with people who do have a really deep experience in food. A good example of that is we have a guy names Joshua Klein. He heads our protein team. Joshua has a degree from Cal Tech in Biochemistry, used to work with a Nobel Laureate on a program to finding a cure for AIDS and HIV. And Joshua works side by side with our chef, this guy named Chris Jones. He doesn’t know a whole lot on biochemistry but is a wickedly creative chef; used to work for a restaurant called Moto, which was named Food and Wine’s Best Restaurants two years in a row. And they work alongside a woman named Shweta Rao, who’s our Director of Baking. She’s spent a number of years at Otis Spunkmeyer. So that’s our idea in creating this team, is we want to bring radically different perspective together to try to search the world’s plant species because only about 8% of them actually have been explored for their functionality in food. I mean, it is just a wide-open area. Then we spend every single day searching and then plugging those plants into things like mayonnaise, and cookies, and even scrambled eggs.

Caryn Hartglass: Well, I think we could make food taste even better than what we’ve been used to. Now, can I ask you a question? I saw in this one video where you taste conventional foods made with eggs and then you try and duplicate it made with your product. Where do you get your eggs from that you compare your product with?

Josh Tetrick: We are really trying to be apples to apples. We do use the same exact same eggs that the company we’re working with is using just to show them we don’t have an unfair advantage. Some of your listeners might know that free-range eggs or barn eggs taste even better than regular eggs, which would really give us an advantage if we’re comparing it. So the eggs that we use in our experiments are actually the bad eggs, which is an unfortunate side effect of our work but in order to be compelling when we present our data, we compare the really unsustainable eggs in muffins or cookies or mayonnaise or ranch dressing or what have you, directly to our product.

And it’s kind of really our central goal that … Like my dad, my dad, who I love to death. My dad doesn’t care about climate change or egg laying hen welfare; he just wants a good muffin or cookie or mayonnaise that’s nice and creamy. And our goal is to give him something that actually tastes better and that’s less expensive. And the cool thing about plants is it’s almost an accident of nature that the end result of a hen is ovulation cycle; it does all this amazing things. It does; it does incredible things in food. But the thing about an egg is it is what it is. It causes the muffin to rise, to be moist in a particular way or holds oil and water together in mayonnaise for so many months but with plants, man, you can go beyond; you really can. You can make mayo actually last longer, you can make it creamier, you can make the muffin more moister. So some of what we’re doing now is actually going beyond it. Not just to replicate it; we’re done with the whole replication. Now, we’re thinking more and more about how can we be better? How can we convince someone like my dad? Not only is it going to save money but the cookie actually tastes and feels better than the cookie he’s used to eating every single day.

Caryn Hartglass: Well, you don’t have to convince me but there’s a whole out there that you need to convince. I’ve been a vegan for 25 years and I spent a lot of time in the kitchen. I love to cook and create great recipes. I love to feed my friends and neighbors who aren’t vegan or vegetarian and have them go nuts over the food that we make here. I know the power of plants and I know that we can make incredible taste in food compassionately, sustainably. But you mention your dad and I’m really into a primarily whole or minimally processed diet and a lot of us that are in this food movement are going in that direction but there’s a huge population that doesn’t mind eating a lot of industrial processed food and they don’t care what’s in it; they don’t know what’s in it. Occasionally, they hear about pink slime on the radio and they get a little nutty but for the most part, nobody knows what’s in their food. They don’t even know if it’s egg or not egg.

Josh Tetrick: No, that’s true. And when you look at … when you really step back and realize the magnitude of the problem, just with eggs, 1.8 trillion eggs, laid every single year and that number is going up, it’s not going down. And as exciting as I think the flexitarian and vegan and vegetarian and sustainable food movements are in the United States, every day, every single day the percentage of eggs in battery cage facilities in our food systems increases, every single day. And mostly that’s happening in China, in developing countries. We have a nation of 300 million people and that’s just a tiny percentage of all the people on the planet here. And you’re right, the vast majority of people aren’t looking; they’re not paying attention to it. I think our central question that radiates in our brain every single day is, with the world exploding to 9.5 billion people by 2060, according to UN reports, how do you create a world where human beings have enough protein, have cheap protein, cheap food, without ripping up the environment? Without massively abusing animals? Without sucking up the world’s water? And part of the solution, I think, is plant-based food companies and plant-based approaches to these really vexing problems.

Caryn Hartglass: My background is in chemical engineering and I always wanted to believe that I could do good things with it. And there have been lots of great things that have been done with chemistry and then some ugly things that have been done, and a lot of the ugly things have been related to food. So it’s really good to know that science is being used to do something good.

Josh Tetrick: And what we do with science is we’re not doing in vitro; we’re not doing DNA splicing; we’re not doing synthetic engineering. Maybe it would be better for popular science if we would but we’re not doing that. What we’re doing is sort of acknowledging that we have a world of plants out there and the vast majority of those plants are entirely unexplored. It’s almost an accident, in terms of the plants we decide to use in our food products. So we search aggressively, all of those plants, we characterize them, we understand their functionalities, and then we work in a really creative way with our culinary team to bring them together. But it’s probably a lot more natural from the ground it comes of.

Caryn Hartglass: Here’s a chicken or the egg question for you. You mentioned Bill Gates and how you were mentioned … Well, I read it in the Food for the Future at the Gates Notes, where they mentioned you. And they also mentioned a company Beyond Meat. So there’s Beyond Meat and there’s Beyond Chicken. Who came first, Beyond Meta or Beyond Chicken? Are you related somehow?

Josh Tetrick: No. We were actually around, at least the name, first but they do a lot of good work. My buddy, Ethan Brown, is a founder there and they’re doing a lot of positive work and they have been really successful with their really awesome product, which is actually really, really good.

Caryn Hartglass: Yeah, absolutely. And what do you think about people that are raising chickens on their own in their backyard?

Josh Tetrick: You know, I’ve got to say, if that was our food system, if the eggs that are being produced were from backyard chickens and they were laying eggs and the eggs and the meat and the chicken we eat for meat were in people’s backyards I’d definitely would be doing something else. I spent about 7 years of my life in Sub-Saharan Africa working on poverty alleviation, working on environmental sustainability, working on water scarcity issues in some of the poorest places in the world and I’m personally very driven and focused to finding solutions for the most urgent needs, the most urgent needs facing not only this country but around the world. That is really the limited exception, people doing that. And I think it is much better than 99.7% of where eggs and chickens come from. Frankly, our company’s goal is, if people end up doing that, that’s their business. What we’re more focused on, where the massive impact is and where the ability to have really widespread scale changes and that’s conventional egg production.

Caryn Hartglass: So can we get Beyond Egg products in our stores yet, or is this available for industry only?

Josh Tetrick: Yeah, both. What’s available in the industry right now will be in a number of different grocery stores within the next three months. But right now, if anyone is interested in staying in touch with what we’re up to, you can just go to hamptoncreekfoods.com. You can sign up. We send a weekly note to everyone and we’ll update you on where you can find all our products.

Caryn Hartglass: Is there a story behind Hampton Creek?

Josh Tetrick: There is. My best friend in the world lost his dog a while ago and his dog was named Hampton and it was really the only time I’ve ever seen him cry. And he was the inspiration behind the idea that really getting me to really think about where our food comes from and it’s a way of recognizing him and his role of making this happen. And then we added “Creek” at the end of it because it sounds like a regular old food company.

Caryn Hartglass: Right; it certainly does. Now, about yourself, when did you start on this vegan path and discovering the power of plants?

Josh Tetrick: I’m 33 now. I’ve been vegetarian since I was 21. I played football at West Virginia University and as soon as I stopped playing football I became vegetarian and that’s pretty much all due to the impact of my best friend, talking to me how animals are raised. And the way I like to think about it is, when you look at a mother pig in a gestation crate or an egg-laying hen in a battery cage, besides the suffering element, which obviously hits you on the face, what really moves me is how absurd it is. It doesn’t seem to align with where the world is. It seems like it’s so yesterday. And in so many areas of my life I try to be today; I try to be tomorrow and it just seems so yesterday. And since I was 21 and I’ve been really trying to make sure my values and the values that I talk about align with what goes in my mouth.

Caryn Hartglass: Well, I appreciated what you said before about working on something that is so big and needs to be changed sooner than later. All factory farming needs to go away and I’m not quite sure how that’s going to happen, if there’s a way, maybe Beyond Meat is the company or a number of others, to eliminate the animal for meat as well as eliminating the animal for eggs. But these things need to end, period. It’s probably the worst thing humanity has ever created.

Josh Tetrick: Definitely.

Caryn Hartglass: And I had a question and it slipped away … Okay. Other than what you’re doing now, do you have some future ideas or you’re just focusing on the egg concept?

Josh Tetrick: We’re pretty focused. We’ll probably take this and do something else with it after we have the impact we all want to have but for right now it’s all about the egg.

Caryn Hartglass: You know, it’s all about the egg but it’s also all about money. A lot of us have lots ideas about how to get people to eat healthier or make this a more compassionate world but it takes money to make change. I see you got this great business going but there had to be some incredible investors and supporters to get behind this project.

Josh Tetrick: Yeah. I think you can really … For those out there that have ideas about doing something, I think there are kind of two ways to do it and we picked the second. The first is to really lean into an idea in incremental way. So to really test it, not spend a whole lot of money on it, to begin selling they need to be online or at your local farmers’ market, depending what sector you’re in. Just test it. Sometimes you don’t need a whole lot of investment for a lot of ideas, depending on what the needs of the business are. There’s actually a great book called The Lean Start-Up that talks about how you … there’s a word that says oochin; you sort of oochin to an idea?”

The second approach is more similar to what we did; one is, I don’t think, necessarily better than the other. We had an idea and I gathered a team together and we were lucky enough to work with an investment partner, khosla ventures, which is about solving some of the world’s most pressing problems and they decided to back us because they see it’s a broken industry and it really needs change. I think both approaches work.

I think the worst approach would be the third: just thinking you can’t do it because you don’t have the connections or the network or the resources or yada yada yada. Mostly that’s probably BS; you can figure out how to do it.

Caryn Hartglass: Right. And I think part of it is you mentioned, at the beginning of the show, and that is to create something completely different.

Josh Tetrick: Yeah. And then a little thing we like to play with ourselves is what would happen, if we didn’t do what we’re trying to do in 30 days, if the world or a person you care about the most or something that you really want was gone, how would you approach this differently, if everything matters? And would I have raised more money for this? If I didn’t raise a certain amount and the world vanished? Would I be able to close these deals if nothing else mattered? And here’s the thing I think we tend to be our focus, and I think for any of your listeners out there that really want to start something, if you have intentions you think you might interested in something it’s about quantity, it really requires an almost obnoxious and absurd intensity to make something like this happen.

Caryn Hartglass: Very good advice. I know with myself there’s just too many things I want to do and I know, for making a business happen, you really need to focus on that one thing. I tend to spread myself all over the place. But there’s a lot of things that need to be done and I like to do a lot of things.

Well, Josh, thank you so much for joining me on It’s All About Food. You are amazing and your company is amazing. I look forward to seeing very positive changes because of Beyond Eggs.

Josh Tetrick: Terrific. Thanks a lot.

Caryn Hartglass: Thank you.

Well, wasn’t that something else? I can’t wait to see what happens when Beyond Eggs takes over the egg industry. Let’s see it happen. I am Caryn Hartglass. You’re listening to It’s All About Food. Take a look at responsibleeatingandliving.com; that’s my website and there’s so many recipes on there that do not use eggs. Certainly, for decades now we’ve been figuring out how to use some very simple egg alternatives that work really well on the home and you can find them on responsibleeatingandliving.com. And we’re going to take a quick little break and then we’ll be talking with David Bedrick who wrote the book, Talking Back to Dr. Phil: Alternatives to Mainstream Psychology and I can’t wait.

Transcribed by Diana O’Reilly, May 26, 2013

Interviews with Harold Brown and Ismael Nuño, 4/30/2013

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4/30/2013:

Part I – Dr. Ismael Nuño
The Spirit Of The Heart

Dr. Ismael Nuño had a 35-year career as one of America’s leading heart surgeons and throughout his career he experienced his fair share of loss and triumph. He details his incredible journey as a heart surgeon in his new book The Spirit of the Heart: Stories of Family, Hope, Loss, and Healing.

4/30/2013:

Part II – Harold Brown
Farm Kind

Harold Brown, a character in the documentary Peaceable Kingdom, The Journey Home, spent over half of his life in agriculture. Growing up on a beef farm in Michigan and later working in the dairy industry. Harold has been involved in the behind the scenes operations of food production that uses animals. Today Harold is an activist advocating for sustainable food production, social and environmental justice, animal rights and peace through non-violence.

TRANSCRIPTION PART I

Caryn Hartglass: Hello, everybody! I’m Caryn Hartglass. You’re listening to It’s All About Food. And I am actually in Florida and ready to do the show from here. It’s been really a great tour. I premiered the Swingin’ Gourmets last week, which was really fun. Read more »

Interviews with Betsy Rosenberg and Ellen Kanner, 4/23/2013

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4/23/2013:

Part I – Betsy Rosenberg
On The Green Front

A veteran of CBS Radio News with a specialty in environmental reporting, Betsy Rosenberg launched EcoTalk – formerly TrashTalk – on KCBS Radio in San Francisco in 1997. She produced and hosted more than 1200 one-minute segments covering green lifestyles with a consumer focus and a “news-you-can-use” approach.

From 2004 through 2007, Rosenberg hosted EcoTalk as an hour-long interview program on Air America Radio. It was the nation’s first syndicated environmental show on commercial radio and was the only green hour to air as a prime-time daily program.

She is currently launching a new project, Green-To-Go radio features (quick tips, lasting impact). Green-To-Go will be syndicated on mainstream channels nationwide. As the co-founder of Don’t Be Fueled! – Mothers For Clean and Safe Vehicles, she leads a six-year-old national campaign aimed at increasing supply and demand for more fuel-efficient vehicles.

Rosenberg is a graduate of The Climate Project, Al Gore‘s training program created to better educate the public about global warming, and she has been a regular guest on local and national television programs, including CNN Headline News and Fox News. Rosenberg speaks about greening our lifestyles, climate change, fuel-efficient vehicles and her work on the Don’t Be Fueled! campaign, and green radio.

4/23/2013:

Part II – Ellen Kanner
Feeding The Hungry Ghost

Ellen Kanner is an award-winning food writer and author of Feeding the Hungry Ghost: Life, Faith and What to Eat for Dinner. She is also Huffington Post‘s Meatless Monday blogger and the syndicated columnist Edgy Veggie, is published in Bon Appetit, Eating Well, Vegetarian Times, Every Day with Rachael Ray, and Culinate as well as in other online and print publications. She’s an ardent advocate for sustainable, accessible food, serving on the Miami boards of Slow Food and Common Threads.

When she’s not teaching undeserved students to cook and speaking about what we’re hungry for, Ellen takes time to tend her tiny organic vegetable garden, hike in the Everglades, make friends with cows and make dinner with friends. She believes in close community, strong coffee, organic food and red lipstick. A fourth-generation Floridian, she lives la vida vegan in Miami with her husband. Learn more about Ellen at www.ellen-ink.com

TRANSCRIPTION PART II:

Caryn Hartglass: Hello everybody, we’re back and you’re listening to It’s All About Food, It’s April 23, 2013. A day after my birthday and the day after Earth Day! I’m feeling pretty good, pretty tired after a really big Earth Day and I’m happy to be here today talking about food, my favorite subject. I want to know who you are. I’ve been doing some events lately, traveling around and people come up to me and tell me they listen to the show and you have no idea how wonderful that is to actually see who you are. If you have a chance to drop me an email tell me about what you like, what you don’t like, and who you are, I really would really like to know you. That’ll help me when I’m talking in an empty studio. I’m actually in a mall and I have to apologize if the sound is not the best, but like I said, I’m traveling and this was really the only place I could broadcast today. Thank you for putting up with that. Now it’s time for some fun, I want to bring out my guest Ellen Kanner. She’s the author of Feeding the Hungry Ghost, she’s an award winning food writer and author of Feeding the Hungry Ghost, Life, Faith, and What to Eat for Dinner. She’s also the Huffington Post’s Meatless Monday blogger and is the syndicated columnist Edgy Veggie, is published in Bon Appetit, Eating Well, Vegetarian Times, Everyday with Rachel Rae, and, Culinate as well as in other online and in print publications. She’s an ardent advocate for sustainable, accessible food, serving on the Miami boards of Slow Food and Common Threads. Hi Ellen.

Ellen Kanner: Hi Caryn, happy birthday, happy Earth Day, keep the celebration going.

Caryn Hartglass: I’m totally there, I’m reading your book, I’m about halfway through and I’m saying yes! It’s all about the celebration! That’s the best thing about what we do, it’s fun and it’s a party and the food is fabulous.

Ellen Kanner: Absolutely, we have got to get this message out there.

Caryn Hartglass: Thank you for playing team vegan by the way, that is fantastic.

Ellen Kanner: For playing what?

Caryn Hartglass: Team vegan.

Ellen Kanner: Oh yeah, where are our shirts? We need team vegan shirts.

Caryn Hartglass: That’s right team vegan, it felt like you were on the same team as I was reading. The book is for anyone who loves good food and good food is good food. This just happens to be plant based.

Ellen Kanner: That’s right, you don’t have to know is it vegan? Well the vegan people want to know, epode with allergies certainly want to know what’s in their food, but other than that it’s just good food.

Caryn Hartglass: Right, I wanted to ask you, I had something on the tip of my tongue and I swallowed it apparently. It’s all about the celebration thing. I want to kind of riff on this a little bit because certainly around this time I talk about all the problems with animal agriculture. I was just talking about it on the half hour before because we’re talking about the environment and we know that there’s a tremendous impact with your food choices and the environment. The bottom line is, or I think this is really going to bring everybody over is how the bright side, the side effects of eating healthy food. It’s delicious, it’s fun, you look fabulous. I turned 55 yesterday.

Ellen Kanner: Oh my goodness, that’s fantastic.

Caryn Hartglass: I’m not afraid to say that.

Ellen Kanner: …because you’re probably 10 years younger.

Caryn Hartglass: I don’t know what I look but I know I look good and I feel good.

Ellen Kanner: It’s the biggest win, win, win across the board, it’s fantastic affordable, delicious food that’s great for your karma, it’s great for the planet, it’s delicious. I mean, why not? I always start with the point of pleasure and that’s what this is all about.

Caryn Hartglass: There are a lot of people who find that they have challenges with this diet. I know I talk to people all the time. I feel a lot of deer in headlights expressions from people wanting to do not knowing what to do. You have your own tricks and suggestions and attitudes about transitioning or eating different foods.

Ellen Kanner: Or eating a little more mindfully. I think that’s a great place to start. No one likes to be told what to do so I, including me, came up with a bunch of what I call gentle nudges. These are just ways to get you to connect a little more profoundly with what you eat and where it comes from. Without turning yourself inside out. Even if it means trying an ancient grain like quinoa or millet instead of the usual white rice. It’s got a lot more nutrition, it’s got a lot more flavor. It cooks quicker, it’s better for you. It’s not hard to find.

Caryn Hartglass: Certainly not like it used to be. It’s amazing the variety of food we have available in most markets in the U.S. There are probably some areas where it’s hard to find some things but more and more in big cities and in relatively highly populated suburban areas you can find any of these great foods.

Ellen Kanner: I just heard from someone who picked up my book in the Cayman Islands. It’s an island and she’s been able to find this stuff and she said “Holy Brocooli!” something that was not probably something I should be saying on air but she’s like “This is really good!”

Caryn Hartglass: They’re always surprised. I don’t know what’s so surprising about it. We’ve gone through 50 or 60 years of some crazy kind of brainwashing indoctrination, getting us away from where we need to be. How we come back is so surprising, how wonderful it is. It’s such a crazy world we live in. I have a few questions. Now you live with your husband who does not eat the way you do.

Ellen Kanner: Yes, but if you’re married to someone long enough and if you’re a decent cook, you can kind of seduce him a little bit. He eats a lot more plant based than he ever has and he likes it. So do all our friends. The last time we had people over I did this fantastic Moroccan dinner with chickpeas and lemons and kalamatas and wonderful greens and tomatoes and we had a great time and maybe a little wine. It wasn’t until two days later my friend Mary called me and she said: “That was vegan wasn’t?” I said yeah, it was also really good.

Caryn Hartglass: That’s right, I love having dinner parties, I love having people over and putting delicious food in their mouth. Sometimes it’s simple and sometimes it’s outrageously complicated and involved, taking many days to prepare, but I love doing that.

Ellen Kanner: Me too and you’re right, it doesn’t have to be complicated. Beans, greens, they’ve been part of our diet since we walked on two legs. It’s so much better for us, the foods you can recognize, all the weird stuff that’s in the middle in the grocery store, the stuff they want to sell you. Kale has never had to say that it’s gluten-free, it just is.

Caryn Hartglass: You just put an idea into my head because I’m always telling people you have to read the labels, the fine print. Put your reading glasses on. When you are buying produce, there’s no labeling, you don’t need to read anything. The only thing that might be helpful is whether it’s organic or not but it just it what it is and how simple is that?

Ellen Kanner: I think we do tend as humans to complicate things but it doesn’t need to be that way. The best food for us has been available for centuries and centuries and it’s still there so go eat some.

Caryn Hartglass: Ok, I want to talk a little bit about some of the things I read in your book. You were talking about when you were about seven, I think, and you want shopping with your grandmother and you saw all of these amazing different foods in jars and things and you tasted halvah for the first time.

Ellen Kanner: Right, it was a Middle Eastern grocery store which, by the way, is still in existence, which I still go to, it’s the same one. So there’s some sort of nice personal history there.

Caryn Hartglass: I love ethnic stores because you get to discover all kinds of different products that aren’t in the national chain stores and sometimes there’s some healthier foods there, simpler foods, and it just adds to the variety. I visited Israel a few times, I haven’t been there since 1988 but I remember being in Jerusalem in the Old City and it’s modernized a little bit but not much. They’re living in all of these old stone structures that were built so long ago and there are vendors of different foods there and I’ll never forget the spice vendors. There might be some places like that here in the U.S. but everything was in these super large big baskets, just huge like garbage cans but made of natural materials filled with spices. One would be a bright red and one would be a bright yellow and all of the beautiful different earth tone colors. I don’t know why that thrilled me, but it did.

Ellen Kanner: There is something kind of thrilling about it. Whole foods are naturally beautiful, produce is beautiful. I know what you mean about the thrill of the spices. There are markets in Morocco that are like that. There are some very fancy spice shops in Paris that are like that, but I was thrilled to find one in Miami which is the only place I’ve been in the U.S. that encourages you to smell the spices, you can get a teensy little spoon and taste them. It has to be a full body experience. I mean that’s how we eat, it’s a very intimate thing.

Caryn Hartglass: I’m glad you brought that up, I’ve been really into an olfactory, smelling kind of experience these days and I find that the higher quality products that I buy, the fragrances are part of the experience.

Ellen Kanner: Absolutely.

Caryn Hartglass: This whole spice thing, you know you’ve got some great recipes in the book and spices are really important. People are afraid when they go to vegetarian foods that they won’t have a lot of flavor and I encourage backing away from the salt when people are preparing foods and where is that flavor going to come from? A lot of times it comes from herbs and spices. I’m thinking back to when I was young and we had jars of…

Ellen Kanner: Honey you are still young, I just want to say that.

Caryn Hartglass: When I was younger and I still lived with my parents, we had the classic combination of jars and spice racks and some of those spices were years old.

Ellen Kanner: Oh I know I do a lot of cooking demos so I always bring a lot of basil and some of the stuff in the jar that’s just sort of brown and you’ve never know it’s the same thing. Go for real, go for fresh, go for green.

Caryn Hartglass: You may have heard this but I use a lot of herbs and spices in my recipes too and some people say well I don’t have these herbs and spices. When they’re just venturing out trying a recipe they don’t want to have to invest in all of these different things.

Ellen Kanner: If you do invest, it’s going to cost less than a couple cups of coffee at your major chains and you’ll have them on hand so when you do come home after an exhausting day of work, you can dress up anything in just a few minutes. What’s worth investing in more than you? In your pleasure, in your health, in your happiness.

Caryn Hartglass: That’s a really good point. So many people go out every day and buy their coffee, buy their tea, and it’s not cheap in many places and they might cringe on buying a jar of some spice that will last for a really long time and dress up their meals. It’s kind of an interesting perspective we have on life.

Ellen Kanner: We want it now, now, now and we don’t want to invest in it. Why not? What’s more precious than we are?

Caryn Hartglass: I tend to buy my spices and herbs in bulk now. I invested in these tins that can hold a pretty large quantity. Not garbage can size but maybe some of them hold four ounces to a pound and I just bought like everything and I have this big collection and I use them in great quantities. I love it.

Ellen Kanner: Be lavish, be generous with yourself, it really does wake up you mouth. It can transform foods effortlessly without salt. I also love lemon juice for that. Just a squeeze really makes the flavor pop. No calories, no fat, no nothing, just the flavor.

Caryn Hartglass: The other thing I like to talk about is that people don’t know where their kitchen is and they need to find it. I imagine that you do food demos and you encourage people to cook.

Ellen Kanner: I do, and you don’t have to have a designer kitchen to do it.

Caryn Hartglass: The sad thing is that the people who have the designer kitchens never use them.

Ellen Kanner: This is true,

Caryn Hartglass: I’ve been in a few. They all pull out the All Clad pots that have never been used.

Ellen Kanner: As you say, it’s frequently the least used room in the house and it’s worth discovering. You can get a lot of stuff out of a kitchen.

Caryn Hartglass: Now you grew up with an interest in food and an interest in cooking. It was vineyard DNA I guess.

Ellen Kanner: Yes it was. The vegan thing I had to sort of forge my own path but my family always cooked and we gathered on weekends. It’s just sort of what we always did. It was a great way to bring people together. It still is.

Caryn Hartglass: It still is. Can we underline that because we’ve gotten so far away from that in our culture today.

Ellen Kanner: It is. I don’t quite get it. I know that for most people, most of my friends, cooking and eating is a lonely kind of drudging act. I’m thinking you know where’s the fun in that? I also have a friend who texts all the time and after like the fourth of fifth one in an afternoon, I’ll say: “You know, you live pretty close. Why don’t you come by on your way home and we’ll have dinner.” It’s much easier.

Caryn Hartglass: I’m all about that. Encouraging people to get together and break the proverbial bread.

Ellen Kanner: It’s sacred and it’s a great way to communicate to commune. Put the joy back in your dinner.

Caryn Hartglass: Now, who is the hungry ghost?

Ellen Kanner: Oh we all are. Originally it was the Buddha’s concept about people who were so hungry and clutch and needy and crazy that they’re that way even after they die and then they come back and haunt you. So if you want to appease the hungry ghost, you do it with care, with prayer, and with food offering. Well we need that now, we all do. We’re hungry for so much, for meaning, for connection, for love, for a greener planet, that we don’t necessarily know how to get for more fun. If we just show a little more care towards ourselves and the foods we choose, we can get all that back. We can feed our hungry ghost.

Caryn Hartglass: Do you find that people if they’re invited to an event, or people who might want to have dinner with you, are they at all intimidated because you cook a certain way and you cook well.

Ellen Kanner: I really try to bring it down. I want everyone to be welcome at my table. I’m a vegan who invites everyone to the table and if someone is nervous about having me over, I’ll say look, let’s make it a potluck, I’ll bring something. Let’s not stress. Let’s put the pleasure back in this.

Caryn Hartglass: I agree with you. I’d like to think that I try and be that way but I know that I scare some people and if I’ve ever scared anyone, I’m sorry. It’s not my intention at all. I want everyone to be happy.

Ellen Kanner: Being vegan, the point is compassion, even for our fellow human animals which is sometimes a struggle for me.

Caryn Hartglass: Some people just don’t know how to make something vegan and they don’t even realize that so many of the foods that they eat are already vegan.

Ellen Kanner: Exactly, but if you think I’m kind of nervous about this whole plant based business, go to your farmer’s market or go to your store or go to someone you know who eats that way and say show me. Let’s make dinner together.

Caryn Hartglass: Now what about cravings? I know you mentions cravings in there somewhere.

Ellen Kanner: Oh we all have them.

Caryn Hartglass: I’ve been hearing a lot of different things about cravings these days and a number of people have different spins on cravings. Do you have cravings?

Ellen Kanner: A craving for greens and oatmeal. I think so much of what most people eat these days is processed and that just creates more cravings. It turns us into junkies, it doesn’t make us too terrible smart but it makes us want to eat more processed foods. If I could suggest one thing if you made one little tweak: more produce less processed food. Once you get used tot hat, you’ll find a lot of the cravings for salt, for sugar, for crazy things that you’re not even sure what they are will go away.

Caryn Hartglass: It pisses me off that a lot of food is designed for us to crave. It’s chemically designed and they have studied the psychology and our physiology and have put into certain processed food this desire factor so that we are never sated and we want more of it. That’s pisses me off. I wish everyone was pissed off, I don’t want to touch those foods that have been designed to program me.

Ellen Kanner: Exactly. They only want you to buy more of them. They’re not doing it for our benefit.

Caryn Hartglass: It pisses me off. We should get angry, we should cook better, we should eat better. So I’m a crazy vegan, I’ve been vegan for 25 years and vegetarian for a whole lot more and I lilac to eat healthy foods and I find, especially when I’m traveling, when I’m not entirely in control of what I’m eating, I’ll eat more in a restaurant and I’ll get more salt and more oil in my food. That’s what I call eating badly. The cravings that I get are for salads and grains.

Ellen Kanner: I’m always desperate to get more greens into people,

Caryn Hartglass: There’s nothing that kale can’t do.

Caryn Hartglass: So what do you hope happens with this book, Feeding the Hungry Ghost?

Ellen Kanner: I hope Feeding the Hungry Ghost leaves you feeling nourished in every single way.

Caryn Hartglass: Ok, well I wish you a lot of luck with this book. It’s great, it’s a lot of fun to read, Feeding the Hungry Ghost, Life, Faith, and What to Eat for Dinner. I’m going to be in South Florida next week Ellen and I hope I have the chance to meet you

Ellen Kanner: That would be so much fun, thank you.

Caryn Hartglass: Ok, thanks for joining me on It’s All About Food. I’m Caryn Hartglass and have a very, very delicious week and send me an email at info@realmeals.org . I want to know who you are.

Transcribed May 24, 2013 by Meichin

Interviews with Brian Alexander and Vance Lehmkuhl, 4/16/2013

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

4/16/2013:

Part I: Brian Alexander
Exploring Life

Brian David Alexander is an internationally recognized lecturer and trainer in the fields of Communication and Rapport, Personal Growth and Development, Education, and Counseling and Personal Coaching. He is a Master Trainer and Master Practitioner of Neuro-Linguistic Programming.

Brian has studied with the founders and leading experts of Neuro-Linguistics and has gone on to pioneer new discoveries and developments in the field. He currently teaches courses at Hamsa College covering such areas as Human Communication and Relationship Skills (Certified Practitioner in NLP) Levels I & II, Advanced Therapeutic Techniques in Neuro-Linguistic Counseling, Ericksonian Hypnosis Levels I & II, Education and Learning Skills, and Belief Systems and Health.

Brian works not only with the mind but the entire mind/body system and the energy body system. He has studied, practiced and taught courses in Reiki, Chi Kung and general Energy Medicine and medical intuition for over 20 years. The mind and body are part of the same cybernetic system and so what affects one affects the other. The body energy systems are an equal part of the whole and working with these can have a profound effect on healing.

4/16/2013:

Part II – Vance Lehmkuhl
V For Veg

Vance Lehmkuhl writes “V for Veg,” the vegan food column in the Philadelphia Daily News, and is the founder and producer of Vegcast, a popular podcast on vegan and vegetarian issues. A cartoonist, he is the author of a collection of vegetarian cartoons, “The Joy of Soy” (Laugh Lines Press, 1997) and is also a founding member of the eco-conscious pop band “Green Beings.” The band’s Lehmkuhl-penned patter song “Leftovers,” listing all the foods available after eliminating meat and dairy, is a favorite at venues such as Vegetarian Summerfest, and has been played multiple times on Dr. Demento’s radio show. Vance went vegetarian in 1985 and has been vegan since 2000.

TRANSCRIPTION PART I:

Hello I’m Caryn Hartglass and you’re listening to It’s All About Food. Hello and how are you today? I’m good, thanks for asking. You know I love to talk about food and today we’re going to kind of expand the notion of food I think and talk about what we feed our minds and how we deal with our mind and food actually is energy, right? And let’s get down to basics: What energy is and how we can use it to heal and learn. We’re going to learn a lot in this first half hour and I’m going to bring on my guest Brian David Alexander is an internationally recognized lecturer and trainer in the fields of Communication and Rapport, Personal Growth and Development, Education, and Counseling and Personal Coaching. He is a Master Trainer and Master Practitioner of Neuro-Linguistic Programming. Brian has studied with the founders Brian has studied with the founders and leading experts of Neuro-Linguistics and has gone on to pioneer new discoveries and developments in the field. He currently teaches courses at Hamsa College covering such areas as Human Communication and Relationship Skills Levels I & II, Advanced Therapeutic Techniques in Neuro-Linguistic Counseling, Ericksonian Hypnosis Levels I & II, Education and Learning Skills, and Belief Systems and Health. Brian works not only with the mind but the entire mind/body system and the energy body system. He has studied, practiced and taught courses in Reiki, Chi Kung and general Energy Medicine and medical intuition for over 20 years. The mind and body are part of the same cybernetic system and so what affects one affects the other. The body energy systems are an equal part of the whole and working with these can have a profound effect on healing. And I can’t wait to hear more on that. Welcome to It’s All About Food Brian.

BA: Hello Caryn. It’s a pleasure to be here with you.

CH: I’ve been wanting to talk to you about these subjects for a really, really long time so I’m finally glad we were able to schedule this time.

BA: I’m looking forward to it.

CH: So, let’s just get right to it. My first question is how did you get started in this field of neuro-linguistics and mind/body systems and energy/body systems.

BA: Well there’s two different paths that you’re talking about. The neuro-lingustics, I was introduced to it probably about twenty-five years ago by a practitioner and I just fell in love with it. It was like I came home.

CH: Hmm, that’s a wonderful feeling.

BA: I started practicing it and discovered that I was able to do so many wonderful things. I was able to help so many people through different problems that they were having. Then I just continued to study and study and came further and further home.

CH: I like the way that sounds. Well I just read my first book on neuro-linguistic programming. It was really interesting and I have the guests on my program a few weeks ago. I learned a lot and it’s really intriguing to me. I haven’t had a chance to do any of the exercises that are in the book yet because it does take some time and focus but they seem so obvious. It seems like commonsense but it does take some skill, some technique.

BA: Well neuro-linguistics basically came about when a couple people said what is excellence? And how is it that some people can excel in one area and other people in another? They began to study what we call subjective experience. An attempt to learn these things and the question was, can it be copied, can it be duplicated? The answer is yes. Most of what people do well is somewhat intuitive, as what you said, it seems natural. It was a matter of neuro-linguistics, or NLP, really evolved from that simple question and concept. So NLP really is not what most people think it is. Truly what NLP is, is the studying of human experience to learn how we do what we do.

CH: The name, if you’re not familiar with what it is, it sounds nothing like what I understand it to be. It sounds almost scary.

BA: Well I guess it is.

CH: Neuro-programming is like some kind of brainwashing, right?

BA: Well, yes but they’re talking about the programs that already exist, those ones that are there by nature.

CH: Yes.

BA: And the ones that are there by nurture.

CH: Well what’s fascinating about the little that I read is how much you can understand about yourself, about the people that are in your life, about your business, your co-workers, people that bother you, people that you enjoy. It really lays out why things work for you and why things don’t and, I haven’t tried it yet, but it seems like there are some pretty good techniques to help you get to where you want to be.

BA: Well, as I said, neuro-linguistics is the study of the processes of our mind/body system. So that’s how we store a process and use information. When you understand that the world opens up. You can accomplish so much for yourself and for others. Unfortunately however, NLP has been so effective there’s many of what I call cookbook recipes for how to achieve behavioral change. And while the recipes are fine in the hands of a good chef, for a lot of people these recipes just lead to other problems and confusion.

CH: That is such a good example, a good analogy. You give a recipe to a good chef you get great food. You give it to somebody else and it could be a disaster. And I’ve seen that so often. We see that in so many fields. There are good doctors there are bad doctors. There are good practitioners there are bad ones.

BA: That certainly applies in the field of neuro-linguistics. There is a strategy for getting rid of phobias, usually requires one session. The fastest I’ve ever gotten rid of a phobia was about seven minutes.

CH: Really? Wow.

BA: The process is very simple. There’s a simple cookbook recipe that allows you to do that. The trick is how do you make sure it doesn’t regenerate itself? How do you deal with other aspects and issues in a person’s life that might cause it to come back or cause other problems to occur in its place?

CH: Can you give a brief example of how it works? Or how you might work with someone?

BA: For a phobia?

CH: Yes, for a phobia. Sure.

BA: Interestingly, a phobia is very much the same as any other traumatic experience in the system. Trauma is one of those insidious things. When it gets inside it likes to dig itself in deep. So examples of trauma, aside from a phobia, rape or abuse is an example, anxiety disorders are very similar to that. All of those disorders that our war vets experience when they come back. They’re all very similar. So it’s a very similar process to remove them. The process is to separate one from the experience. It’s an understanding of how our mind processes information. So when you have a traumatic event it roots itself inside and every time your memory comes up to that event, it’s like playing a tape loop. It plays the same loop over. You re-experience the same thing.

CH: Right.

BA: You can’t stop it in the middle. It’s like your computer. When you double-click on an icon to start up a program, there’s no way to stop that program from starting up, short of pulling the plug on your computer.

CH: Right you watch that little thing spinning until it’s up.

BA: And then you can shut it down, you can stop it afterwards. But when you’re in the middle of any traumatic experience…you can’t really shut it down in the middle. It has to play itself out. So that the best way is to stop it from ever starting again. So what we have to do is separate one, disassociate one, from the emotions of the experience. In other words, break what we call the semantic response, the time-based loop that occurs in the mind that re-creates this experience. So, if you think about it, in your mind you’re going to have a picture, a actually a moving picture, of an experience and there’s going to be several emotions that are attached to that experience. What you want to do is take those emotions out in such a way that they can’t get back. You’re going to separate the two. So then it just becomes an experience.

CH: Right. Well it’s quite magical and, if done right, it can really take care of a problem so quickly. You know, we create computers and some people, religious people like to say that God created man in his image and I like to think that we create computers in our image because we function like computers, we are living computers and, like you said, there are all these processes that go on within our mind. When we understand them we can modify them.

BA: There’s two different, what I call types of the unconscious mind, the unconscious and the subconscious. One of them is the mechanistic unconscious, that is the simple routines that occur, the beliefs, the values. When you first start out in life, you’re an open book, you have no conscious mind it’s strictly unconscious. There’s no filter that allow you to say, I don’t believe that, I don’t like that, I’m not going to accept that in my system. So as children every thing we’re told to be true, we accept as being true. So many of our beliefs and values that we hold now came from then. As well as many health issues or other problems that we have in life, they also come from that period.

CH: It’s really amazing how much we give to our choices or our understanding when we were so young but it’s our foundation.

BA: Well, it is. And when you start talking about man being created in some image. I’d like to say that our unconscious mind has, basically like our bodies, there’s a normality to our bodies. We look at it. We know what’s normal—two hands, five fingers on each and so on. The same thing happens in the mind. There’s a certain set of processes that are normal for everybody but everybody may access them a little differently.

CH: Have you used this approach to help people with any kind of eating problems? I like to always relate back to food because I’m always talking about food. There’s so much in our early history that’s associated with food and people who want to change what they’re eating have such difficulty because it’s programmed inside of them.

BA: It’s almost like an addiction.

CH: Yeah, absolutely.

BA: I’ve worked with a great many people over a great many different types of issues, a lot of health issues, eating disorders directly. It really depends on what the person is coming to see me about. I can’t think just off the top of my head of a specific type of eating disorder I’ve worked with somebody on. There’s been so many different types of things.

CH: OK, let’s talk about, we may get back to NLP but I wanted to talk a little bit about energy and there’s a lot of people out there that practice Reiki and just like we were mentioning before there are some that are good at what they do and some that aren’t. This is a field that is gaining some momentum in some areas. Some people still are saying that there’s nothing that supports its impact. We don’t have enough clinical evidence to show that it really has an effect but some people have experienced benefits. How did you get interested in Reiki? And actually general energy medicine and what is it?

BA: This is the other path. When we started out I said there were two separate paths. I began, I suppose I’ve always been interested in it to some extent and I’ve done martial arts for a great many years so I began to study, about 25 years or ago or so, tai chi and other energy work and from there I became interested in the aspects of energy and the human body. Our bodies are energy systems, we’re electrochemical and electromechanical devices. We generate an energy field. And we can all use it. We all have it, we all use it. If you bang your shin, the first thing you do is grab it with your hand. You bang your elbow you grab it with your hand because there are areas in our palms that are really great for transmitting energy. So this is a natural function with us. A young child when he hurts himself goes running to mommy because he or she knows it intuitively that mommy’s energy is much stronger. So when mommy puts her hand over it, it’ll provide better healing.

CH: Mmmm. I like that.

BA: Of course mommy can kiss it better because mommy’s saliva is probably good too.

CH: You know I’m getting a little more understanding of this. I’ve seen the technique, I don’t really understand what’s going on where people will put their hands over their food.

BA: Oh, yes.

CH: What is that and what’s supposed to be happening?

BA: Well I said that our bodies create an energy field. I have different tests that I do with people to demonstrate. You can feel this field for quite a distance off, several feet. And all life has an energy field around it, every living thing. When you begin to talk about energy and food, if your food is alive it has its own energy field. You’re mixing your energy field with the food’s energy field to enhance it, to improve it, to strengthen it. My first teacher in chi kung a great many years back, told me of something he’d seen with his own Chinese chi kung master. What happened was there were two petri dishes filled with bacteria. The master held his hands over one, the bacteria began to grow and multiply. Then he held his hands over the other and the bacteria began to die off. He called it healing chi and killing chi.

CH: That’s amazing.

BA: The explanation is in Chinese the saying Yi leads Chi or mind leads energy. So where we focus our energy, where we center our energy, is where it goes. If you put your hands over your food, as in a prayer if you will, you’re not just asking the food to provide nourishment for you, you are nourishing the food. By nourishing that living food it in turn provides more nourishment and health benefits for you.

CH: But doesn’t that drain from us when we focus it on the food?

BA: You have a universal supply. Yes, you can use your own energy…

CH: I see it sort of focuses it like a conduit.

BA: Yes. The amount of energy you’re giving to the food to strengthen it is very small compared to what the food will give back to you, if the food itself is healthy…I was going to say, and that brings up an interesting thing, there are some foods that give energy to us, there are some foods that take energy from us.

CH: Anything specific or…?

BA: The more life, the more vital, your food is, the more energy it can give back.

CH: And how do we know if it’s vital?

BA: Ah, if your food is already dead, it’s not going to be giving anything to you, it could be taking something away from you.

CH: And what defines dead?

BA: Well, other animals for example.

CH: Right, they’re dead. So when we eat plant foods that have just been harvested or harvested not too long ago, they still have life in them.

BA: Certainly.

CH: But cooked foods aren’t alive. They have some nutrition in them.

BA: Yes. And there’s a lot of foods that are neutral as well. Well, they don’t give or take.

CH: They don’t take. I see.

BA: So there’s going to be some neutral foods. Your body can get something out of everything and the more you cook a food, the more you can drain the energy out of it. And you can test it, there are ways to test these things on your body to find out what the effects are, whether they are going to give to you or take from you.

CH: OK. I like that. I like this idea of focusing the energy into my food. Is there any specific way to do that? Can we do it without really knowing what we’re doing?

BA: Oh yes. There are many different rituals people have developed for giving energy to food. I’ve read of several that can become very complex. You can call on spirits and gods and energy to help the food but the reality is holding your hands over the food for just a few moments with your mental concentration saying, “I’m revitalizing this food, I’m giving it health and life and energy” and that’s enough. You’ve created your own personal ritual for energizing your food.

CH: OK, well I started doing it recently and I’m going to just continue doing it because why not? Can’t hurt and it can do a lot of good.

BA: The potential for good is far greater than the potential for hurt is. So you might as well just keep doing it and as you said, you certainly aren’t going to lose anything by it.

CH: Right. Well I think there’s so much that we don’t know. I mean, I know there’s so much that we don’t know and when it comes to energy I think that this is really going to be the next field where we start really exploding with knowledge and information. We’re just like starting to understand it and maybe we’ll have some tools in the future where we can actually measure and verify and “see” what we’re working with.

BA: Well we have to be open to these concepts, I mean as a people we have to be open to it. I’m always amazed even when I do energy work with people and they see some of the results. But a lot of times people say well it’s just the placebo effect or something. I had a friend with a couple of elderly dogs and one was very sick, it wouldn’t go up the stairs any more, just basically lay down and stayed there. And I went over for a few minutes and put my hands over the dog and she was quite amazed. She said it’s the first time the dog hasn’t snapped at anybody when they got near it. And for the next week she told me the dog was able to go up and down the stairs. And the dog didn’t know anything about placebos.

CH: (laughs) That’s right, not that we know of unless this dog had been reading up on things.

BA: I don’t know what it was doing in its spare time but I saw the actual effects of the energy on it so there is something to this.

CH: As a scientist I know that things happen that are good and things that happen that are bad with respect to medical care and sometimes people survive things and sometimes people don’t and it’s not happenstance or reasons and just because we don’t know what those reasons are doesn’t mean they don’t exist. We need to look further and it’s always frustrating that the medical community doesn’t focus enough on those spontaneous remissions or those magical healings and they just fluff them aside but those are where the answers are.

BA: Well I’ve had more than one example where I’ve done an energy treatment with a person before they went in for an operation and they told me later that everybody was amazed at how well they went through the operation.

CH: Well I can say that I might be one of them. I’ve had good fortune to work with you and I had great success afterwards and I am very grateful about that…because I’m here years later to talk about it. And that’s a good thing.

BA: There are many others of us that are grateful as well that you’re here.

CH: Oh thank you. We have a little bit more time left and I just wanted to detour a little bit and talk about some other things that you’ve been working on now. You wrote a fictional story, a book, a few years ago called The God Matrix. And I enjoyed reading that book and it incorporated a lot of, I think, of your personal beliefs in the story. And I realize now, in hindsight, there was a lot of this energy, medicine and energy concepts in it that lent themselves so nice to the story and made it really interesting but also made it feel like, even though you were talking about aliens that came from a more intelligent, more profound, place, it made sense. It just made sense. It just seemed right. Like yes, this could be possible.

BA: Well yes, I talked about energy and I talked a little bit about eating and a little bit of what we were talking about earlier, neuro-linguistic programming. So I incorporated many of these concepts into my fictional book, maybe not quite as fictional as I originally thought it was.

CH: And where can people find this book?

BA: Well, it’s available through Amazon or Barnes and Noble or any of the online stores. Or you can go directly to the author’s website thegodmatrix.com.

CH: OK. Well, I really enjoyed that book and if anybody wants a good read it’s a good one. I would like to know that there are good aliens out there, well I don’t want to tell the whole story but…enough said. It’s a nice story and just shows that we have a lot of work to do here on this planet, but there’s always hope to make things better. We can start with ourselves and if we have issues that we want to work on, no matter what they are, issues within ourselves or with other people or people that we work with, here are some really good techniques that are worth looking into. You’re in Canada but if people wanted to work with you is there a way to contact you?

BA: Well if they go to my website that’s a good start. They can learn a little bit more about what I do there. My own personal website is briandalexander.com.

CH: OK. Well thank you so much for joining me on It’s All About Food and for all the great work you are doing. Can you, I just want to ask everyone, can you feel his energy? Whenever I talk to Brian I just feel you have this control of energy–it just kind of pops out of the phone. A great conduit for energy.

BA: Thank you Caryn

Transcribed by Suzanne Kelly, 6/3/2013

TRANSCRIPTION PART II:

Caryn Hartglass: Okay, everybody, I’m back. I’m Caryn Hartglass. You are listening to It’s All About Food. Now, we’re just going to relax and have a good time and talk more about my favorite, food, because it really can be fun.

And I’m going to bring on my next guest, Vance Lehmkuhl, who writes V for Veg vegan food column in the Philadelphia Daily News. He’s the founder and producer of VegCast, a popular podcast on vegan and vegetarian issues. A cartoonist, he’s the author of a collection of vegetarian cartoons, The Joy of Soy, and is also a founding member of the eco-conscious top band, Green Beings. The band’s Lehmkuhl- pend patter song, Leftovers, listing all the foods available after eliminating meat and dairy is a favorite avenue such as vegetarian summer fests and has been played multiple times on Dr. Demento’s radio show. Vance went vegetarian in 1985 and has been vegan since 2000.

Welcome, Mr. Vance Lehmkuhl, to It’s All About Food!

Vance Lehmkuhl: Hello, Caryn!

Caryn Hartglass: Hey! How are you?

Vance Lehmkuhl: I’m pretty good today. How are you?

Caryn Hartglass: I’m very good. I can’t remember when I met you, it was at some Summerfest long ago and I haven’t seen you for quite some while but …

Vance Lehmkuhl: We got to get you back to support that.

Caryn Hartglass: I know. There’s just too many things to do.

Vance Lehmkuhl: Yeah. I know how it is.

Caryn Hartglass: Too many things. You probably experience this too and I say this from time to time but I used to think I knew all the vegans and I don’t anymore. There’s so many of them.

Vance Lehmkuhl: There’s too many of them. They’re proliferating like mad.

Caryn Hartglass: There’s so many of them and some of them are making them, making more of them. There’s certainly not enough but we’re increasing and that’s a good thing.

Vance Lehmkuhl: Yeah. I used to say this about vegan restaurants in Philadelphia or vegan-oriented restaurants in Philadelphia, that I would know about them 6 months before they came out and lately I’m hearing, “Hey, did you hear about this new one?” I’m a vegan food columnist. I’m finding out from other vegans because they’re just so many of them cropping up and it’s great there’s too many of those to keep track of.

Caryn Hartglass: I know. I certainly feel the same way here in New York City. There are many that I have not been to, which I cannot believe because 20 years ago if there was a vegetarian restaurant that popped up I had to be there. It was such an amazing thing. It’s still an amazing but they’re everywhere and they’re good.

Vance Lehmkuhl: Yeah. It’s an embarrassment of riches.

Caryn Hartglass: Exactly. Well, whenever I think of you or see your name pop up on the Internet when your column comes up in philly.com, I always have a smile on my face because you always bring out the best or the fun things in the vegetarian/vegan lifestyle.

Vance Lehmkuhl: Well, thank you. That’s, I guess … it’s kind of my role. I try to bring the fun.

Caryn Hartglass: Well, it’s important because if we really focus on why we do what we do, it’s not fun.

Vance Lehmkuhl: Well, no.

Caryn Hartglass: And the world has a lot of ugliness to it: a lot of pain, a lot of suffering, a lot of exploitation. And it can be hard to just be done with life, get up every morning out of bed but we wouldn’t be experiencing life the way we should if stayed on the dark side and it’s really important to see the humor, humorous healing. Humor can energize and I thank you for doing that.

Vance Lehmkuhl: Well, sure. I should give a shout out to Dan Piraro, who I had a talk about this with on VegCast, this very topic of how you take something that is just intrinsically not funny and find humor in it. I did my book in 1997, The Joy of Soy, which I was just vegetarian at the time so some of the cartoons are flawed, from my perspective now. But Dan’s continued to crank out Bizarro, and he very often do another vegan-oriented cartoon and he keeps on coming up with new angles to both amuse people and yet make them think for a second what they’re reading on their daily newspapers. He’s a great master of that.

Caryn Hartglass: Well, that’s the idea: to get people to think. And as we know, most people are sleepwalking through life, for the most part. And many of us are marketed through life to live and react and shop and consume the way corporations would like us to. And wow, what kind of power would we get if we start to think?

Vance Lehmkuhl: Yeah. Well, that’s true. It’s a double-edged sword because people shield themselves from the kind of stuff that is troubling to think about. And when you do think about it, at first if you just let that be something that remains troubling, you can be either troubled by it by shutting it out but if you start doing something about it, it becomes more of an impetus to do more and to get out there and make an impact.

Caryn Hartglass: Now, of course cartoons are visual. But could you describe some of yours, maybe some that have really gotten … that you’ve heard a lot about or gotten a lot of great responses to?

Vance Lehmkuhl: I’ll just tell you about two cartoons. One was in The Joy of Soy. It’s my favorite cartoon, The Joy of Soy. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the musical Sweeney Todd or the story of Sweeney Todd …

Caryn Hartglass: Oh yeah. I performed in Sweeney Todd several times. I’m just going to plug myself here but I was in it with Jean Stapleton in one production.

Vance Lehmkuhl: Wow, now that’s … I can’t really… All I did was try to … I re-drew the iconic poster image that has this kind of 19th century cartoon of Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett, with him with his hands in the air and looking like he’s shouting and I have Mrs. Lovett coming to him saying, “ A guy out there wants to know if we have any vegetarian pies?” and Sweeney Todd saying, “He’s in luck; a vegetarian just came in this morning.” So I always thought that was a pretty funny cartoon, although it’s not one of those that really, I think, isn’t going to convert anybody.

And the other cartoon that I have to mention, just because I keep on seeing it all over the place, is one that I just drew basically as an exercise using Flash, the application, using the drawing portion of it when I was learning how to use that software. And I drew a bunch of overweight and unhealthy-looking people asking a bunch of thin people, who were obviously vegans because they had T-shirts on that said, “Meat is murder” or whatever. And the unhealthy people are eating drumsticks and ice cream and saying, asking the vegans, “Where do you get your protein?” And this has now been picked up and had a caption added to it about obesity in America, which I did not have actually on the original cartoon but I’ve seen this now dozens of times around the Internet and some people get upset saying, “It’s possible to be vegan and be obese and blah, blah, blah. You can’t be tarring people with this brush.” So I’m actually just mentioning that to … trying to explain I did not put that caption on the cartoon and is now seems out of my control. It’s one of the Internet means that goes around and flares up every now and then so maybe … I don’t know. That was not meant to be the professionally released cartoon. I just put it up on my webpage as a type of exercise. It does resonate with some people.

Caryn Hartglass: And where can we see that?

Vance Lehmkuhl: I don’t actually have that.

Caryn Hartglass: Oh, you don’t have that. Okay, great.

Vance Lehmkuhl: You can Google the images “where do you get your protein?” and it will probably come up somewhere there. It was on my, back when I was a cartoonist for the Philadelphia City Paper, they gave me a webpage where I promoted some of the Joy of Soy stuff but that is not there anymore because I haven’t done any cartooning for them about 10 years now. So that was back in the day.

Caryn Hartglass: Okay. Back in the day. It’s funny you brought up Sweeney Todd; it’s, I think, one of my favorites. There were a number of things … I always wonder sometimes when people see things, if they get some of the messages and I don’t even know if some of the messages were intended the way I interpret them. But the funny thing, the creepy thing about that particular show, if people aren’t familiar with it, is this man who was a barber comes back to his town in London to seek vengeance for sometime he was very wronged for. And he is working above a pie shop and it’s during the Industrial Revolution. And he’s poor and the woman and the pie shop can’t afford to buy meat and they end up putting dead bodies into meat pies. It’s really economical and they’re recycling and most of the bodies that the barber kills are people that are lonely and alone. Okay. But people get this reaction like, “Oh, my God, people in pies!” And certainly, we shouldn’t be cannibals but it’s not that far a stretch from all the somebodies that we’re putting in all our food products: the cows, the pigs. They’re not its; they’re someones.

Vance Lehmkuhl: Right. The thing about it is it’s very much like the whole horsemeat scandal.

Caryn Hartglass: Oh, gosh! Can we talk about that crazy thing for a minute?

Vance Lehmkuhl: Yeah. I’m kind of intrigued by this whole … the horror that people have, realizing… the same way that a lot of people in Sweeney Todd realized those meat pies have people in it, and saying, “By the way, you’ve been eating horse.” And they were perfectly happy when they thought they were just eating cows but horse, that’s a whole other thing because there’s this whole cultural division. It doesn’t even extend across the Channel, in France but in England and America, generally we just think of that as equivalent to eating the family dog or the family cat. It’s all a question of how you’re seeing it. You’re doing the same wrong and it’s the same kind of abomination. The point I would just like be sure to remind people is that’s the price we pay, for those of us who are eating meat, for trying to shut it out, try to shut out the facts of what’s going on and try to not look at what’s going on. The meat industries around the world flourishes with all kinds of deceptive and corrupt practices because consumers, generally, just want to get the meat and not know anything about where it came from or how because that kind of thought is just troubling. So we have that kind of vacuum of knowledge and it’s almost inevitable that things like these are going to kind of go on because there’s no light being shined on them. So I think it’s a phenomenon that people should, as consumers, be aware of, that when you support the meat industry with your dollars, you’re basically paying it to mistreat with you and it might be … rather than advocating for better labeling or anything like that, it might be better if you just opted out of that hole.

Caryn Hartglass: Well, why is it okay to eat a cow or a pig but not eat a horse. I mean, just really simply? Or why is it okay to eat a cow’s side but cringe at eating their brains. It’s doesn’t make any sense at all because it doesn’t make sense.

Vance Lehmkuhl: Well, I can’t argue with that.

Caryn Hartglass: And yeah, you made such a good point, where people, so many people don’t know what’s in their food. They don’t care what’s in their food until the media tells them something to care about and then everybody gets all hysterical. One of the best examples, recently, is the whole pink slime thing, which just made me laugh because yeah, it sounds pretty gross, pink slime, but the meta industry is just trying to get as much protein out of their raw materials as they can and you have no idea what else they’re doing.

Vance Lehmkuhl: Right.

Caryn Hartglass: That’s the tip of the iceberg, okay? A little ammonia to make this slop usable in hamburger.

Vance Lehmkuhl: Right. Yeah. Everybody got outraged about pink slime but what might be called brown slime or brown …

Caryn Hartglass: How about the excrement that’s allowed in food? How about that?

Vance Lehmkuhl: I mean, there’s all kinds of … We can name any number of things that are unsavory to talk about …

Caryn Hartglass: Right. Or the pus in milk?

Vance Lehmkuhl: … that are standard in these products but I guess maybe that’s in the calendar for later this year or next year, to have a little blowup about some other component but people seem to think if we can just eliminate this or make this tweak to the system, then we can continue to do this thing we know is not right but which we happen to enjoy the flavor of. Really is, the only real solution is to eliminate it, in my opinion.

Caryn Hartglass: Yes, just get rid of it. My dad always said, “If you can’t solve the problem, just eliminate the problem” and that’s how you do it. Eat plants. Everybody eat plants.

Vance Lehmkuhl: Yup.

Caryn Hartglass: I like putting messages out through art. And I think that you do that to a large degree. You are also a musician.

Vance Lehmkuhl: Right.

Caryn Hartglass: You still doing your Green Beings?

Vance Lehmkuhl: Yeah. Our most recent album was Electric Green that had a bunch of songs. I have a new … I don’t want to necessarily talk about what’s happening this year until I have it nailed down but there’s a song that I really enjoy, that I’m trying to get a good studio recording of. Sarah Schleuter Eisman, George Eisman’s daughter, sang at the summer fest a couple of years ago, which is set to a lyric by a blind Arab poet from the 11th century named Al Mari, which got some of the most entrenchment observations on how humans feel from the animal world for no good reason. It’s eye-opening that somebody was writing this stuff a millennium ago. I set that to music and I think that came out pretty well so that’s going to be on the next thing we put out.

But yeah, trying to get things across in whatever way, either music or humor-induced share the aspect. If you can kind of get into somebody’s brain in a way that they’re already predisposed to enjoy something aesthetically, then you bring the message along with that and usually, I think, they’re in a little better frame of mind to evaluate the message, where when you’re just talking to them and presenting things that are logical and factual they’re used to seeing that coming, and trying to put up defenses against it.

Caryn Hartglass: We were talking about energy in the first part of this program and there’s a whole mystery behind energy. But I think people are a lot more receptive to understanding certain concepts at a different level and we’re communicating in a different level through music. And I love connecting with people and knowing that I touched them somehow in some moment. It’s one of the greatest feelings I’ve ever had and I know that we don’t really understand what’s going on but something is going on.

Vance Lehmkuhl: Yeah. And I hope you’re still … I remember you have a great singing voice and I hope you’re bringing that to people around wherever you go.

Caryn Hartglass: Thank you. We actually have some big plans. I’m not going to be specific about that right now but it involves vegetables and music.

Vance Lehmkuhl: Cool. That’s great. I look forward to that.

Caryn Hartglass: Yeah. You have a podcast, VegCast. And part of it you feature music. And one of the musicians at least has to be a vegetarian. Is that the rule?

Vance Lehmkuhl: Yeah. If it’s a solo artist, either the solo artist himself or if it’s a band, at least one member of the band has to be at least vegetarian. That’s the rule I’ve had from the beginning. The only other rule is I have to have the permission from the artist, to actually have the right to give me permission to play the song permanently online on vegcast.com so I’ve been able to get from some people, some high profile people like Moby, and Nelly McKay, Jim James. There are a lot of vegetarian and vegan musicians out there that kind of don’t have a lot of showcase so I’m able to showcase some of them. So if people are listening to this and you are a musician, you can contact me at vance@vegcast.com and we can see about finding a slot there.

Caryn Hartglass: Okay, I’m going to send my brother to you.

Vance Lehmkuhl: Okay. Beautiful! That’s great.

Caryn Hartglass: My brother is a vegan and he has a jazz band called Batik. You can go to batikjazz.com to get a taste of some of his music.

Vance Lehmkuhl: Great! We like to try to let people find out about the bands and other ones we’ve had one VegCast. I’m hearing about them from other places and they’re starting to get reputations. I don’t want to say, “Go on VegCast” and that’s your ticket to stardom; there are other people that hasn’t happened to.

Caryn Hartglass: Oh yeah, just a few.

Vance Lehmkuhl: It is part of the mission of VegCast to kind of try to disperse and spread information that is out there that people might not encounter otherwise. And I should also allow that we do also tend to play a lot of Green Beings on VegCast because I can.

Caryn Hartglass: Obviously. Of course. And what is a green being, anyway?

Vance Lehmkuhl: Well, the concept of the band really is just encompassing the whole green aspect with… Another songwriter in the band, Paul Norquist, who has flirted with vegetarianism but is more emphasizing the environmental aspect. He’s a great pop song writer. He’s written a bunch of songs. I tend to write songs more about the food aspect or about the animal justice aspect. But the overall concept of the band is to take kind of these concepts that have to do with social responsibility or ethics or these kinds of serious topics and treat them in a lighthearted way that hopefully still carry a little bit of message in them but also allows people to tap their toes and hum along. So that’s the basic concept.

Caryn Hartglass: It’s a good one. So we just have a few more minutes left and I want to wrap it up talking about food, the good part of food. So earlier, you were talking about the restaurants in Philadelphia and when new ones pop up, you’re not the first one to know about it. I haven’t been to Philly in a while. What are some of the good restaurants, vegan restaurants that are there?

Vance Lehmkuhl: Oh, we have a good many now. The most important one, historically, has been Horizons, which has been in Philadelphia from 2006-2011 and then they closed and re-opened. The owners of Horizons re-opened as a new restaurant with a similar emphasis called Vedge, where they actually have been doing more with just vegetables and moving away from trying to imitate the kind of meat dish, where you have a big hunk of protein in the middle and then garnish it with sides. They are actually doing creative and exciting things with vegetables in a fine-dining environment. It’s a hugely popular restaurant in town. And at the other end, in terms of just upscale or downscale, Blackbird Pizza, which is just a basic kind of pizza joint that has great … The pizzas are all vegan. They have daiya cheese and they also have some cheese-less pizzas. They have cheesesteaks and things that are all vegan. I’ve mentioned Horizons because this restaurant as well as another one called Hip City Veg, which is kind of fast food vegan and two other places recently opened, all come from people who trained at Horizons. They all started out as line cooks or other things at Horizons and they’ve gone off and started their own places. One thing that they all share is the ethic of veganism. It’s not just people who decided they wanted to cash in on a trend or doing something and offering a couple of vegan dishes. These are people who are vegans and who basically want to share this food with as many people as possible.

Caryn Hartglass: I have to say that I love that and I don’t think it’s completely true in the restaurant industry. I know that a lot of people get into it because they have a passion for food and it’s a great feeling to feed people but I really think, with vegan restaurants, it’s more true: we’re the owners, we’re the chefs. It’s more than food. It’s a complete message: health, environment, animals. It’s a beautiful thing.

Well, Vance, thanks for joining me on It’s All About Food.

Vance Lehmkuhl: Yes. Okay, thank you!

Caryn Hartglass: Okay. And check out V for Veg and VegCast and look for those great cartoons from The Joy of Soy.

Al right, I’m Caryn Hartglass. You’ve been listening to It’s All About Food. Please visit my website, responsibleeatingandliving.com, and we’ll be back for more next week. Have a delicious one.

Transcribed by Diane O’Reilly, 4/21/2013

Interviews with Reuben Proctor and Anjali Shaw, 4/9/2013

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4/9/2013:

Part I: Reuben Proctor
Veganissimo

Reuben Proctor has been vegan since 2000 and has done translation, consulting, and administrative work for vegan companies and animal rights organizations since 2004. He was born in New Zealand and now lives and works in Germany.

4/9/2013:

Part II: Anjali Shah
The Picky Eater

Anjali Shah is a food writer, health coach, and owner of The Picky Eater, a healthy food and lifestyle blog. Anjali Shah grew up a “whole wheat” girl, but married a “white bread” kind of guy. Hoping to prove that nutritious food could in fact be delicious and desirable, she taught herself how to cook and successfully transformed her husband’s eating habits from a diet of frozen pizzas and Taco Bell to her healthy, yet flavorful recipes made with simple, wholesome ingredients. Through her blog The Picky Eater, Anjali shares her passion for healthy, tasty cooking.

TRANSCRIPTION PART I:

Caryn Hartglass: Hi there, everybody! I’m Caryn Hartglass. You’re listening to It’s All About Food. It’s April 9, 2013 and what is going here in New York City? I cannot believe it, 80-degree weather. Read more »

Interviews with Ocean Robbins & Sid Garza-Hillman, 4/2/2013

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4/2/2013:

Part I: Ocean Robbins
Food Revolution

In 1990, at age 16, Ocean Robbins was co-founder of YES!, which he directed for 20 years. He is co-host and CEO of the 75,000 member Food Revolution Network. Ocean has spoken in person to more than 200,000 people and facilitated more than 50 week-long gatherings for leaders from 65+ nations. He serves as an adjunct professor in the Peace Studies department at Chapman University. Ocean is author of Choices for Our Future and of The Power of Partnership, and has served as a board member for Friends of the Earth, EarthSave International, and many other organizations. He is a founding member of The Turning Tide Coalition, co-founder of the Leveraging Privilege for Social Change program, and founding co-convener of Leverage Alliance. Ocean is a recipient of the Freedom’s Flame Award, the national Jefferson Award for Outstanding Public Service by an Individual 35 Years Or Younger, and the Harman Wilkinson Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Social Sciences.

Ocean lives in the mountains of Santa Cruz, California, with his beloved wife Michele, and their identical twin boys, River and Bodhi (born in 2001 with autism). Ocean, Michele, River and Bodhi live 100 yards from Ocean’s parents, Deo and John Robbins (author of the international bestseller Diet for a New America and founder of EarthSave). For more information about Ocean’s life and work, go to www.oceanrobbins.com.

4/2/2013:

Part II: Sid Garza-Hillman
Approaching the Natural: A Health Manifesto

Sid Garza-Hillman was born in Los Angeles. He graduated from UCLA with a B.A. in Philosophy. For over a decade after college, Sid was a working musician and actor with a growing interest in nutrition. Sid is now a Certified Nutritionist and Weight Management Coach. He works with private clients all over the country and teaches nutrition and healthy living classes to children and adults through his practice Transitioning to Health. He is also the Staff Nutritionist and Programs Director at the Mendocino Center for Living Well located at the Stanford Inn Eco-resort in Mendocino, California. He currently lives on the Mendocino Coast with his wife, 3 children, two dogs, and two guinea pigs (White Rose and Pink Rose).

TRANSCRIPTION PART I:

Caryn Hartglass: Hello, everybody! I’m Caryn Hartglass and you’re listening to It’s All About Food. And guess what we’re going to be talking about today? That’s right; food, my favorite subject. And there are so many things, of course, that are connected to our food, our food choices, health, environment, and animals. Read more »

Interviews with Carol Adams, Jasmin Singer and Elizabeth Wholey, 3/26/2013

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3/26/2013:

Part I: Carol Adams, Jasmin Singer
Defiant Daughters

When The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory by Carol J. Adams was published more than twenty years ago, it caused an immediate stir among writers and thinkers, feminists and animal rights activists alike. Never before had the relationship between patriarchy and meat eating been drawn so clearly, the idea that there lies a strong connection between the consumption of women and animals so plainly asserted.

But, as the 21 personal stories in this anthology show, the impact of this provocative text on women’s lives continues to this day, and it is as diverse as it is revelatory. One writer attempts to reconcile her feminist-vegan beliefs with her Muslim upbringing; a second makes the connection between animal abuse and her own self-destructive tendencies. A new mother discusses the sexual politics of breastfeeding, while another pens a letter to her young son about all she wishes for him in the future. Many others recall how the book inspired them to start careers in the music business, animal advocacy, and food. No matter whether they first read it in college or later in life, whether they are in their late teens or early forties, these writers all credit The Sexual Politics of Meat in some way with the awakening of their identities as feminists, activists, and women. Even if you haven’t read the original work, you’re sure to be moved and inspired by these tales of growing up and, perhaps more important, waking up to the truths around us.

Including a foreword from Carol J. Adams herself, this collection of fresh, bold voices defies expectations and provides rousing support for the belief that women have the power to change the world around them for this generation and those to come.

3/26/2013:

Part II – Elizabeth Wholey
Sustenance: Food Traditions in Italy’s Heartland

Elizabeth Wholey writes about the food, agriculture, art, and crafts of the Upper Tiber Valley, where she has resided for the past twenty years. She is a member of the Slow Food Alta Umbria and the International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP).

TRANSCRIPTION PART I:

Hello everybody! I’m Caryn Hartglass, it’s time for It’s All About Food. It’s All About Food, my favorite subject–food. A very happy March 26^th, 2013 to all of you out there. This is going to be a great show. Read more »

Interviews with Jill Eckart and Karen Ranzi, 3/19/2013

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3/19/2013:

Part I: Jill Eckart
Processed Meats

3/19/2013:

Part II: Karen Ranzi
Super Healthy Children

Author, lecturer, Health Coach, Raw Vegan Chef, and speech pathologist, Karen Ranzi, M.A. authored and published her book Creating Healthy Children in 2010. Her fresh plant-based recipe book and a book about healing acne naturally will be available in 2013.

Karen travels throughout the United States and abroad delivering her impassioned message about raising healthy families. She has presented for universities, schools, health institutes, and associations. In June 2012, Karen was the keynote speaker at a health congress south of Moscow, organized by the Russian Association of Naturopathy.

Karen received enthusiastic audiences during her health and wellness workshops at the University of South Carolina, Penn State University, and Ramapo College. She was keynote speaker at Lesley University’s Obesity Fair in Cambridge, MA. She is a staff writer for Get Fresh Magazine, VegWorld Magazine, Vibrance Magazine and SAFbaby.com. Karen has been a featured guest on numerous TV and radio talk shows including several episodes on Dr. Gary Null’s Progressive Radio Network. She was the featured speaker on The Living Healthy Show of New Bedford, MA in the Fall of 2012, and that show is currently being viewed on Peg Media and 14 cable networks across the U.S.

Karen is also a speech pathologist working with children for over 30 years, and specializing with autistic children for the past 12 years. She incorporates health coaching into her program and has seen significant progress in the children’s communication skills and ability to focus and learn.

Karen found the natural path that enabled her son to heal from asthma, chronic ear infections and multiple food allergies in 1994. By means of her education, life-changing personal experiences and sincere desire to share her message, Karen has been able to guide thousands of families toward developing excellent health.

TRANSCRIPTION

PART I:

Caryn Hartglass: Hey everybody, I’m Caryn Hartglass. It’s time for It’s All About Food, and you know what, I just realized that this week is my fourth anniversary, here at Progressive Radio Network, hosting this show, It’s All About Food. I wanted to talk about that for just a minute. I am so grateful to have this opportunity, grateful to the Progressive Radio Network, the whole crew and the studio, and to Gary Null. Read more »

Interviews with Laurie Sadowski and Omawale Adewale, 3/12/2013

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3/12/2013:

Part I – Laurie Sadowski
Allergy-Free Cakes And Cookies

Laurie Sadowski is the author The Allergy-Free Cook Bakes Bread, an active food writer with two degrees in music (education and musicology), and a certified Personal Trainer Specialist and Nutrition and Wellness Specialist.

3/12/2013:

Part II – Omowale Wale Adewale
Omowale Boxing

“Omowale Wale” Adewale is a vegetarian champion boxer, boxing trainer and coach, and personal fitness trainer. He is also the co-founder of G.A.ME, an organization developed to address socio-economic issues facing poor black and Latino communities.”

TRANSCRIPTION PART II:

Hi everybody I’m Caryn Hartglass and we’re back for the second part of It’s All About Food here on March 12th, 2013. I wanted to remind you of a few things. You can send me an e-mail anytime during the show if you want to ask a question or anytime during the week: info@realmeals.org. How easy is that? Read more »

Interviews with Sid Lerner and Deb Kimless, 3/7/2013

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3/5/2013:

Part I: Sid Lerner
Meatless Mondays

Sid Lerner is founder and chairman of The Monday Campaigns, with national health behavior initiatives such as Meatless Monday, Healthy Monday, and Kids Cook Monday, in association with Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and Syracuse University Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. He is a member of the Board of Advisors of the Mailman School, has been a guest lecturer at the Bloomberg School and founded the Lerner Center for Public Health Promotion at Maxwell.

Lerner, a graduate of the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, is the marketing guru who worked with the creative team behind the “Please don’t squeeze the Charmin” advertising campaign. He now uses his marketing prowess to advance public health, encouraging people to exercise more and to eat healthier through The Monday Campaigns, which has become a global force in the fight against preventable disease.

3/5/2013:

Part II: Dr. Deb Kimless
Red Thread

“Dr. Deb” conducted her undergraduate course work and graduated with a BS in Biology and Natural Science, Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania. She earned her medical degree at the University of Medicine & Dentistry of New Jersey and completed her residency at the Temple University Hospital in Philadelphia and is Board Certified in Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine. Dr. Deb obtained her Plant Based Nutrition certification from Cornell University and is a certified Nutritional Consultant through the Physician’s Committee for Responsible Medicine and does private nutritional consultation.

TRANSCRIPTIONS

PART I:

Hello I’m Caryn Hartglass and you’re listening to It’s All About Food. This is a lovely March 5^th 2013 and you know what, it’s a Tuesday, a Tuesday, but you know what? We’re not going to talk about Tuesdays today, we’re going to talk about Monday, Monday, so good to me (sings)… Read more »

Interviews with Susan Levin, Dawnyel Pryor & Jennie Steinhagen, Food For Life, 2/26/2013

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2/26/2013:

Susan Levin and Dawnyel Pryor
PCRM’s Food For Life

Susan Levin, M.S., R.D., is director of nutrition education at the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting preventive medicine, especially better nutrition, and higher standards in research.

As director of nutrition education, Ms. Levin researches and writes about the connection between plant-based diets and a reduced risk of chronic diseases. Through her work, she also addresses the need for nutrition guidelines that reflect PCRM’s New Four Food Groups (fruits, vegetables, legumes, and whole grains). In addition, Ms. Levin assists in teaching nutrition and health classes to participants in a clinical study exploring the links between diet and diabetes. Ms. Levin received her Master of Science in Nutrition from Bastyr University in Seattle, Washington. Ms. Levin received the Charlotte Newcombe Scholarship twice during her post-graduate work at Hunter College in New York. She received her bachelor’s degree in journalism and mass communications from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Before joining PCRM, Ms. Levin taught English to biomedical English majors at the Peking University Health Science Center in Beijing. Her lectures on nutrition to the school’s professors and students emphasized the healthfulness of the traditional plant-based Chinese diet. Ms. Levin is also an avid long-distance runner.

Ms. Pryor manages the Food for Life Nutrition and Cooking Class program, supervising 85 instructors teaching 1,300 classes across the United States in 150 cities. Ms. Pryor also manages the marketing of the organization’s continuing education events and The Cancer Project’s and diabetes initiative’s programs, products, and services. Ms. Pryor’s previous work includes four years with the American Institute for Cancer Research where she was an education associate focused on managing and promoting the organization’s nutrition educational events. Before, she was the program associate of the Education and Youth Development Division at Children’s Defense Fund focused on advocating for youth gun violence prevention and for juvenile justice. Ms. Pryor is the founder and chair of the District of Columbia Junior Advisory Committee of the Ovarian Cancer National Alliance and the Ovarian & Gynecological Cancer Coalition/Rhonda’s Club. She also sits on the board of directors of the Ovarian & Gynecological Cancer Coalition/Rhonda’s Club. Ms. Pryor has a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Howard University.

TRANSCRIPTION:
Hello everybody. I’m Caryn Hartglass and it’s time for another It’s All About Food. Thank you for joining me. It’s February 26th 2013 and my question for you today is: How many push-ups can you do? I mean the real ones. We were just having a little fun here in the studio and I just did 10. Not bad. Maybe next time I’ll try for 15 and who knows? Read more »

Interviews with Tom Dotz and Bob Arnot, 2/21/2013

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2/19/2013:

Part I: Tom Dotz
Neuro-Linguistic Programming

Tom Dotz founded the NLP Institute of California in 1990, growing it in four years to the largest organization of its kind in the U.S. In 1998 he acquired NLP Comprehensive, initiating new programs to keep it at the forefront of NLP. Tom has studied NLP since 1978, and is certified as an NLP Master Practitioner and Health Practitioner.

2/19/2013:

Part II: Dr. Bob Arnot
Chia Seeds, Super Grains

Bob Arnot, physician and avid chia advocate, is a New York Times bestselling author and has written fourteen previous books on nutrition and health topics. Arnot has been a medical correspondent for NBC Nightly News, Dateline NBC, the Today show, CBS Evening News, 60 Minutes, and CBS This Morning, and he is a health columnist for Men’s Journal. He lives in Palm Beach, Florida and spends his winters in Vermont.

TRANSCRIPTION PART I:

Hello everybody. I’m your host. I’m Caryn Hartglass and we are about to start It’s All About Food. How are you today? Can we talk about food? You know I love talking about food. And before we get started with the main focus of the show today, I wanted to really just talk about my lunch today. It was such a dream phenomenal experience that I really need to savor it a little bit longer so I hope you don’t mind if I share it with you because it was so spectacular. Read more »

Interviews with Joel Fuhrman, Sarah Gross & Nira Poliwoda, 2/12/2013

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2/12/2013:

Joel Fuhrman, MD
The End Of Diabetes

Joel Fuhrman, M.D., is a board-certified family physician and nutritional researcher who specializes in preventing and reversing disease through nutritional and natural methods. He is the author of several books, including the New York Times bestsellers Eat to Live: The Amazing Nutrient-Rich Program for Fast and Sustained Weight Loss and Super Immunity. He is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and the research director of the Nutritional Research Foundation. Dr. Fuhrman is also on the science advisory board of Whole Foods Market.

Take advantage of these very special offers on products by Dr. Fuhrman:

$10 off orders of $100 or more with code is LS10OFF100

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PROGRAM TRANSCRIPTION PART I:

Caryn Hartglass: Hello everybody, I’m Caryn Hartglass. You’re listening to It’s All About Food. Thank you for joining me on this February 12, 2013. It’s a beautiful day here in Manhattan, and I am so glad you’re joining me today. It is going to be a great program because my first guest, and I want to get right to it, one my very favorite people on the whole planet and the best doctor that I know, Dr. Joel Fuhrman. He is a board certified family physician and nutritional researcher who specializes in preventing and reversing disease through nutritional and natural methods. He is the author of several books including the New York Times‘ bestsellers Eat to Live: The Amazing Nutrient-Rich Program for Fast and Sustained Weight Loss, and Super Immunity. He is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and research director of The Nutritional Research Foundation, and he is also on the science advisory board of Whole Foods Market. Dr. Fuhrman, welcome to It’s All About Food.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: Hi, it’s great to be here.

Caryn Hartglass: Hi. I know you’re busy doing so many wonderful things, saving so many lives and helping so many people, and I’m really grateful to have you here for this moment.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: Thank you!

Caryn Hartglass: Thank you. I have read all of your books and I’m a big fan. I read a lot of these health books, and yours are clearly the best on so many levels. I’m so glad that you have been on the best seller list of The New York Times. What is it now, Eat To Live has been there for over 80 weeks, and now you have this second book The End of Diabetes? A well deserved congratulations to you.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: Thank you! Yes, it’s really exciting. The book has only been out, I think, about a month, or so, and it’s already on the ten best seller list, so people are really analyzing it, and…..

Caryn Hartglass: They’re eating it up!

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: Right, they’re eating it up!

Caryn Hartglass: So I have a lot of questions, and I posted to my listeners and readers that you were going to be on the show today. I did get responses, so I’m hoping we can address some of these questions.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: Sure.

Caryn Hartglass: There are a lot of really interesting things in the this book that I didn’t know about, and I want to start by talking about beta cells because that is so related to diabetes and why people have the reactions they do. So can we talk a little bit about beta cells, how genetics are involved and how eating affects them?

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: Of course, let’s do it.

Caryn Hartglass: So from what I read, I understand that some people have less beta cells, genetically?

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: Yes, that’s right. We are talking here right now about adult onset or type 2 diabetes which is mostly caused by people becoming overweight and the extra stress being overweight places on the pancreas. The main thing is that fat on the body blocks the uptake of insulin. Because your cells can’t utilize the insulin and the uptake is blocked, the beta cells in the pancreas then respond to that by producing extra insulin. So maybe you have an extra 10 pounds of body weight, and your body produces 1- 1/2 times as much insulin as a person of normal weight; whereas, if you have 30-40 pounds of extra body weight, your body would produce 4-5 times as much insulin. Your beta cells in the pancreas keep chugging along and making the insulin the body needs, except after a number of years, the beta cells will kind of “poop out” not being able to keep up with this huge demand required by this overweight person. Then their ability to produce this insulin starts to drop. That amount of insulin, even after it drops, is still greater, almost all of the time, than a person of normal weight might need. Yet, it’s still not enough to produce the excessive demands of the overweight body. Now, as you were suggesting, some people who are overweight can keep secreting abnormally high amounts of insulin their whole life and never become diabetic and with other people the beta cell reserve and the capacity of the beta cells to produce so much insulin, genetically, is somewhat limited. So they are more prone to developing type 2 diabetes. So in all cases all overweight people have more circulating insulin, and the beta cells are being overworked to reduce this insulin. Insulin, itself, promotes cancer. Insulin, itself, is a fat storage hormone and has pro-angiogenesis properties which means, “fat, go ahead and grow, cells reproduce, I’m going to feed you with fuel and bring oxygen nutrients to you, and my angiogenesis promoting effects are going to help the blood vessels grow into you to be travel networks, the roadway, to bring you food and oxygen.” So that’s what insulin does, and when you are overweight you are essentially fueling fat. The more glucose you eat, the more sugar you eat, the more insulin-promoting foods you eat, obviously, putting sugar in your blood stream all of the time, promotes the storage of fat.

Caryn Hartglass: So whether or not you are diabetic, if you are overweight you are producing too much insulin, and that’s going to have all kinds of health problems. Not necessarily diabetes, perhaps, but you could have all kinds of other problems, and it’s not a good thing.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: That’s right. So that is why one of the main reasons being overweight increases the risk of heart attack and cancer is because our body has higher levels of circulating insulin. One way of measuring the body’s level of circulating insulin is putting a tape measure around your waist.

Caryn Hartglass: (laughing) You don’t need a sophisticated diagnostic tool for that?

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: Correct.

Caryn Hartglass: Okay. It’s always good to have a little humor when talking about these things. You have a great little graph in your book. It is so simple, and when I saw it and understood it, I went “Wow”. Can we talk about glycolysis, what it is, and how important it is?

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: Yes. What happens is that the body takes the glucose into the blood stream, and we use that for energy to live our life, but the body only burns about 40-50 grams of glucose per hour. So what happens when we eat a meal and we flood the body with all of these calories? We store it, and the glucose that we are not burning the body stores, primarily, as glycogen. Now, when we are not eating, not digesting food anymore for three, four, five hours later, as the candle burns down, we are slowly going to be fueling our body off that glycogen, and the glycogen stores will be gradually depleted like burning the gasoline in our car, driving a car around. So we are going to store the glucose as glycogen and we’re going to burn it off, and when the glycogen is eventually depleted, we normally get a signal to eat again and then it’s time to replenish or glycogen stores to keep our glucose levels consistent so that our brain and the rest of our body can function normally. Basically, 80% of our body’s energy needs at rest are being utilized by the brain, and the brain under normal conditions can only function on glucose, so we have to keep the glucose coming in continually to fuel the brain.

Caryn Hartglass: But what you said is that during this period of glycolysis, after the body has gotten the glucose it needs and we have this period in between meals, there are a lot of things going on such as moving waste. You mentioned that if we eat too quickly by snacking or just eat all of the time, we don’t give our body enough time to go through this period so that it can remove waste. I thought that was fascinating. I never knew that.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: That’s right. So we are saying that glycolysis is normal and necessary. It is essential for the body’s systems and rhythms. The body works in cycles of resting, digesting, resting and cleaning, digesting and storing, over and over again. We call it the catabolic phase, or the breakdown phase. So we eat and we’re in the build up phase, we then break down the food we eat and utilize and store it away in our body as fat or glycogen, and then we are going to not eat and live off what we just stored, and that’s called the catabolic phase of the digestive cycle, burning up what we just stored. It’s like you took your car to the gas station and filled it with gas and then drove it around, pretty much emptying the tank, and then refilled it again; but, what most Americans are doing is taking the car from the gas station, and they drive it around for just one block, a 20-gallon tank. So only driving it around for one block and then bringing it back to the gas station to fill it up again, with the gas tank not being elastic, you will pour gasoline all over the street. In the case of the human body, though, we do have an elastic gas tank. We can fill it up again when there is no need for energy, and the body will store the extra energy it does not need as fat on the body, getting bigger and bigger. I am saying two things here: Number one, the body has signals that tell us exactly when we should refill our gas tank, and those signals supply our body and our brain with a perfect amount of energy we need to sustain and maintain a perfect, normal weight. The weight that leads to a lean body mass maximizing muscle with no fat storage on the body. That’s called true hunger. True hunger exists as a precise computer to give us the exact amount of calories we need to maintain a perfect body weight without getting any fat on the body. If you become overweight, here’s the point. You would have to be eating outside of the demands of true hunger, recreationally, with addictive drives, toxic hunger, I call it, a low nutrient diet driving you to eat when you are not hungry. When you are feeling weak, headachy and fatigued so that you think it’s time to eat and you think you’re hungry, it’s because your dietary quality is poor. Now you feel detox symptoms, or withdrawals due to your poor diet, driving you to eat excess calories. Lastly, the point you were just making earlier, I am suggesting that the scientific literature points to the fact that the longer we live in a catabolic phase digestive cycle, the longer life we’ll have. Let me say that again so that people can understand me here. What I am saying is that the longer we live our life in that part of the phase of the digestive cycle when we are not digesting and eating, that means the space between meals where we are working, talking, walking, and living life not putting food in our mouth, the longer we space our meals out when are not feeding our body, the longer we will live. This is because in your body, essentially, almost all healing, self-repair, and rejuvenation of tissue is occurring in that catabolic phase when you are not digesting food. The micronutrient intake of most Americans is so poor and deficient in phytonutrients and oxidants, that they feel so ill the minute they start to detoxify or repair and then feel like they have to keep feeding the body all the time. So they are snacking all day, going from one meal to the next without any catabolic phase and even eating late at night, big meals with concentrated calories so difficult to digest that they keep the body’s digestive tract going for three, four, five hours after a meal. With the body still digesting, the body never gets to rest. Thus, they develop heart disease, cancer, diabetes and other diseases from extreme overeating. So I am suggesting that the primary foundation of all of these difficulties is micronutrient deficits and poor quality foods, eating processed foods, eating bagels, donuts, cookies, crackers, soda, bread, oils, meats, cheese, all these foods that do not contain the micronutrient load, the antioxidants, the phytochemicals, all of the thousand nutrients we know are in nature’s kingdom that the human body and other primates thrive on. When you don’t eat them you are going to get unrelenting desires and cravings to overeat, even perverted cravings to overeat foods, laying the foundation of the American heart attack, diabetes, and obesity epidemic.

Caryn Hartglass: You give this analogy to cars and fuels. Unfortunately, I do know some people who like to fill up the car very frequently, apparently very nervous about running out of gas. I do think a lot of people treat their cars better than they do their own bodies, buying the high octane, more expensive, fuels, but they don’t think about quality fuel for their own body. It’s a great analogy, people’s cars and their own bodies.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: Yes, I guess in life you can get another car, but you only get one body. Once you have damaged it, that’s it, it’s still yours. So you’re right, it’s utterly amazing how most people are completely oblivious to what they do when young, and they pay the price for it later on in life. My daughter and I were just talking about what you do when you’re young, whether it’s education, taking care of your health, saving money, or let’s say, just having good posture, talking about doing things in athletic careers, hurting your joints when you’re young, you will pay a price with knee pain when you are older. So we are talking here about preventative care, doing things intelligently for your future that young people don’t do. We think when we are young we are not vulnerable to anything, so we have to really think about this for a minute. We are not talking about just how long we are going to live, we are talking about living a quality life, being able to enjoy our later years, not being in pain, having our full mental faculties intact, having our full vision intact. You know, of course, this is a really serious subject, and you know I am on a mission to get this subject out. Diabetes is the leading cause of blindness, the leading cause of leg amputation, the leading cause of kidney failure. We are talking here not just about the 500 billion a year in needless health care cost, we are talking about the needless human suffering. Now nutritional science has advanced to the point that we have a preponderance of evidence showing that you don’t have to have diabetes. Also, it’s really important to say that people take medications thinking they are controlling it. I get these emails from people saying “I have controlled blood pressure. My diabetes is controlled.” CONTROLLED?! You are on medication, but you still have it! Studies show that you are still going to develop macular degeneration and all of these problems, so you have to get rid of it. You have to show me you have normal numbers without medication. You have to have normal blood pressure without the need for blood pressure medication. You have to have a normal blood glucose without the need for diabetic medication. Then you are protected. Then you are not going to have the stroke or heart attack, not going to get demented. You won’t have to go blind later in life. The more you need medications, the more dependent you are, means the more tendency you have to the disease and the more damage occurring to your body, ongoing. The medications give people a false sense of security that they are protected, and they lead people down the wrong path. It’s so true with diabetic medication, and Caryn, you might be familiar with the ACCORD study where they took diabetics and gave them better medical care, more attention to their glucose. So they had two groups, one group being the typical group– didn’t go to doctors as often, forgot to take their medications, were not medicated as carefully–and the other group had really top-flight medical care, the best doctors, more visits. The group that had more medical care, better control of their glucose with better use of medications, were dropping off like flies. They were dying at such an increased rate that the government had to stop the study. The doctors were saying, what’s this result with more medical care, better care? WELL, OF COURSE! You can’t push the glucose down with a drug. You have the beta cells, we just talked about, in the pancreas failing from overwork. So you give patients a drug making them gain weight which makes the pancreas work harder. You take insulin putting more fat on the body to push the sugar down? That is going to accelerate the degenerative process. The point is there is nothing else you can do except eat right, exercise getting in great shape and taking great care of your health because drugs are not the answer to what ails us. The medical profession does not have the magic pill like in some fairy tale, that will take care of our problems. It just doesn’t work that way.

Caryn Hartglass: You even write in your book that insulin and some other medications make diabetes worse in that it makes you want to eat more which aggravates the situation even more.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: That’s right because the medications lower the blood glucose. They are angiogenesis promoting, helping the body store fat, increasing your hunger leading to weight gain. So you become more diabetic and you are back to the doctors again getting more medication. It’s absolutely insane. You think, how many people have diabetes? About 40% of our population, presently, has pre-diabetes or diabetes, and about 70-70 percent are overweight. Besides that we are talking about reversing high blood pressure, reversing heart disease, and getting back into great shape again. We are talking about people who are willing to take the toxic medications in their mouth twice a day but aren’t willing to walk up a few flights of stairs twice a day. They aren’t willing to take a walk for 20 minutes twice a day. The point is that the exercise has been shown over and over again to be much more efficacious than just taking drugs. I ask people how often they take the drug. Everyday? Twice a day? They tell me, “yes, twice a day, just how my doctor prescribed it.” People look at me like I’m nuts when I say why do you take the drugs twice a day, but you won’t exercise twice a day?

Caryn Hartglass: But that’s too difficult.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: Right. The point is, if we’d never had these medications, people would be forced to change the way they ate, forced to exercise regularly, and we would have a population without diabetes, without this nutritional stupidity. On the other hand, unhealthy food is so powerfully addicting. It takes over the mind in a way that people can’t rationally think, act, behave or control themselves. They have become food addicts which is every bit as powerful as cocaine, heroin or tobacco. So food is very addicting, but here’s the thing, most dietologists will say to me oh yeah, yeah, I know that works, but we can’t get our patients to do that. The American Diabetic Association says the reason we have to give everybody drugs is because people won’t eat right, which is essentially double talk for saying that the diets we are giving people don’t work. The point is that when eating a high nutrient diet your taste buds change, your appetite goes down. We can beat food cravings and food addictions but we have to teach people how to do this with a higher intake of high nutrient foods, not by willy-nilly cutting back calories and trying to eat less. That never works. So our taste buds can be retrained, and the body can learn to like healthy foods just as much as it likes unhealthy foods. It’s called a no-brainer.

Caryn Hartglass: We like this food more! I love my food, and you don’t know how good you can feel until you are feeding your body properly.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: That’s right. You like the food more, and you are enjoying it even more not only emotionally but, at the same time, intellectually because you know it’s good for you.

Caryn Hartglass: Can we talk about resistance starch? So I was reading about this in your book, and I just loved what I was reading, the discoveries about resistance starch. It’s almost like you can eat things, and you think you are getting so many calories, but you are not.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: Yeah, I think nutrition is really fun.

Caryn Hartglass: It is fun!

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: Because the more we learn, the more it shows why we should be eating certain foods and why they work. We are talking about foods like greens, beans, squash, eggplant and cauliflower. Why is it that these foods, for example, don’t raise your glucose, don’t make you gain weight, don’t cause diabetes as do other carbohydrates like white rice or white potatoes which may raise your blood glucose more. One of the reasons why is that beans contain two types of carbohydrates, two types of starch predominantly. One of these is called slowly digestible starch which means that when we eat the food the glucose is broken down so slowly that it is fed into your body over many hours. This means that the body can burn it for energy as it is being fed in and not stored as fat or even as glycogen. The second thing is that a big percentage of the carbohydrate in beans is called resistant starch, which you just brought up, which is not even broken down into glucose or simple sugars at all. It is resistant to the body’s enzymes that can break it down, and instead it gets degraded, or we can say that the bacteria in the digestive tract ferments it which turns it into fat, not even into carbohydrates. So the carbohydrates are turned into a fat, and because it was bacteria that turned into this fat, mostly butyrate, it gets turned into this fat so far down in the digestive tract that 90% of those calories remain in the stool and get passed down the toilet. So a good percentage of those calories in beans don’t even get absorbed as calories into the body. Also, the difference between walnuts and walnut oil or sesame seeds and sesame oil, when you eat the whole nut or seed, the fat calories get absorbed so slowly that it causes fatty acid oxidation and the body can burn it. Whereas with the oil it is absorbed into the blood stream so rapidly it can’t be stored, so the body produces hormones that can burn it into fat. So when we flood the body rapidly with nutrients it can convert into fat, but when we take it slowly over many hours it cannot convert into fat. So it’s not calories in and calories out or eat less, exercise more. Actually, that’s not the answer here. We are talking about foods that have properties to resist fat storage, like mushrooms, onions, green vegetables, like beans, berries, or pomegranates. We are talking about how these foods have anti-angiogenesis effects. This is opposite from how sugar promotes fat storage or how white rice promotes fat storage due to high insulin effects. Insulin is a fat storage hormone, and insulin is pro-angiogenesis. When you eat beans, greens, berries, and seeds, things like that which have anti-angiogenesis effects, they say “no way Jose” you are not storing fat on my body. I’m blocking fat storage hormones and I’m going to stop the body from being able to store fat. I’m not going to let blood vessels grow and feed fat. Fat can’t grow if you eat the right type of calories. So, it’s really not about eating thimble-sized portions of food, here. It’s about eating generous portions of food and the right type of delicious foods that don’t promote fat storage in the body.

Caryn Hartglass: You know, they call beans the magical fruit, but I’m not going to go there. So we have a caller, and I want to see what she has to say. Lori, are you with us?

Caller: I have a question for Dr. Fuhrman. I have been a vegan for 23 years, and I exercise regularly. A few years ago I was diagnosed with Graves disease. I was desperate and took a radioactive iodine pill. I have been on Synthroid, and I feel fine with that. My TSH level is normal. A couple of years after this, the Graves got into my eyes, and I have double vision that can only be treated, I have been told, with wearing prisms which is what I am doing. I am already doing the greens, the berries, everything you are talking about. Is there anything else you can suggest that I can do.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: With Graves disease you have antibodies that attack the thyroid gland, and those antibodies have negative effects on the body including the eyes and other parts of the body. So even when the thyroid gland is removed or treated with radiation so that you don’t have it anymore, your body still has the disease. So autoimmune diseases are treatable with nutritional excellence. The answer is yes, we can monitor the benefits of this treatment style with nutrition by checking your antithyroid globulin antibodies and other markers of the disease process, even though you do not have a thyroid anymore. So the G-bomb is the essential core of treating autoimmune disease, and G-bomb stands for greens, beans, onions, mushrooms, berries, and seeds. Also, there are some episodic days of the month where we are juicing or just on water where you are just doing some fasting to help lower those antibodies, making sure your body weight is low, taking more omega 3 fatty acids which has beneficial effects, and taking probiotics will have beneficial effects. So we are talking here about putting a proper diet style together which is higher in nutrient density, lower in calories, and making sure there are no nutritional deficiencies which exist simultaneously. Like, for example, vitamin D deficiency can be permissive to autoimmune disease. So I think the answer to the question is that we have to get back to the basics of making sure you are doing everything right for superior nutrition to see if your body can fix the autoimmune process. Most likely we can make tremendous progress with Graves disease, because I have seen many, many cases of Graves disease even reverse and not needing radioablation of the thyroid gland, getting completely better, and you can still do that at this point in your life.

Caryn Hartglass: Thank you Dr. Fuhrman. We have just a few more minutes left. Can we take one more call?

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: Sure.

Caryn Hartglass: Okay, Eric, are you on the line?

Caller: Yes, I am. Can you hear me?

Caryn Hartglass: Yes.

Caller: Alright, thanks a lot Caryn. Dr. Fuhrman, how are you?

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: I’m great!

Caller: Alright, I have a couple of questions. I’m working on nutritional excellence, and I wanted to ask you what your opinion is of the 80/10/10 book. Have you had a chance to look over the 80/10/10 book?

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: Well, I think you are referring to is a diet that has 10% fat, 10% protein, and 80% carbohydrate. It is mostly a fruit-heavy diet.

Caller: And, also a lot of greens.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: Yes, and also a lot of greens. I have been a physician specializing in nutrition for more than 20 years, and I seen many, many people ruin their health with a diet so high in fruit. So I don’t consider this an ideal way to eat. Some people can do okay with it, but I don’t think it’s good to advocate a diet where a whole segment of the population does not thrive, getting weak hair and nails, and being prone to infection. So I do not recommend that diet style or that book.

Caller: Okay. I do have all of your books and the DVDs also, and I am mostly following the nutritarian diet. So I was just curious in that area. So I wanted to ask you about the berries and the fruits that we eat on the nutritarian diet style. I have listened to your seminar on the ten DVD set, and I wanted to ask, should we, first of all, since the oils, nuts, and seeds slow down and don’t allow glucose to be utilized. Part of the process of diabetes, where that comes from, the fat blocks the glucose from being utilized properly. So, I wanted to ask you, is it better to eat the fruits and the berries first instead of last which, I guess, is the traditional way of eating dessert, but it should be, maybe, according to natural hygiene, where the fruits and juices, the most easily digestible foods, should be eaten first without combination with the oils, nuts or seeds.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: No. I appreciate the question, but I don’t agree with that either. So I am recommending here the nutritarian diet, and thank you for supplying that term, which obviously, that is the style, high in nutrients, where people eat a variety of foods in their diet. Including green vegetables, beans, nuts and seeds, fresh fruit; whereas, the diet you were describing would be too fruit heavy and I want a variety of those foods, and I want you to eat a variety of foods at various meals. I do not want you to eat fruit-only meals. I want you to have greens and beans or greens and nuts and fruit in the meal, but we don’t want to have a fruit-only meal, and once that meal is mixed where you have, like, some pomegranates on a salad or oranges cut into a salad with a nut-based dressing; an orange, cashew, sesame-seed dressing or tomato-strawberry dressing, etc., mix the foods so that…….

Caller: It’s okay to mix the fruits, and the beans, and all that?

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: It’s okay to mix the food, and actually what you are saying is that the other foods that have low-glycemic effects mitigate or lessen the glycemic effects of the fruit when eaten in the same meal. So the benefit is to actually eat the foods together, to eat a fruit with a salad or eat beans with some nuts, and when you eat these foods together, the fats from the nuts and seeds increase the absorption of the anti-cancer phytochemicals in the green vegetables, lowering the risk of cancer later in life. One of the studies done that is so impressive is the [7-day inventive study] showing that those people who ate nuts and seeds on a regular basis lived, on the average, six to seven years longer than those people on a low-fat diet that did not have nuts and seeds in their diet. This is because the fat increases the absorption of the beneficial phytochemicals that prevent cancer. So what I am saying is forget about natural hygiene food combinations and forget about 80/10/10. The nutritarian diet has various foods mixed together in the meals because the foods together act synergistically to protect our health.

Caller: Thank you.

Caryn Hartglass: Oh, Dr. Fuhrman, you are the best, and I wish we had more time, because I could listen to you all day. I guess I’m just going to have to go to your website www.DrFuhrman.com and read all of your newsletters, listen to all of your telecasts, and take advantage of everything that is up there, and read all your books like I have been. You’re just loaded with wonderful information that is so helpful and reassuring. So just keep doing what you are doing. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman: Oh, thank you Caryn! It’s a pleasure being on your show, and best of luck for what you’re doing.

Caryn Hartglass: Thank you, and take care! We are going to take a little break. That was Joel Fuhrman, and I am Caryn Hartglass. You are listening to It’s All About Food. While we are on a break, you can go to my website www.ResponsibleEatingAndLiving.com where we have recipes. All of the podcasts from this show are archived up there, and there are videos, so visit! Now it’s time for a break, and we will be right back.

Transcribed by Ann Dungey, 2/25/2013

2/12/2013:

Part II: Sarah Gross & Nira Paliwoda
NYC Vegetarian Food Festival

Interviews with Mitchell Davis and The Shannons, 2/5/2013

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2/5/2013:

Part I: Mitchell Davis
Taste Matters

Mitchell Davis is the Vice President of the James Beard Foundation, a cookbook author, a food journalist, and a scholar with a Doctorate in Food Studies from New York University. A graduate of Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration, Davis spent two years cooking and eating in France and Italy before settling in New York City to write about food.

2/5/2013:

Part II: Annie and Dan Shannon
Betty Goes Vegan

Annie and Dan Shannon live in Brooklyn, NY. Annie has worked at the animal advocacy organization In Defense of Animals and as the Fashion Industry Liaison for the Humane Society of the United States. She does most of the cooking. Dan was previously the Director of Youth Outreach & Campaigns for PETA and is now a Senior Strategist for the social movement strategy consulting company Purpose. He does the dishes.

TRANSCRIPTION PART I:

Caryn Hartglass: Hello, everybody! I’m Caryn Hartglass. Read more »

Interviews with Adam Gollner and Jill Eckart, 1/29/2013

1/29/2013:

Part I: Adam Gollner
The Fruit Hunters

Adam Leith Gollner is the author of The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Obsession, Commerce and Adventure. His writing appears in The New York Times, Gourmet, Bon Appetit, Orion, the Globe and Mail, Maclean’s, and Good Magazine, among others. He used to be editor of Vice Magazine and associate editor of Maisonneuve Magazine. He recently made a short film about goblins. He has also played in a number of bands and still makes music now and then. He lives in Montreal, mostly, and Los Angeles sometimes, but always has this as his desktop image. The Fruit Hunters is published by Scribner in the United States, Doubleday in Canada, Larousse in Brazil, Souvenir Press in the UK, Sallim Publishing in Korea, and Hakusui Sha in Japan. Springs Eternal: The Neverending Quest for Neverending Life will be published in 2011. Until then: Ishq.

1/29/2013:

Part II: Jill Eckart
PCRM’s 21 Day Kickstart

Jill Eckart, C.H.H.C., is nutrition program manager at the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting preventive medicine, especially better nutrition, and higher standards in research. As part of the nutrition team, Ms. Eckart manages a variety of programs, including the launch of PCRM’s online 21-Day Vegan Kickstart program that more than 200,000 people have participated in since 2009. Ms. Eckart received her Bachelor of Arts degree in sociology and service leadership from Loyola University in Maryland. She received her certification in holistic health counseling from the Institute for Integrative Nutrition in New York City.

TRANSCRIPTION PART I:

Caryn Hartglass: Hello everybody, I’m Caryn Hartglass, and it’s time for another episode of It’s All About Food. And we are live here, on January 29^th, 2013, I’m in the studio here in Manhattan. Read more »

Interviews with Wenonah Hauter and Meria Heller, 1/22/2013

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1/22/2013:

Part I: Wenonah Hauter
Foodopoly

Wenonah Hauter is the Executive Director of Food & Water Watch. She has worked extensively on food, water, energy, and environmental issues at the national, state and local level. Her book Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America examines the corporate consolidation and control over our food system and what it means for farmers and consumers.

When she was 11, Wenonah’s father bought a hardscrabble farm in the Bull Run Mountains of Virginia. There she developed an appreciation for what it really means to grow food — she picked potato bugs, plucked chickens and chopped kindling.

Today, Wenonah is experienced in developing policy positions and legislative strategies, she is also a skilled and accomplished organizer, having lobbied and developed grassroots field strategy and action plans. From 1997 to 2005 she served as Director of Public Citizen’s Energy and Environment Program, which focused on water, food, and energy policy. From 1996 to 1997, she was environmental policy director for Citizen Action, where she worked with the organization’s 30 state-based groups. From 1989 to 1995 she was at the Union of Concerned Scientists where as a senior organizer, she coordinated broad-based, grassroots sustainable energy campaigns in several states. She has an M.S. in Applied Anthropology from the University of Maryland.

Publisher’s Weekly calls her book Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America, “…a meticulously researched tour de force…” In Foodopoly she examines the corporate consolidation and control over our food system and what it means for farmers and consumers.

1/22/2013:

Part II: Meria Heller
The Universal Wheel

Meria Heller is a celebrity, her smash podcast heard in over sixty countries, hosting top authors, environmentalists, humanitarians and alternative Doctors is only part of her celebrity status. Now in it’s 11th year, it is the number ONE show of it’s kind worldwide. Nominated for the 2001 Peabody Award for Excellence in Broadcasting. Her guests are a who’s who of the best people on the planet, from Governor Jesse Ventura, Kitty Kelley, Gore Vidal to Dr. Arun Gandhi.

Meria can be heard on Progressive Radio Network Sundays at 3pm (ET)/ Noon (PT).

TRANSCRIPTIONS

PART I:

Hello everyone. I am Caryn Hartglass. Welcome. Thank you for joining me and thank you for tuning in. It’s time for It’s All About Food. That’s the name of this program. You know that and as I always say, it is all about food, everything is. If you connect the dots you realize food is somewhere in that picture and we’re going to be talking a lot about that today especially connecting the dots. Read more »

Interviews with Bhavani Jaroff and Talya Lutzker 1/15/2013

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1/15/2013:

Part I: Bhavani Jaroff
i Eat Green

Bhavani Jaroff has over thirty years experience as a natural foods chef. Her career began while a student at the N.Y.S. College of Ceramics at Alfred University. At the time, there was not a vegetarian meal plan on campus so Ms. Jaroff designed and implemented a Vegetarian Meal Plan for the university. As part of her work study program, she cooked for 75 vegetarians daily and within the first semester, the program had expanded to over 125 students. After college, Ms. Jaroff worked in many natural foods restaurants both in New York City and Boston. Recognizing the need for an alternative to standard catering, Ms. Jaroff founded Morningstar Catering, a full service natural foods catering company. She ran Morningstar Catering for 12 years, before choosing to be a stay-at-home mom and raising her three children as vegetarians. As a homemaker/businesswoman, Ms. Jaroff put her catering experience to work and organized other mothers to form a food coop which she ran out of her home for the next 8 years. Bhavani can be heard on Progressive Radio Network every Thursdays at 10am (ET)/ 7am (PT).

1/15/2013:

Part II: Talya Lutzker
Ayurvedic Vegan Kitchen

Talya Lutzker is a Certified Ayurvedic Practitioner, Nutritionist, Professional Chef, founder of Talya’s Kitchen Catering Company and the author of 2 cookbooks. She also teaches yoga, cooking classes and is a certified Ayurvedic masseuse. Talya’s passion for holistic medicine and innovative, healthy food sparkles through in her intelligent, warm, fun and inspiring teaching style. Through cleansing programs, cooking classes and one-on-one consultations, Talya helps people learn to love cooking, self-care and eating well.

Yoga and Ayurveda, Talya’s first loves, are the foundations of her many skills and offerings. In the Bay Area, Talya offers Iyengar-inspired yoga classes that focus on anatomical alignment, deep muscular engagement, pranayama and the use of props that protect and deepen the yoga practice. She studied Iyengar Yoga at the Ramamani Iyengar Memorial Yoga Institute in Pune, India and has practiced under the tutelage of senior and master Iyengar teachers Kofi Busia and Maya Lev for the past 10 years. Talya holds a B.A. in Environmental Studies and Physical Activities from the University of California in Santa Barbara and is a graduate of the Coaches Training Institute’s Leadership Program.

TRANSCRIPTIONS

PART I:

Caryn Hartglass: Hello everybody! Good day! It’s Jaunary 15, 2013 and it’s time for It’s All About Food and I’m your host, Caryn Hartglass. Thanks for joining me. It’s been a big progressive radio network day for me and maybe for you too, but this morning I had the wonderful opportunity to be on another progressive radio network show The Natural Nourish and we’re doing a bunch of cross-promotion, cross-pollination here Read more »

Interviews with Linda Long and Charlene Spretnak 1/8/2013

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1/8/2013:

Part I: Linda Long
Virgin Vegan

Linda Long has had a lifelong relationship with the food industry, starting as a waitress and short order cook at the age of 12 in her parents’ truck stop in Pennsylvania. A home economist who taught high school foods in the early part of her career, and spending a decade in the resort hotel business, Linda has been a committed vegan for over 30 years.

Long has had a varied career in the academic, corporate and media communities, with a strong emphasis in fashion, food and nutritional topics. She writes and photographs for vegetarian magazines, including Vegetarian Journal, American Vegan, VegNews and book covers for other authors.

She is a member of the James Beard Foundation (JBF), International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP), Women Chefs & Restaurants (WCR), New York Women’s Culinary Alliance (NYWCA) and American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP).

1/8/2013:

Part II: Charlene Spretnak
All Together Now

Charlene Spretnak is the author of several books that proposed a “map of the terrain” and an interpretation of various emergent social movements and intellectual orientations. She has helped to create an eco-social frame of reference and vision, focusing particularly on modernity, its discontents, and the corrective efforts that are arising.

In 1984 she was the principle coauthor of Green Politics: The Global Promiseand co-founded the Green Party movement in the United States. She is also the author of The Spiritual Dimension of Green Politics (1986); States of Grace: The Recovery of Meaning in the Postmodern Age (1991); and The Resurgence of the Real: Body, Nature, and Place in a Hypermodern World (1997). In addition, she edited an anthology, The Politics of Women’s Spirituality (1982), and contributed early works to the field of ecofeminism.

In 2011 her book Relational Reality: New Discoveries of Interrelatedness That Are Transforming the Modern World presented numerous recent discoveries indicating that physical reality, including human beings, is far more dynamically interrelated than even relational thinkers had surmised. As examples of the Relational Shift moving through modern societies, she focused on four areas: education and parenting, health and healthcare, community design and architecture, and the economy.

In 2006 Charlene Spretnak was named by the British government’s Environment Department as one of the “100 Eco-Heroes of All Time.” For further information on her work, see http://www.CharleneSpretnak.net.

Charlene can be heard on Progressive Radio Network every Thursdays at 3pm (ET)/ Noon (PT).

TRANSCRIPTIONS

TRANSCRIPTION PART I:

Caryn: Hello Everybody. I am Caryn Hartglass. You are listening to IT’S ALL ABOUT FOOD. A very happy, healthy 2013. It is January 8, and I’ve been off for a couple weeks and it’s been nice to take a break actually, and now I am really excited to get back and talk about my favorite subject, say it with me: FOOD, and all that food has to do with our health, the environment and the animals that we choose to NOT eat. Read more »

REAL Favorite Cookbooks of 2012

With so many vegan cookbooks coming out all the time, there are so many to choose from. Here are our REAL Favorite Cookbooks of 2012.

1. Ramses Bravo, BRAVO! Health-Promoting Meals From The TrueNorth Kitchen
This is my personal favorite because Ramses Bravo has created recipes that are not only delicious but so good for you; sugar, oil and salt free (SOS-Free). While I do eat salt, sugar and salt on occasion, I believe SOS-free food is the healthiest way to go. This cookbook shows us how, deliciously.
LISTEN TO THE INTERVIEW with Alan Goldhamer, TrueNorth Health Center founder

Read more »

Episode #119: FTC Study on Food Marketing to Children, FDA on food contamination, Diverticulitis

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In this episode the following are discussed:
FTC Releases Follow-Up Study Detailing Promotional Activities, Expenditures, and Nutritional Profiles of Food Marketed to Children and Adolescents.

F.D.A. Offers Broad New Rules to Fight Food Contamination.

Current Good Manufacturing Practice and Hazard Analysis and Risk-Based Preventive Controls for Human Food.

Genetically Monetized Food.

Dark Ecology.

Diverticulitis
Can people with diverticulitis eat nuts and seeds?.

Best REAL Reads of 2012

It’s time for the Best Of 2012 IT’S ALL ABOUT FOOD podcasts. There were 80 interviews this year with doctors, nutritionists, athletes, chefs and authors, all of them about food! I read a lot of books this year for my IT’S ALL ABOUT FOOD interviews. Below are my favorites. My next post will be about my favorite cookbooks of 2012.

Atina Diffley, Turn Here Sweet Corn: Organic Farming Works.
LISTEN TO THE INTERVIEW

Read more »

Interviews with Ellen Kamhi and Jon Krampner

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12/18/2012:

Part I: Ellen Kamhi
Natural Nurse

Ellen Kamhi, PhD, RN, The Natural Nurse® has been involved in Natural Medicine since 1973, when she directed a program in Ethnobotany at Cochise College in Douglas, Arizona. Dr. Kamhi attended Rutgers and Cornell Universities, sat on the Panel of Traditional Medicine at Columbia Presbyterian Medical School, and is a Medical School Instructor, teaching Botanical Pharmacology. She was nominated for the March of Dimes, Woman of Distinction 2004 and received the J.G Gallimore award for research in science. Dr. Kamhi is a professional member of the American Herbalist Guild (AHG), and is nationally board certified as an Advanced Holistic Nurse (AHN-BC). Ellen Kamhi is the author of many books, including Cycles of Life, Herbs for Women, The Natural Guide to Great Sex, WEIGHT LOSS-the Alternative Medicine Definitive Guide, The Natural Medicine Chest and Arthritis, The Alternative Medicine Definitive Guide. She hosts radio shows daily, including on Gary Nulls Progressive Radio Network, and is regularly quoted in numerous mainstream media including Marie Clare, Latina, Self, Woman’s World, Prevention, Cosmopolitan and Glamour. Dr. Kamhi provides group and individual online certification educational modules in Herbal Medicine, Essential Oil Therapy, Energy Medicine, Radionics and all aspects of holistic medicine, and provides personal health consultations. She is on the Peer Review Editorial Board of several journals/organizations, including: Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine, Natural Medicine Journal, Natural Standard Database. Ellen Kamhi is actively involved as the Professional Herbalist/Nutritionist and Educator for Nature’s Answer®, Hauppauge, NY.

Dr. Kamhi can be heard on Progressive Radio Network Tuesdays at 10am (ET)/ 7am (PT).

12/18/2012:

Part II: Jon Krampner
Creamy and Crunchy: An Informal History of Peanut Butter, the All-American Food.

Jon Krampner, who has had a lifetime on-and-off affair with peanut butter, is the author of two previous books: “The Man in the Shadows: Fred Coe and the Golden Age of Television” (Rutgers University Press, 1997) and “Female Brando: The Legend of Kim Stanley” (Watson-Guptill/Backstage Books, 2006). He lives in Los Angeles and has a slight preference for crunchy. More at CreamyandCrunchy.
Read more »

Episode #118, Kitchen Organizing, Rice Paper, Soy Lecithin, Holiday Dinner Menu

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In this episode I give an update on my kitchen organizing project with herbs and spices. I talk about rice paper and soy lecithin and recipes I use them for. The REAL Holiday Menu 2012 is covered in detail along with some recommendations for resolutions.

Interviews with Chad Sarno and Fran Costigan 12/11/2012

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12/11/2012:

Part I: Chad Sarno
Crazy Sexy Kitchen

Chad Sarno is a chef, consultant, speaker, and committed plant activist. He has brought his unique culinary style to projects spanning public education at some of the world’s premier wellness retreats, and culinary expos to the launch of an international boutique restaurant chain from Istanbul to London.

Chad has been contributing chef to numerous recipe books as well as featured in many national publications. He has been a guest on dozens of morning shows, and food focused programs on television and radio internationally over the years. Through the intersection of clean food and culinary education, Chad continues to share his passion for helping others achieve their health goals, starting in the kitchen.

In his most recent project, Chad has teamed up with New York Times Best Selling Author Kris Carr of Crazy Sexy Diet to write Crazy Sexy Kitchen: 150 Plant-Empowered Recipes to Ignite a Mouthwatering Revolution.

Chad is currently the senior culinary educator for Whole Foods Market’s healthy eating program, and resides with his beautiful daughter in Austin, TX.

12/11/2012:

Part II: Fran Costigan
Irresistible Chocolate Vegan Desserts

Native New Yorker Fran Costigan, the “Queen of Vegan Desserts,” is an internationally recognized culinary instructor, author, consultant, recipe developer and the pioneering vegan pastry chef who marries healthy eating with sumptuous tastes. The “Fran Factor” is her unique ability to transform traditional desserts into modern, healthful, and luscious vegan desserts that satisfy vegans and omnivores alike. In Fran’s recipes, ‘nothing is missing except the dairy, eggs, white sugar and excess fat.’ She is the authority on all things related to vegan baking and desserts.A graduate of the New York Restaurant School, the Natural Gourmet Institute, and Nick Malgeri’s Professional Pastry Intensive, today Fran teaches her unique courses at the Institute of Culinary Education, the Natural Gourmet Institute (including her always sold-out Vegan Baking Boot Camp Intensive®), and at other venues throughout the US and Canada. Fran’s second cookbook, More Great Good Dairy-Free Desserts Naturally (Book Publishing Company, 2006), is designed as a complete course in vegan baking.

Fran’s recipes feature organic whole grains, fair trade natural sweeteners and chocolates, and clean seasonal ingredients. Fran’s third cookbook, Irresistible Chocolate Vegan Desserts for Everyone: Unapologetically Delicious, Decadent, Dark, Organic and Fair, will be published by Running Press, fall 2013.Fran and her decadent modern vegan dessert recipes have been featured on Discovery Health Channel Show Get Fresh with Sara Snow, on Better TV, and on ABC’s Nightline. Her work has been profiled in numerous print and online publications such as The New Yorker, VegNews, Veg Family, Vegetarian Journal, Vegetarian Voice, Café Sweets Japan, and Organic Spa Magazine. Fran is an advisory board member of New York Coalition for Healthy School Foods. She also also promotes her message through her professional affiliations,which include the New York Women’s Culinary Alliance (NYWCA), International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP), Women Chefs and Restaurateurs (WCR).

LISTEN HERE to the 11/17/2010 interview with Fran Costigan on IT’S ALL ABOUT FOOD.

TRANSCRIPTION

PART I:

Hello everybody! I’m Caryn Hartglass and you’re listening to It’s All About Food. Hope you’re having a very happy 11th of December 2012. And we’re in that happy holiday season. It’s Hanukkah and I want to remind you to visit responsibleeatingandliving.com. We have a great food show up for Hanukkah right now: it’s my baked potato pancakes/potato latkes. I’m so in love with this recipe. Read more »

Interviews with Colleen Patrick-Goudreau and Freya Dinshah 12/4/2012

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12/4/2012:

Part 1: Colleen Patrick-Goudreau
The 30 Day Vegan Challenge

The award-winning author of five books, including the bestselling The Joy of Vegan Baking, The Vegan Table, Color Me Vegan, Vegan’s Daily Companion, and The 30-Day Vegan Challenge, Colleen Patrick-Goudreau has guided people to becoming and staying vegan for over 12 years through sold-out cooking classes, bestselling books, inspiring lectures, engaging videos, and her immensely popular audio podcast, “Vegetarian Food for Thought.” Using her unique blend of passion, humor, and common sense, she empowers and inspires people to live according to their own values of compassion and wellness. She also contributes to National Public Radio and The Christian Science Monitor, and has appeared on The Food Network and PBS. Visit colleenpatrickgoudreau.com for more.

12/4/2012:

Part II: Freya Dinshah
Apples, Bean Dip, and Carrot Cake: Kids! Teach Yourself to Cook

Freya Dinshah is coauthor of the new book, Apples, Bean Dip, and Carrot Cake: Kids! Teach Yourself to Cook. Freya provided the concept, supplied the majority of the recipes, guided the project, and asked her daughter Anne to be coauthor. Anne then invited 26 children to be chefs, developed kid-friendly language, photographed their efforts, and shared the tasting tasks.
For several years Freya has volunteered at the Newfield Terrace Community Action Organization after-school program. Freya is currently serving as nutrition educator and teaches basic cooking skills to children ages 6 to 18. She has been a key organizer for local and national events to encourage compassionate, healthful living. Freya has taught cooking classes to people of all ages for over 40 years.
Freya resides in southern New Jersey where she works full-time as president of American Vegan Society and editor of American Vegan magazine.
Read more »

Episode #117: Artificial Sweeteners & Weight Gain; Restless Leg Syndrome; Inspiring words for healing and eating healthier; Vegan Omelette and Epic Lasagna

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Hello, everybody, I’m Caryn Hartglass and you’re listening in the 117th episode of Ask A Vegan. It’s the 2nd of December 2012. I’ve been enjoying counting these episodes. I can’t believe that so many have already happened. I’m not a point where I’ve started to transcribe these podcasts. And I think, ultimately, they are all going to fit very nicely in some neat little book, because there have been really, too many good bits of information that have been covered on the show. I think it’s time to concentrate them all into one place. Meanwhile, I’m just going to keep doing these every week and talking to you, and to do that, I need to hear from you.
Read more »

Interviews with Michelle McCabe and Noam Mohr

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11/27/2012:

Part I: Michelle McCabe
Food Policy & Obesity

Michelle McCabe is a Research Assistant at the Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity at Yale University. She works with Roberta Friedman, Director of Public Policy, to research and create policy briefs and maintain the Legislative Updates.

Michelle advocates for a healthy school food environment in her town. She is in her second term as chair of the Fuel for Learning Partnership, a PTA council standing committee that serves on the Wellness Coalition, organizes educational events around nutrition and local food, and seeks to improve school lunches and school food policy.

Michelle received her Bachelor’s degree from Vassar College and her Master’s degree from the University of Texas, Austin, both in art history.

11/27/2012:

Part II: Noam Mohr
Global Warming

Noam Mohr is a physicist at Queens College with degrees from Yale University and the University of Pennsylvania. He has worked on global warming campaigns for the U.S. Public Interest Research Group and EarthSave International, publishing a number of reports on climate change including A New Global Warming Strategy, Flirting with Disaster, Pumping Up the Price, and Storm Warning.
Read more »

Episode #116: Nutella, Palm Oil, Twinkies, Caraway Seeds, Organic Herbs and Spices

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ASK A VEGAN PROGRAM TRANSCRIPTION:

Hello everybody! I’m Caryn Hartglass and you are listening to the Ask A Vegan show. It is the 25th of November 2012. Thank you for joining me today.
Read more »

Interviews with Anne Dinshah and Terry Hope Romero, 11/20/2012

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11/20/2012:

Part I: Anne Dinshah
Dating Vegans: Recipes for Relationships

Anne Dinshah is a lifetime vegan and author of Dating Vegans. Her other books include Healthy Hearty Helpings, The 4 Ingredient Vegan (co-author with Maribeth Abrams), and the newly released Apples, Bean Dip, and Carrot Cake: Kids! Teach Yourself to Cook (co-author with Freya Dinshah). Her career as a rowing coach takes her to a variety of locations throughout the United States where she embraces the challenges of everyday life with focus, persistence, and grace. Anne enjoys sports from swimming to wrestling. She has been fortunate to become friends with many men and experience romantic dating adventures. With the help of nonvegan friends who appreciate her vegan cuisine, Anne is building her stone and timber-frame writer’s cabin in western New York state. She is committed to building bridges as a vegan in a culture that depends heavily on animal products.

11/20/2012:

Part II: Terry Hope Romero
Vegan Eats World

Terry Hope Romero is co-author of bestselling books Veganomicon, Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World and Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar. Her first solo cookbook of Viva Vegan! came out in spring 2010. She contributes to VegNews‘s “Hot Urban Eats” column and has hosted the public access/podcast vegan cooking show the Post Punk Kitchen. Terry lives, cooks and eats in NYC.

Listen to the June 23, 2010 interview on IT’S ALL ABOUT FOOD with Terry Hope Romero.
Read more »

Interviews with James Colquhoun and Courtney Meder 11/13/2012

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11/13/2012:

Part I: James Colquhoun
HUNGRY FOR CHANGE

From the producers of the documentary films “Food Matters” James Colquhoun and Laurentine ten Bosch say that everyone on a diet ought to get “Hungry for Change” instead. Their first film, “Food Matters” has been seen by millions who have rediscovered their health with the core message of the film: you are what you eat. On the heels of that success, the couple began receiving scores of messages from people eager for them to turn their attention to weight loss. A prescriptive companion to the DVD, the book HUNGRY FOR CHANGE: The How-to Guide for Breaking Free from the Diet Trap combines the expertise of top medical doctors and nutritionists with proven strategies to prevent and reverse disease, and more than 100 recipes to lose weight simply by adding better food to your diet and avoiding harmful ones.

Here is VIDEO of James and Laurentine discussing HUNGRY FOR CHANGE.

11/13/2012:

Part II: Courtney Meder
PURE, CLEAN WATER

Courtney Meder works at her family’s business, Pure & Secure (home of the original Pure Water Distillers) in Lincoln, Nebraska. She and her family have dedicated their lives to spreading awareness about toxins in the water supply and how distillation is the best way for a family to protect their loved ones from these harmful toxins. They are committed to purity and quality and truly believe there is no compromise when it comes to one’s health.

Episode #115: GMO Labeling, November Holidays, More REAL Recipes

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TRANSCRIPT:

Hello everybody. I’m Caryn Hartglass and you’re listening to the 115th episode of Ask A Vegan.

Time marches on doesn’t it? Things just add up. We have so many podcasts now on the Responsible Eating And Living website; over 300 hours of information. I hope from time to time you visit our It’s All About Food archives and the Ask A Vegan archives, there is just so much information there that I hope is useful to you.
Read more »

Episode #114 Emergency Preparedness, Vegan-Style

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In this program, I talk about tips for emergencies: food, water, lighting. Read more »

Episode #113 Multiple Sclerosis, Probiotics, Mushrooms

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In a earlier Ask A Vegan Episode 2/5/2012, I spoke about MS. and Dr. Terry Wahls website. In light of a recent NY Times article, A Controversial ‘Cure’ for M.S. Disappointed with no mention of diet in the article I thought it important to discuss the subject again as well as an earlier NY Times article, Some With MS Put Their Hopes in a Diet by Jane E. Brody, published: March 11, 2008

Other items discussed in this episode:
The New Yorker’s article, Germs Are Us.
New findings in the JAMA report: Multivitamins in the Prevention of Cancer in Men, The Physicians’ Health Study II Randomized Controlled Trial.

A listener who had heard my interview with Ken Babal on the health benefits of mushrooms, shared some links where to buy organic mushrooms:
Hokto Company Website with a store locator where their mushrooms are sold.
FungusAmongUs, a web site that sells organic bulk mushrooms.

Interviews with Tom Regan and Ricki Heller 10/23/2012

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10/23/2012:

Part I: Tom Regan
The Case for Animal Rights

Thomas Howard Regan was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on November 28, 1938. He is an American philosopher and author (professor emeritus of philosophy at North Carolina State University) who specializes in animal rights theory.

Tom Regan wrote multiple books on the philosophy of animal rights. His most famous being The Case for Animal Rights, a work that significantly influenced the modern animal rights movement. It was also nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

Tom Regan started his career in 1965 as Instructor, and then Assistant Professor of Philosophy, at Sweet Briar College. In 1967, he started as Assistant Professor of Philosophy at North Carolina State University. In 1972 Associate Professor of Philosophy, in 1978 Professor of Philosophy and from 1996 to 1999 Regan served as Head Philosophy & Religion in the North Carolina State University.

During his more than thirty years on the faculty, he received numerous awards for excellence in teaching; published scores of professional papers as well as more than twenty books; got major international awards for film writing and direction

Tom Regan is married to the former Nancy Tirk, with whom he co-founded The Culture and Animals Foundation, advancing animal advocacy through intellectual and artistic expression.

10/23/2012:

Part II: Ricki Heller
Diet, Dessert And Dogs

Ricki Heller is an educator, writer, cookbook author, natural nutritionist and lover of all things canine. She’s is a college teacher who works as a part-time cooking class instructor/chef and a part-time freelance writer. She holds a PhD in Modern American Literature. Find out more about Ricki at her website, www.dietdessertndogs.com.
Read more »

Episode #112: Wheat Belly, Sick Reasons For Eating Meat

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I had the opportunity to speak with Dr. William Davis about his book, Wheat Belly on my IT’S ALL ABOUT FOOD show last week but we ran out of time and I wanted to talk more about the book. I review it during this ASK A VEGAN EPISODE. Listen to the interview with Dr. Davis here.

I also reviewed the very ridiculous article Six Reasons Why I Eat Meat Every Day — Mondays, Too from BEEF, the nation’s leading cattle publication.

Below are this week’s REAL Recipes, vegan and gluten-free of course.

REAL Yogurt
Oranges with Mint
REAL Classic Pizza
Minestrone
Sourdough Cornmeal Pancake

This is the month of our annual fundraising drive. We invite you to attend the REAL Virtual Pancake breakfast. Enjoy our Sourdough Cornmeal Pancake and make a donation to Responsible Eating And Living

Interviews with Dr. Melanie Joy and Dr. William Davis 10/16/2012

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10/16/2012:

Part I: Melanie Joy
Carnism

Melanie Joy, Ph.D., Ed.M. is the founder and president of Carnism Awareness & Action Network (CAAN). Dr. Joy is a Harvard-educated psychologist, professor of psychology and sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, celebrated speaker, and the author of the award-winning primer on carnism Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows. She has written a number of articles on psychology, animal protection, and social justice and she has been featured on programs including the BBC, National Public Radio, PBS, ABC Australia, and Good Morning Croatia, and in Slovenia’s Jana, the Austrian Der Standard and the Italian Le Scienze. Dr. Joy has given her critically acclaimed carnism presentation across the United States as well as internationally. Dr. Joy is also the author of Strategic Action for Animals.

10/16/2012:

Part II: Dr. William Davis
Wheat Belly

William Davis, MD, is a preventive cardiologist whose unique approach to diet allows him to advocate reversal, not just prevention, of heart disease. His book Wheat Belly is a #1 on the New York Times Bestseller. He is the founder of the TrackYourPlaque.com program. He lives in Wisconsin.

TRANSCRIPTION PART I:

Hello everybody! It’s time for It’s All About Food. I am Caryn Hartglass, the founder of the nonprofit Responsible Eating and Living (REAL). I wanted to tell you that October is the time for our REAL Appeal at Responsible Eating and Living. We are a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization. Read more »

Episode #111: NY Times Food & Drink Issue; Homemade Bread Starter, Vegan Cheese, Vegan Yogurt

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Inspired by the Food And Drink issue of the New York Times Magazine I discussed the Michael Pollan’s article on the food movement, famers markets, community, and government action, the Food from California’s Central Valley and eating in Greenland omnivores only or as a vegan.

Other topics covered in the episode include:

Using recipes from Miyoko Schinner‘s Artisan Vegan Cheese: Mozzarella, Hard cheese, Yogurt

Buying yeast, without the unwanted ingredient: sorbitan monostearate, and making starter.

This week’s Real Recipes

The REAL Asian Fusion Dinner:

Basic Miso Soup

Carrot Apple Ginger Dressing

Tofu and Eggplant in Plum Sauce

and

Prune Butter Muffins

I finish with Joni Mitchell’s Big Yellow Taxi whose lyrics are so appropriate four decades after the song was first written and recorded in 1970.

Episode #110: School Lunches, Exercise Programs, Counting Calories, FTC Green Guides

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The following articles and topics were covered in this 110th episode:
No Appetite for Good-for-You School Lunches
Do Exercise Programs Help Children Stay Fit?
GOP bill would repeal Agriculture Dept. calorie caps on school lunches
What’s wrong with counting calories.
FTC Issues Revised “Green Guides”
Will Help Marketers Avoid Making Misleading Environmental Claims
F.T.C. Issues Guidelines for ‘Eco-Friendly’ Labels
Going Green With Parsley

This week’s REAL recipes:
Stuffed Red Italian Peppers Tuscan Style
Asian Slaw
Caesar Salad

Interviews with John Robbins and Mark Reinfeld 10/9/2012

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The song Caryn Hartglass talks about with Mark Reinfeld at the end of this program is Phidyle by Henri Duparc. It can be heard below.

10/9/2012:

Part I: John Robbins
No Happy Cows

Groomed to follow in the footsteps of his father, John Robbins chose a different path for himself, becoming a social activist and fierce advocate for plant-strong diets and compassionate living. John Robbins is the author of The Food Revolution, Diet for a New America, Reclaiming Our Health, Healthy at 100 and The New Good Life. His life and work have been featured on the PBS special Diet for a New America, and he has won numerous awards for his pioneering work, including the Rachel Carson Award, the Albert Schweitzer Humanitarian Award, the Peace Abbey’s Courage of Conscience Award, and Green American’s Lifetime Achievement Award. He lives with his family in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

10/9/2012:

Part II: Mark Reinfeld
Taste of Europe

Mark Reinfeld is the winner of Vegan.com’s Recipe of the Year Award for 2011 and has over 20 years experience preparing creative vegan and raw food cuisine. Mark was the Executive Chef for the North American Vegetarian Society’s 2012 Summerfest, one of the largest vegetarian conferences in the world. He is described by VegCooking.com as being “poised on the leading edge of contemporary vegan cooking”. He is the founding chef of the Blossoming Lotus Restaurant, winner of Honolulu Advertiser’s ‘Ilima Award for “Best Restaurant on Kaua’i”. Mark is also the recipient of a Platinum Carrot Award for living foods – a national award given by the Aspen Center of Integral Health to America’s top “innovative and trailblazing healthy chefs.

Mark received his initial culinary training from his grandfather Ben Bimstein, a renowned chef and ice carver in New York City. He developed his love for World culture and cuisine during travel journeys through Europe , Asia and the Middle East . In 1997, Mark formed the Blossoming Lotus Personal Chef Service in Malibu , California. To further his knowledge of the healing properties of food, he received a Masters Degree in Holistic Nutrition.

His first cookbook, Vegan World Fusion Cuisine, coauthored with Bo Rinaldi and with a foreword by Dr. Jane Goodall, has won several national awards, including “Cookbook of the Year’, ‘Best New Cookbook’, ‘Best Book by a Small Press’ and a Gourmand Award for ‘Best Vegetarian Cookbook in the USA ’. In addition Mark coauthored The Taste Of The East, The 30-Minute Vegan and The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Eating Raw.

He currently offers online vegan cooking lessons at CookingHealthyLessons.com as well as vegan cooking and raw food preparation consulting, cookbooks, recipe development, cooking classes, workshops, chef training, intensives and retreats in both North America and Europe. If you would like to learn more about Vegan Fusion Cuisine and Mark Reinfeld please visit veganfusion.com.

TRANSCRIPTION PART I:

Caryn Hartglass: Hello everybody, I’m Caryn Hartglass and you’re listening to It’s All About Food. Here we are, October 9, 2012. I wanted to let you know that during the month of October, which is vegetarian awareness month and also a lot of other things, Read more »

Episode #109: GMO Bans, Eating For Health, Vegan is Mainstream, Zoonotic Diseases, Local vs. Organic

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9/30/2012: In this episode of ASK A VEGAN I discussed the Russian Ban on GMO Monsanto Corn; Dr. Dean Ornish’s article in the New York Times called Eating For Health, Not Weight; how Vegan Fare Is In Mainstream in Southern California; Fish Oil and the range of Vegan Diets; Zoonotic diseases and the article Potentially Deadly Virus Related to SARS Appears to Be Not Easily Spread; an update on Arsenic in Rice and a new survey showing Local Produce Increasingly Preferred To Organic.

This week’s REAL recipes:
Orange You Glad Soup
Heavenly Salad
Vegetable Quiche
Sunflower Seed Crust

With September coming to an end, I finished by singing a song from the Fanstasticks, Try to Remember:

Try to remember the kind of September
When life was slow and oh, so mellow.
Try to remember the kind of September
When grass was green and grain was yellow.
Try to remember the kind of September
When you were a tender and callow fellow.
Try to remember, and if you remember,
Then follow.

Follow, follow, follow, follow, follow,
Follow, follow, follow, follow.

Episode #108: Arsenic in Rice, GMOs in Corn, Calcium in Milk, Horses and Drugs

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9/23/2012: In this program I covered a number of topics in the news this week. The links for the articles covered are below.

Consumer Reports, CR Investigate Arsenic In Your Food

FDA, Total Diet Study – Analytical Results, CFSAN/Office of Food Safety*, April 2001; Updated July 2008, January 2011, February 2012

Does GMO Corn Really Cause Tumors in Rats?

Statement from Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack on Failure to Pass Food, Farm and Jobs Bill

Calcium and Milk: What’s Best for Your Bones and Health?

Animal abusers in N.Y. may have to register like sex offenders

Racing Economics Collide With Veterinarians’ Oath.

REAL Recipes:
We enjoyed Tofu Steaks and Tempeh in Barbecue Sauce this week.

Interviews with Maia Dowe and Jon Hinds 9/25/2012

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9/25/2012:

Part I: Maia Kobb Dowe
Recovery From Autism

Maia graduated from Russell Sage with a Bachelor of Science in Nursing. Upon graduation she took a position at the New York Hospital / Cornell Medical Center (now New York Presbyterian Hospital) where she worked in the Burn Trauma Unit / ICU becoming a Charge Nurse after 1 year. Working on the Burn Unit, she became interested in research and subsequently worked with Johnson & Johnson as a Clinical Research Associate, in Medical Immunobiology, where she stayed for 15 years, moving to Quality Assurance and Training for Clinical R&D.

Maia is the mother of a 22 year-old son who is recovered from Autism. He is now a senior in college, an Honor student in Physics, and an accomplished jazz guitarist. He has many close friends and is a charming and compassionate human being. Her son was diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder at age 2 1/2 in 1993 — before the Internet, before the DAN protocol, and before people were really making the bio-medical connection with the Autism as a significant piece of the puzzle leading to the cause and the cure for Autism. Understanding the biology behind the disorder, and remediating her son’s developmental deficits piece by piece, bit by bit, became Maia’s all-consuming life’s passion.

9/25/2012:

Part II: Jonny Hinds
Monkey Bar Gym

Jon is a Master Trainer and business founder with over 30 years of global training experience. With his broad knowledge of human physiology and simple training philosophies, Jon has mastered the art of healing and strengthening the body. His dedication to these disciplines has yielded numerous patented training tools and a unique training methodology that continue to attract Olympic and professional athletes from all over the globe.

Jon is also an exceptional motivational speaker and has toured with the famed Tony Robbins. His frank and direct demeanor allows him to quickly disarm and connect with his clients making the efficient progression he’s widely known for look simple.

Jon can leverage his abilities to motivate and inspire any who are willing to listen. Jon is as equally compelling from the confines of an elevator as he is in the expanses of a stadium. His lifelong pursuit of better approaches, regardless financial implication or trend, have galvanized a truly uncommon integrity in him. His endorsements and practices are carefully watched by a diverse community of elite trainers, athletes and coaches.

Jon is currently the Owner and Founder of the Monkey Bar Gym franchise. He is also the Vice President of LifelineUSA, a global leader in fitness innovation and product distribution. Jon is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin, the National Academy of Sports Medicine and is certified by the National Strength and Conditioning Association. Jon is also a writer and contributor to a variety of major sports publications and periodicals.

TRANSCRIPTIONS

PROGRAM TRANSCRIPTION PART I:

Caryn Hartglass: Hello. I’m Caryn Hartglass, and you are listening to It’s All About Food. It’s September 25, 2012, and here we are in the studio in Manhattan, New York. It’s a beautiful day. The air is fresh, the sky is clear, and it’s really lovely to be alive. So, I’m thankful for that.

So much in the news about food. I just wanted to mention a few things: Arsenic in our rice, and genetically modified organisms in our corn that are making tumors in rats, and who knows what else they’re doing. All these things are exploding this week in the news, and the question is, where can we go to get food that is not only good for us but not contaminated with things we don’t want to eat? Honestly, I don’t know that I have the answers because everything is connected on this planet, and when people are doing things in one place, it affects our water, it affects our air. The best that we can do, and there are a few things: One is we can buy from farmers and stores that have organic produce, but in this latest study that came out about arsenic in rice, we know that even organic rice is affected. So that’s kind of daunting. In addition, and I always like to say this because I think this is really important, even though it may seem very undocumented and trivial, is that whenever you eat and whatever you eat, enjoy it. Don’t worry about it when you’re eating it, and tell your body to take the good from the food, and leave the things that aren’t good for you out and let them pass through. Just let your body know that, and it will listen. We have really powerful minds if we use them correctly. So don’t panic, but certainly, if you have an opportunity, write your congress people. Let them know that we don’t want to have arsenic in our rice, and how do we do that? Well, we stop using toxic herbicides and pesticides in agribusiness. We get rid of factory farms because they are giving arsenic to chickens because they are unhealthy, and the arsenic kind of keeps them going until they are slaughtered. Then there is arsenic in their excrement and that is used as manure which is put on all the fields growing all the plants, and that’s how the arsenic gets into the ground, where we don’t want it.

Okay, so, that’s just a little bit of food for thought to get started, and now I want to bring on my first guest, Maia Dowe. She graduated from Russell Sage College, and she received a Bachelor of Science in nursing. When she graduated, she took a position with a New York Hospital, Cornell Medical Center, which is now New York Presbyterian Hospital, where she worked in the Burn Trauma Unit, ICU, and became a charge nurse. After that she worked with Johnson & Johnson as a clinical research associate in medical immunobiology. She worked with J&J for a total of 15 years in Quality Assurance and Training for clinical R&D as well. What we are going to be talking about today is what she experienced while being the mother of her son who was diagnosed at a very early age with autism, and this is a really fascinating story. I think we have a lot to learn from it, so let’s just jump right in. Welcome to It’s All About Food, Maia.

Maia Dowe: Thank you, Caryn. It’s really wonderful to be here today. Just listening to you speak a little bit in your intro about toxicity in food brings me back. My son is actually 22 years old, now, and he was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder when he was only 2 1/2, and that was back in 1993. So, there was no internet, we’ve talked about this, and autism wasn’t blown wide open like it is today. We didn’t know everything we now know about food, about gluten, dairy, and large proteins that get in the way of the immune and mental processing for children with autism.

Caryn Hartglass: Even with the internet and everything that’s available to us today, there are so many people that don’t have this information, and many people struggle with autism. Now, how did you know that your son had a problem at 2 1/2 years old?

Maia Dowe: Well, you hear so much about children where they had, pretty much, normal/ typical development until the age of two or three and then started to lose their words and their functions. In our case I think there was potentially some toxicity or an environmental viral trigger, maybe, going on much earlier because by the time Brian was one, it was clear to me that something was a little different. He had trouble crawling. He had a couple of words leading into age two but never put two words together, which is one of the things you do look for. By age 2 1/2 he had lost that. I was working, and he was in a nursery program. He was not interacting with the other children, not following directions, kind of going off by himself. The reason I found out at age 2 1/2, even though I was suspecting things, which my medical doctors were not supporting, my older sister, believe it or not, who had three boys of her own, came to watch my son over Christmas, and she made the observation which she shared with me. This was a lucky thing because when you have a child with autism, the sooner you know and the sooner you start limiting their foods and giving the right supplements and right behavioral teaching, the better chance you have of helping them.

Caryn Hartglass: Early diagnosis for everything is so critical, and it’s all about paying attention.

Maia Dowe: Exactly.

Caryn Hartglass: So, then what did you do?

Maia Dowe: The most important thing was to get a full, what they call, differential diagnosis by a hospital. In our case, we already suspected autism. I live in New Jersey, and there are, in the Princeton area, a couple of very well-known and expert programs in autism, and so we brought Brian directly there to Eden Institute. They did an observational diagnosis where they are trying to interact with the child, watching his interaction with the parents, and then doing some very specific, problem solving, coordination testing. Mostly, it was the connectiveness, and he didn’t have language, and I guess that was the biggest thing. He avoided eye contact, he didn’t have language, and he would scream because he couldn’t communicate.

Caryn Hartglass: Now, did you see a difference, because at 2 1/2 years old it’s really hard to know, but do you think there was something that triggered it, an event, and could you, maybe, tell a difference. I know when kids are older and they have already started to develop, their parents see an on-off difference. Their child just changes, they are never the same, and they try to figure out what it was that triggered it.

Maia Dowe: In my case I’m not sure if it might have been the oral polio vaccine. My son got a second dose of it, and I did see more of a regression following that. Also, I was always watching children at the park, watching the way they moved, used the swings, their motor coordination, eye contact and connectedness, and although my son was always very cuddly and there wasn’t that missing piece, those other things were never what they should have been. He was very sick from a very young age and had a lot of problems with digestion. He was breast fed, but at times when my milk supply wasn’t the best, we tried infant formula and he would projectile vomit the formula. He had a lot of chronic diarrhea as a baby, and so I think there was a digestion absorption problem going on from the get go. So, maybe our story was a little bit different because of that, because you need those proteins and nutrients in order to develop proper neurological function.

Caryn Hartglass: Autism is a word that is used all of the time today, and it covers a wide range. There is no blood test for autism, so it is a subjective kind of diagnosis, and people don’t always fit into a particular mold. I think this is because there is a lot more to it. We may attribute autism to a lot of different problems, and there may be more than just one or two to three or four things, but a lot of different things. It’s convenient, in some ways, to be diagnosed as autistic because then you can benefit from some state aid with schools and help. So, some parents may want to have this diagnosis for their children. We still don’t know a whole lot about it, and I think many different things could have triggered some of the symptoms that your son had. That’s what makes it so hard to figure out what to do about it because there are probably many different causes. Some people believe it’s vaccines, even though the scientists are trying to dispute that all of the time. I’m fascinated with this concept that the eggs in our mother’s womb were formed in our grandmother’s womb so that our DNA started two generations back and could have been affected by so many things a long, long time ago. So, it is really hard to keep track of what might cause developmental problems.

So, you were on a path, and you did a lot of different things. So, what are some of the key things that you did that helped?

Maia Dowe: I do want to say that we followed the theory of autism being multifactorial and that there were many different things contributing to the problem. So in order to heal a child you have to look at it from many different angles as well. So the first thing we did was to put my son into a one-on-one behavioral teaching program. He was very fortunate to be accepted into the Douglass Developmental Disabilities Center at Rutger’s University in New Jersey, and he was in their outreach program almost right away. That early intervention everyday makes a difference because there is that window. Even though we now know that neuroplasticity exists well into adulthood and all of our lives, the brain is much more plastic between the ages of two and five. That is a window for recovery, re-teaching, and establishing that connectiveness. In our case, because I worked in medical immunobiology and I was looking at all of these various studies in my work, I started to see some parallels with certain immune deficiencies and what I observed going on with my son. Low and behold when we had him tested, he did have immune dysfunctions. So, the other piece was that it was very difficult for him to gain weight. We found a connection between wheat and dairy before the big studies came out of Scandinavia, establishing the connection between wheat, gluten and autism. The way we saw it, Caryn, was that he would wake up in the morning and he would be the best he was all day. As soon as he would start putting things in his mouth, it would be downhill from there. If he got a bagel with cream cheese, one of our favorite things to eat in my family, he would start spinning himself in the middle of the floor, toe walking, kind of going off more into his own world. So in a certain sense, it was very obvious, even at two, that something in the food he was eating was, at the very least, making this problem worse.

Caryn Hartglass: Good for you for paying attention. Most people don’t. We see such subtle things like, teachers probably know this, when kids have birthday parties in their classroom and the parents wanting to celebrate bring in cupcakes and candy. Then afterwards they leave their children in the hands of the poor teachers who now have to deal with this sugar overload and the behavioral changes in the kids.

Maia Dowe: Then people love to say those don’t exist. Yet those of us who are observant know they do.

Caryn Hartglass: Yes, absolutely. Okay, so you found this connection. Now what is this leaky gut thing that happens? Can you talk a little bit about that?

Maia Dowe: Yes. So it’s hard to know which comes first, the horse or the cart. Does the leaky gut come first and then you have the problem with the gluten, dairy, and other large proteins, or do the large proteins assault the gut lining and then you have this hyperpermeability. I believe, in my son’s case as this was observable almost from birth, that it had to do with toxicity. I ate a lot of tuna fish all my life, almost everyday when I was pregnant, so I think I had a high mercury burden myself. I know there is a lot of controversy surrounding Thermisol, the mercury preservatives used in the vaccines 20 years ago and in almost all of them when my son was diagnosed. I do believe that the toxicity from our environment is disruptive to the gut lining. Children that are experiencing this are having those large molecules get through the leaky gut and they circulate as toxins to the nervous system, neurotoxins, and to the immune system. These kids tend to get sick a lot. They are on a lot of antibiotics that leads to fungal overgrowth and an imbalance of the friendly bacteria in the gut, and it just goes on and on and on like a snowball making everything worse. So for a parent to try to unravel all of this, it is a lot of pieces to put together, and it’s not easy.

Caryn Hartglass: The thing about the wheat and dairy for a lot of people, I think, they just don’t believe it will work. It takes a tremendous amount of effort for parents raising a child to monitor that and make sure they keep, what they aren’t even sure are problems, out of the diet.

Maia Dowe: Right. It’s hard to commit to something that is so difficult to do when you are not sure, really, where it’s going to get you and your child regarding improvement in their communication, their eye contact, and their ability to learn.

Caryn Hartglass: The other thing with autistic children, I understand, is that they are finicky eaters.

Maia Dowe: You are so right. They are amazingly finicky eaters, and the reason for this is because they have a hypersensitivity to touch, the texture of the food, and it relates to their processing problems. There can be a hypersensitivity to sound or, what we call, tactile defensiveness, to being touched on the skin, and it is the same thing with the textures of food in the mouth. One thing I can say is that it is so worth doing, and it is so much easier to do today, to eliminate the gluten, which is the protein in the wheat, and the casein in the dairy. These products are available in Shoprite and everywhere you go. I was sending away for brands from Canada about 20 years ago. When the children are little, if you have the luxury of having a child who is diagnosed early, it is so much easier to control them. The hard thing is when they go to school and they are out of house. They feel different and see other kids having things that they can’t have. One thing, since I know we don’t have a tremendous amount of time, I do want to get across to parents is that if you try the GFCF diet that is widely known about in the field of autism now, please be aware of the following: When you have a leaky gut lining which means large molecules are getting through the intestinal lining which shouldn’t be getting through because that semipermeable membrane is now more wide open, more permeable than it should be like a sponge that is wearing out, be aware that if they can’t break down one large protein like gluten, for instance, chances are they can’t break down a lot of large-chain proteins. So you tend to see a better result if you can take all of them away at once, and so by that I mean soy, corn, eggs, any large molecule that you know about. That part sounds harder to do than it is because now, with all of this awareness, you can find cookies, shakes and drinks that will say on the label no wheat, dairy, corn, soy, eggs.

Cary Hartglass: The top allergens.

Maia Dowe: Right!

Cary Hartglass: So it’s easier now, but there still are a lot of people struggling for some reason. We all need some sort of “Spock mind meld” or something so we can all come to the same place at the same time. A lot of doctors don’t know these things, as well, and certainly a lot of parents don’t know about this. A lot of parents struggle financially and with their jobs, and how much time do they have to look on the internet or do research. So it can be really overwhelming. I’m sure your nursing background helped you a lot in understanding what you were reading and where to go to look for information.

Maia Dowe: It did help me a lot. I was very fortunate, not just in my nursing background, but in the job I had at the time in clinical research with Johnson & Johnson where I was lucky enough to be exposed to information that made me wonder if this was a factor for my son and to look into it. One of those things was digestive enzymes, for instance. I was looking at a study with children with cystic fibrosis who were taking digestive enzymes because they didn’t make them and were digesting food very well doing that. So I sought out enzymes for my son, and now we know that anybody that doesn’t digest and break down foods well can be helped by taking enzymes with their foods so that you can get those smaller building blocks that our bodies need to make things like neurotransmitters, antibodies, or hormones.

Caryn Hartglass: An interesting thing is that nature is smart in that nature has figured out a lot of things for all life on earth, and she has figured out what humans need but we’ve kind of gone in our own direction and reconfigured things so that we are eating all of the wrong things. So I find that a lot of things that work for one chronic disease or one illness will work for another. That is the magic of this plant-based diet because when you eat it you are reducing your risk significantly for all the chronic diseases. The diet that works for cardiovascular problems works for diabetes, works for cancer, works for multiple sclerosis, works for all the autoimmune diseases. It works, works, works, and a lot of the nutrients we are lacking are because we are not getting it from our food like we should. Right now vitamin D is the sexy vitamin because everybody is saying it prevents this and that and everything else, and everybody works indoors and we are afraid of skin cancer.

So what supplements were you giving your son?

Maia Dowe: I brought my son to nutritional doctors, and it was very difficult in the beginning, 22 years ago, to find physicians who were interested in being a pioneer in this area with children with developmental disabilities, but the doctor who has been with my son for 13 years and really made one of the biggest differences for us is Dr. Kenneth Bock. He is up at the Rhinebeck Health Center. Dr. Bock practices integrative medicine, and I think he actually was the president, or head, of the Integrative Medicine Association for a number of years. What is good about that is that when you have a child that is dealing with a critical situation, sometimes you need to get a bandaid on it, and that bandaid can be a pharmaceutical or a dietary change that might mean we do have to include certain things for a while that ultimately you wouldn’t want. So I had a lot of medical guidance for Brian, and got many of his supplements directly from his doctors, but I love Kirkman Labs. They are based out of, I think, Oregon, and they have many special supplements that have been specifically designed for children with autism, developmental disabilities, children that can’t have wheat, dairy, and many of the allergens. They were one of the first companies to come out with an enzyme called dipeptidyl peptidase-4. We like to call it DPP-4 for short, and this is the enzyme that many children with autism and related disorders don’t have and don’t make well themselves. You take this enzyme with food. You can open the capsule and sprinkle it on the child’s food. That way they are not developing these, what I call, intermediate break-down products. For instance, when you eat wheat and dairy together and it’s broken down only half way, that forms a morphine-like substance called casomorphin, and that can make you completely disconnected with brain fog, hard to concentrate and all those other things.

Caryn Hartglass: Pizza!

Maia Dowe: Exactly! Pizza, macaroni and cheese, cereal and milk, like what do kids love to eat? So, it is putting them in this fog almost all the time, and the actual reaction from the gluten can be a delayed reaction, so it can be hard for parents to observe. So it is important to take those enzymes, and it is such an easy thing you can do. You want to avoid wheat and dairy as often as possible if you are trying this diet approach, but sometimes with kids you can’t or it is hard, and that’s where the enzymes come in. They help tremendously, and they help to break down the food into usable subsets that their bodies can regulate themselves naturally the way they need to do.

So, I know I’m getting off on a tangent, but I just want to say even though my son was in one of the best one-on-one programs–teaching the applied behavior analysis, ABA, which is the standard one-on-one therapy–as we began to unravel the medical side of the autism, clean up his diet, and heal the leaky gut, he became so much more teachable. So, instead of running a program 500 times, we could run it 15 times or 5 times, and he would have it. He could generalize skills easier. So, I just feel that the idea of a puzzle piece being a symbol for autism is so perfect, and we need to use that to remember that there are many pieces to this puzzle.

Caryn Hartglass: And the more you put it together, the easier it is solve the rest of this puzzle.

Maia Dowe: And, each time you put a piece in you don’t take it out when you look for the next piece. All of the pieces have to stay in. I’m doing my one-on-one teaching, I’m taking those large proteins (wheat and dairy) out of the diet, I’m adding enzymes. At the same time I’m doing some vision therapy, if the child needs it. My son had trouble with every processing system. He needed auditory training, and as he got older and he was declassified, actually, from his primary diagnosis of autism at age 7, he still had residual processing problems with vision, motor coordination, and processing auditory directions. So, what you need to know is to keep adding those pieces in and doing those therapies, but don’t take the other pieces out. Don’t forget what got you to that point. You have to maintain the diet.

One thing, I don’t know if we have time to talk about it, is toxicity.

Caryn Hartglass: Sure, just briefly.

Maia Dowe: So you were talking about eating a clean diet, vegan diet, and this is where it is difficult for children that have textural problems, but I’ve seen so many great recipes you have for making juices, and you can actually make fun cookies gluten-free and add vegetable juices and other good nutrients which is a wonderful thing to do. You also want to be careful to avoid the processed foods that have so many additives and toxins in them. Not only that, but we need to be aware of toxins on our skin, products we put on our children’s skin, and what’s in our water at home.

Caryn Hartglass: There is a lot to think about, and it all matters.

Maia Dowe: Right, and it is so far reaching, but you need to be aware of toxicity and just eating clean and close to the earth which really helps these children so much because it is hard to be reading the labels on every single thing.

Caryn Hartglass: Right. The good news is that your son has done very well. He is an honor student in physics and a senior in college. He is a jazz musician, has many close friends, and he is doing well. So I congratulate you for that.

We are going to take a break now and we will be back with my second guest, and, Maia, stick around and you can join me in the next half. I’m Caryn Hartglass. You have been listening to It’s All About Food. Check out my web site ResponsibleEatingAndLiving.com where you can find a lot of information, and send me an email at info@RealMeals.org

Transcribed by Ann Dungey, 2/17/2013

TRANSCRIPTION PART II:

Caryn Hartglass: We’re back! I’m Caryn Hartglass, you’re listening to It’s All About Food. Okay, we’re gonna change things up a little bit, and I’m gonna bring on my next guest, Jon Hinds. Read more »

Interview with Robert Klitzman 9/18/2012

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9/18/2012:

Robert L. Klitzman, MD
Am I My Genes?

Robert L. Klitzman is Professor of Clinical Psychiatry and the Director of the Masters of Bioethics Program at Columbia University. He co-founded and for five years co-directed the Columbia University Center for Bioethics, and is the Director of the Ethics and Policy Core of the HIV Center. He is the author of When Doctors Become Patients, A Year-long Night: Tales of a Medical Internship, In a House of Dreams and Glass: Becoming a Psychiatrist, and other works.

TRANSCRIPTION:

Caryn Hartglass: Hello, I’m Caryn Hartglass, and you’re listening to It’s All About Food. Hello! Let’s see, what day is it today? It’s September… gosh, 18^th. September 18^th! Anyway, I always like to say what day it is because I like to say what day it is. Read more »

Episode #107: Pink Slime (again), Veggie Libel Laws, Obesity Gene, No Happy Cows

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Pink Slime is back in the news with BPI’s Lawsuit against ABC. I discussed BPI’s “Making of Ground Beef” POSTER and a related article from the Civil Liberties Defense Center dated January 9, 2012 called Veggie Libel Laws: Attempts At Silencing Animal Rights Advocates.

I talked about Havard School of Public Health’s The Obesity Prevention Source – Genes Are Not Destiny and commented on Nicholas Kristof’s When Happy Cows Produce Happy Milk.

Two REAL recipes are featured this week – Vegan, Gluten-Free Holiday Recipes:
Sweet As Honey Cake
Challah Bread

Interviews with Talia Fuhrman and Miyoko Schinner 9/11/2012

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Episode #166

9/11/2012:

Part I: Talia Fuhrman
Healthy Eating: Fun, Delicious, Easy

Talia Fuhrman, daughter of author Joel Fuhrman M.D., has a degree in nutritional sciences from Cornell University. She is on a mission to help people understand that eating healthfully can be fun, delicious, and easy. A lover of cooking and journalism, she understands that disease prevention must be made tasty and easy for even the most newbie nutritarians and basic aspiring chefs. As a freelance nutrition journalist, she writes for Vegetarian Times and VegNews regularly and has her own blog www.taliafuhrman.com. She has written for numerous websites and magazines including www.collegecandy.com, www.crazysexylife.com, www.girliegirlarmy.com and Positive Impact Magazine.

She has put in countless hours studying how food interacts with the body and throughout her teenage years and early twenties you could easily find her curled up on the couch with the latest health and wellness book. A health guru to her friends, Talia has always enjoyed teaching people about how to protect their health and hopes to write, lecture and cook delicious food now and into the future in order to help increasing numbers of people achieve ideal health and feel full of energy all while eating mouth-watering meals.

9/11/2012:

Part II: Miyoko Schinner
Artisan Vegan Cheese

Miyoko Schinner has been teaching, cooking, and writing about vegan foods for more than thirty years. She lives in Northern California and is known for having written The New Now and Zen Epicure and Japanese Cooking: Contemporary and Traditional, and owning a very successful vegetarian restaurant in the bay area. Miyoko is host to a new vegan cooking show, Vegan Mash Up

TRANSCRIPTION

PART I:

Caryn Hartglass: We are back. Again, I’m Caryn Hartglass. You’re listening to It’s All About Food. It’s September 11. 2012. And thank you for joining me today. Read more »

Episode #106, Tuna, Sea Shepherd, Kaparos, Organic Foods, Soda, Rouge Tomate

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Tuna is not a vegetable!

I discuss the article AQUA 2012: Soybean Oil is a Good Alternative to Fish Oil in Tuna Diets.

While focusing on the ocean, I bring up the brave work of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, and encourage listeners to find out more about them on their website.

With the Jewish holidays coming up, I explain the ritual of kaporos or kapparot, and encourage people in the NYC area to go to one of the Alliance To End Chickens As Kaporos protests.

Lots of people are talking about the recent study Are Organic Foods Safer or Healthier Than Conventional Alternatives? and I added my thoughts to the conversation. Mother Jones offers an excellent retort 5 Ways the Stanford Study Sells Organics Short.

Seems like I can’t do a show lately without mentioning something about Soda and Sugary Beverages in the news and this week is no exception.

Happily more non-veg restaurants are serving up innovative, delicious vegan courses and the offerings at Rouge Tomate in NYC are spectacular!

Last but not least, I review the REAL recipes posted to the website this week, Kasha and Onions, and Leek and Lentil Soup, and briefly discuss one ingredient, Kelp Powder.

Interviews with Del Sroufe and Sebastiano Cossia Castiglioni

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Episode #165

9/4/2012:

Part I: Del Sroufe
Forks Over Knives Cookbook

Plant-based chefs are no longer a novelty – there are lots of people who have learned to make fabulous vegan dishes – and many are so good that most people don’t notice that the food is prepared differently. The problem is that many of the dishes produced by these chefs, while made with plant foods, are unhealthy because of the fat content. Del Sroufe is the best chef in the U.S. at creating dishes that are not only plant-based, but low-fat and oil-free; most are compliant with programs like the McDougall Program, Dr. Esselstyn’s program and many of the other plant-based gurus who are achieving incredible results with their patients. Del has mastered the art of captivating the new convert to a plant-based diet with mouth-watering dishes that seem like they are just too good to be healthy. But they are! Additionally, he has developed a diverse repertoire of hundreds of recipes that guarantee that no one will ever get bored with or tired of the food. Let’s face it – humans spend a lot of time eating, and eating should be enjoyed. Converting to a program of dietary excellence with Del’s help means that you are not giving up anything – in fact you’re going to have a culinary experience better than you ever imagined!

9/4/2012:

Part II: Sebastiano Cossia Castiglioni
Sustainable Biodynamic Farming

Born in Milan, Italy in 1966, Sebastiano has been a vegetarian and an animal rights activist for nearly thirty years. He is the owner and chairman of one of the most renowned and pioneering wineries in Europe, Querciabella, where organic viticulture implemented in 1988 led to a complete conversion to strict biodynamic practices in 2000. His Tuscan wines have garnered worldwide acclaim, including “Best Italian Wine” in 2004. Sebastiano is an industrial designer and the creator of a multinational business network encompassing fields as varied as agriculture, financial advisory, advanced technology, and real estate. He currently lives with his family in Northern Europe.

TRANSCRIPTION PART I:

Caryn Hartglass: Hello everybody, I’m Caryn Hartglass, and it’s time for It’s All About Food. It’s September 4th, it’s a Tuesday in this year of 2012, and we’ve moved, and it was easy, no sweat or anything! We just changed days, so instead of Wednesdays from 3 to 4, we are now every Tuesday from 4 to 5. Read more »

Episode #105: Egg yolks, Food Safety, Semantics, Cheese, GF Yeast Bread

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In this show I discuss the new article Egg Yolk Consumption and Carotid Plaque in the Atheriosclerosis Journal, the
Center for Food Safety Lawsuit Targeting FDA along with the
infectious disease outbreaks being reported by the Center For Disease Control and Prevention. Inspired by a listener’s comments I talk a bit about semantics. Based on another listener’s question on whether or nut our sunflower seed cheese tastes like cheese, I talk cheese and its various flavors. Finally, I give a brief description of the art of baking gluten-free yeast bread with a new Braided Bread recipe.

Interviews with Brian Clement, Zel Allen and Greg Singer

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Episode #164

8/29/2012:

Part I: Brian Clemente
Food is Medicine

Dr. Brian Clement, Ph.D., N.M.D. is director of the Hippocrates Health Institute, the world’s first and fore-most residential complementary health care facility. The institute was founded in Boston a half a century ago and relocated to West Palm Beach, Florida in 1986. As director, Clement pioneered the integration of cutting edge, non-invasive medical technology with traditional medicine and pure lifestyle modalities. Gathering a team of health professionals from every aspect of the comprehensive field has helped the thousands of individuals seeking healing. While all kinds of individuals attend the life change program, Clement and the institute are best known for the work they have accomplished for people with catastrophic illness.

Monitoring the program’s participants through medical blood profiles and dark-field microscopic analysis has created a watershed of data and research material that has been pursued for studies by Colombia University. This information is now being considered by the National Institute of Health. Clement was a founding member of the Coalition for Holistic Health, a gathering of natural health care organizations, some twenty-five years ago. This group was formed to resist the frontal attack of the pharmaceutical industries and U.S. government on traditional therapies. He has taught in thirty countries, worked with the Swedish, Indian, and Egyptian governments on their healthcare systems, consulted the Ministers of Health in Ireland and is internationally known figure in the establishment of health policies.Under Dr. Clement’s directorship, Hippocrates Health Institute received the status of number one medical spa in the world at the turn of the twenty-first century. He spends much of his time researching, writing and addressing groups globally.

Brian Clement is the father of four children and happily married to Dr. Anna Maria Gahns Clement with whom he shares responsibility for overseeing the institute’s ongoing operations.

8/29/2012:

Part II Zel Allen
Vegan For The Holidays

With a focus on healthy eating, compassion for animals, and environmental consciousness, her vegan journey led Zel Allen to partner with her husband, Reuben, to publish Vegetarians in Paradise. Their online publication is read by more than 125,000 visitors monthly www.vegparadise.com. In addition to her articles, the e-zine spotlights her humorous illustrations and her innovative recipes. Zel’s interest in the powerful health aspects of nuts resulted in her one-of-a-kind cookbook, The Nut Gourmet, which features 150 innovative, totally nutty recipes.

Presently, Zel spreads the message of a healthy vegan lifestyle by teaching vegetarian cooking classes at libraries, churches, and at Glendale Community College in Southern California. She lives in Granada Hills with her husband and her cat Fuzzy, once a homeless kitten. You can also see their website at VegParadise.com

8/29/2012:

Part III Greg Singer
Vegtoons

Vegtoons producer, Greg Singer, has worked in the production management, story development and executive offices of DreamWorks Feature Animation, Fox Feature Animation and Cartoon Network. Mr. Singer also has worked with UNICEF’s Cartoons for Children’s Rights campaign, NASA’s space life sciences division, and the U.S. Peace Corps, assisting Kenya’s Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources. Click on the links for more on Vegtoons and the Vegtoons Kickstarter

TRANSCRIPTIONS:

PART I:

Caryn Hartglass: Hello everybody! I’m Caryn Hartglass you’re listening to It’s All About Food! I hope you’re having a great day today! It’s August 29, 2012, and it’s time to talk about food. Hippocrates said, “Our food should be our medicine and our medicine should be our food. The natural healing force within each one of us is the greatest force in getting well.” Read more »

Episode #104: Going Bananas

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What you may want to know about bananas – non vegan chemical coating, chitosan, to prolong shelf life; how cultivation may lead to extinction; potassium and more. I share my thoughts on the wild Macaque in Florida, Pierre Boule’s Planet of the Apes and Dieticians in Supermarkets. The Ask A Vegan recipe of the week is Ginger Beans and Greens with Tomato and Mango.

Interviews with John Schlimm and Jenny Brown 8/22/2012

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Episode #163

8/22/2012:

Part I John Schlimm
Grilling Vegan Style

John Schlimm, a member of one of the oldest brewing families in the United States, is the international award-winning author of several books, including The Tipsy Vegan and The Ultimate Beer Lover’s Cookbook. He holds a master’s degree from Harvard and lives in Pennsylvania.

LISTEN to our first interview with John Schlimm on 12/7/2011 talking about THE TIPSY VEGAN.

8/22/2012:

Part II Jenny Brown
Lucky Ones

Jenny Brown is the cofounder and director of the Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary—a not-for-profit organization and farm animal shelter—a vegan animal rights activist, and previously worked as a television producer until 2002.

LISTEN to our first interview with Jenny Brown on 10/27/2012 talking about The Woodstock Animal Sanctuary.

TRANSCRIPTION PART I:

Caryn Hartglass: Hello, it’s time for It’s All About Food. It’s all about food because it is all about food, everything, I think anyway. Health, environment, animals, everything on Earth is connected to the food we make and the food we eat, and I like talking about food. I’m Caryn Hartglass and I am the founder of a non-profit called Responsible Eating and Living because I think food should be not only delicious and fun and beautiful and good for you, but I think it should be good for all life on Earth. And, I believe we can have our cake and eat it too. We can have great, delicious food, feed the entire world healthfully, and not do very much damage as a result or any at all. Unfortunately, today, there’s a lot of crazy things going on with our food production, and it’s effecting our environment in terrible ways. But, there’s a lot of things that we can do everyday, three meals a day (if we have three meals a day) with every bite. And it can be really, really fun. So today we are going to talk about how fun it can be. Especially with barbecues and summertime. Today it’s August 22, 2012 and there is still plenty of summertime left for those of you on the part of the planet where it is summer in August. I know here in New York it is very much summer, and it’s a beautiful day today. But, there is plenty of time left for enjoying outdoor barbecues and all kinds of fun eating and partying, and you can do it with food that’s kind to you and kind to the planet.

So, we are going to bring on John Schlimm. He’s been on It’s All About Food before. He’s a member of one of the oldest brewing families in the United States. He’s an international award-winning author of several books including The Tipsy Vegan and The Ultimate Beer Lover’s Cookbook. He holds a masters degree from Harvard, and lives in Pennsylvania. And, we are going to be talking about Grilling Vegan Style. Welcome to It’s All About Food, John.

John Schlimm: Hey Caryn. It is so exciting to be with you and your listeners again. How lucky am I to get to do this again with you?

Caryn Hartglass: Well I am all fired up to talk about your 125 fired up recipes.

John Schlimm: Me too. It’s going to be so fun getting to add a little civil to summer here with you.

Caryn Hartglass: Yeah, I’ve looked at your book and played with a few recipes. This is a winner. This is a good one. What I love about it is most of the ingredients are so simple. It’s just a lot of beautiful, fresh, summer-grade food.

John Schlimm: Well, with The Tipsy Vegan and now with Grilling Vegan Style, it was important to me to first create books that I call “parties in a book,” and parties that everyone is invited to. But I was also determined to make these two books what I call “small town friendly.” Because I live back in my small hometown, and I want my friends and neighbor, here, to be able to go to our supermarkets, and our farmer’s markets and find all the ingredients.

Caryn Hartglass: I like it. There are lots of products out there, fortunately, in the market today for vegans. But in this book, you don’t even have to get those special products. You can make your own vegan sour cream, you can make your own vegan mayonnaise, and also Worcester sauce. You have a great recipe for that too.

John Schlimm: Yeah, I think it’s so important for me to blast through these silly myths that vegan eating and the vegan lifestyle is mysterious and how blah eating food is and how these are specialty ingredients you can only get in health food stores on Mars. Maybe that’s the case in some books and in some places. That will never be the case in my books because my books are all about fun and easy eating and cooking because I really believe that the cooking should be just as fun as the eating.

Caryn Hartglass: Okay. In your book you start out talking about all the different kinds of grills that you can buy and use in order to grill, and there’s a lot of choices out there.

John Schlimm: It can really be overwhelming, and that’s why I tried to really explain it for the beginners out there as easily as possible. To really say, “You do have a lot of choices. So this is a decision and investment both in money, of course, but also in time and future fun.” So take your time with this decision. Go around. See what’s out there. See what you specifically need. Is this something you are going to do in the back yard? Is this something you are going to want to take with you on the road? Or maybe you live in an apartment with just a little balcony. There are grills that fit that. There are grills that go on boats. So, lots of choices, talk to fellow grillers. Find out what they like or don’t like about certain types of grills, and then, you can make decision based on that. Whether you want a charcoal grill, an electric grill, a gas grill, or there are these big fancy ones out there that are hybrid grills. They combine both charcoal and gas. Those are a little pricey right now, but I think in the years to come we are going to see those come down to a range that the rest of us can afford.

Caryn Hartglass: Can I ask you what kind you use?

John Schlimm: Well I actually like either a charcoal or a gas. And I’ll tell you what. I’m currently looking for a new grill. Mine has gone caput after experimenting with all of these recipes. So, I am going out and looking. But all of my friends, I go to their houses, they have a variety, whether its charcoal or gas, electric. My mom has a little Foreman grill that you can fit maybe two veggie burger patties on. She loves it. She plugs it in, uses it in the kitchen. She makes stuff for herself and my dad all the time. So, again, look for what you need and go out and make your choice.

Caryn Hartglass: I think it’s important to note in this book that it’s a party book, and it’s certainly great to go out and enjoy yourself at a barbecue. And there are all kinds of options in this book for that. But, you can use these recipes indoors, as well, and just for yourself.

John Schlimm: Absolutely. There is this amazing invention, and I would love to know who actually invented it. It’s the grill pan. You probably have one, and a lot of people might already. If not, run out now and get one. It is just a pan. It has all the little ridges. You use it on the stovetop. You might not get that smoky flavor, but guess what? That’s where our imagination comes into play. But especially during the winter months, if you don’t have a grill or it’s not easily accessible during the winter, grill pans are amazing. I use my grill pan all the time.

Caryn Hartglass: I’ve got a cast-iron, its rectangular, it goes on my gas oven burner top, and I turn two burners on underneath it. One side’s for pancakes, the other side’s for grilling. It costs nothing, and it’s fabulous.

John Schlimm: Yeah, it’s just absolutely brilliant. Kudos to whomever out there invented that.

Caryn Hartglass: Okay, good, so now we have our tools all taken care of. Now we’re going to jump in and make some food. As I was telling some people earlier, you should not be looking at this book when you are hungry. Very, very dangerous because everything is so good and tempting looking. So, I just want to talk about a few things that popped out. Oh, it’s just everything. I was recently at a pizza party. We were making all of these different pizzas and one of the things that we had there were these roasted or grilled peppers. And you’ve got this great Shishito Heat-Wave.

John Schlimm: Shishito peppers are really coming into their own. I’m really excited that I’m getting to introduce them to the few people out there that haven’t heard of them yet, but they are in most supermarkets now. They’re really this great marriage of jalapeño and green pepper because they’re not really hot, maybe every eighth or ninth one will be hot, but they are so good. You pop them on a grill and you get that brown, sort of blistery effect on them. Oh, yum.

Caryn Hartglass: Yeah, they are really simple. This recipe that you have just uses a little bit of oil and salt and pepper. There’s really nothing to it. And yet, they’re beautiful and they’re really, really yummy.

John Schlimm: Yeah. They’re really a showstopper at a party.

Caryn Hartglass: Absolutely a showstopper. And they are just peppers. That’s the amazing thing about vegetables, and I think they are finally getting some of the attention that they deserve. I just wanted to mention before we go further that the pictures in this book by Amy Beadle Roth are really, really lovely.

John Schlimm: She is just a brilliant artist with an impeccable eye. She shot all of the photos for The Tipsy Vegan, which was the very first book she’s worked on. So it was so wonderful. It was my first vegan cookbook, and we could sort of travel down that road together. But, yes, her photos really make the food jump right off the page and make you feel like you can just reach right in and grab them. If only we could.

Caryn Hartglass: Yeah, you want to like the pages here, there’s now question about it. So what I like is you have so many different things. You’ve got popcorn that you can make on the grill. Why not?

John Schlimm: I really wanted to push the limits with this book. I couldn’t believe that there hadn’t been a vegan grilling cookbook done before. There certainly have been a few vegetarian ones done, but those leave out a chunk of us that can’t enjoy all of those dishes. I really wanted to put a book out there that was going to break some new ground and contribute something to this whole wonderful discussion we are having and move it forward. So I put recipes like the popcorn in there. Another one that’s getting a lot of buzz from people on twitter and facebook is the tattooed watermelon salad.

Caryn Hartglass: Oh, I was going to bring that up.

John Schlimm: People are like, “What? You can put watermelon on a grill?”

Caryn Hartglass: Yeah, we were just talking about that before the show started. Crazy.

John Schlimm: It’s another really, totally simple recipe. My thought process is you can put everything on a grill at least once and try it. Maybe not everything works, but we found a lot of things that do work like the watermelon, like the popcorn. Peanut butter and jelly sandwich for all of those finicky little eaters. And especially now with back-to-school, maybe not everyone’s so excited about back-to-school, but have a back-to-school party for all of your little ones and grill up some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

Caryn Hartglass: I haven’t made it, but I was just thinking about having that gooey peanut butter melting in your mouth. It just sounds so good.

John Schlimm: Yeah, another show stopper. And guess what? The adults will like it just as much as the kids. Because isn’t that one of the ultimate comfort foods, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich?

Caryn Hartglass: I’m looking at the romaine holiday. All of these (most of these) are really simple. This is just romaine leaves that you haven’t prepped really very much. It’s just a long…almost like you cut a head of it in half, and then you sprinkle it with some really great flavorings. I like this for a lot of reasons. One is sometimes when I go to a restaurant I order a salad like this because, as a vegan, that way I know, I can see all of the ingredients they have put it in that might be suspect. But I imagine for a picnic or an outdoor party this is terrific because if you don’t cut up the lettuce ahead of time it really holds its own, it stays muscly, the presentations great. People don’t think about this, but this is a good one.

John Schlimm: And I am all about easy entertaining. I love to entertain as much as the next person. I think that you realize this, because I’m sure that you entertain a lot. The host and hostess so often are stuck in the kitchen having to do all the work while everyone else is in the other room or in the backyard having all the fun. So to have dishes that are easy, especially like the romaine holiday, what a great luncheon dish if you are having people over for lunch. You can easily prepare it, and really spend time with you guests and not in the kitchen or at the grill.

Caryn Hartglass: You have a string bean and arugula salad, and you say that you can use yellow or green beans, but the yellow beans really pop in this recipe with the arugula. I was really surprised to see that. It’s gorgeous. Go yellow string beans.

John Schlimm: One of a million different things that I love about working with vegetables, and of course there’s a lot of fruit that we’ll talk about that you can grill as well. They really are works of art. No artist on the face of the planet comes close to Mother Nature when she is creating these beautiful fruits and vegetables for us to work with. The work’s already taken care of for us as far as making these plates look beautiful. We are just the middle person preparing them and putting them on the plate. That dish really is a great example of just how beautiful and, again, simple that a dish can be.

Caryn Hartglass: I don’t know why anybody would choose a beef burger, a turkey burger, a crappy frankfurter over some of these gorgeous recipes that you have in here. But, some people will. What is a cedar plank?

John Schlimm: Well it is what it says. It is a piece of cedar that has been prepared. You can certainly get it in a specialty store.

Caryn Hartglass: Like a specialty food store? Or what kind of specialty store?

John Schlimm: Well I’ve seen them in specialty food and kitchen stores. That’s one of those things that you might have to look around a little bit for. But, it’s really worth it because that comes with the cedar smoked mushroom recipe in the book. And certainly after you use it on that recipe, I’m sure you’ll find other things that you can also use that cedar plank for.

Caryn Hartglass: So it’s just a piece of cedar wood?

John Schlimm: Yes.

Caryn Hartglass: Like the kind that I would use in my closet to keep the moths out.

John Schlimm: Yes, more or less, but for a different purpose.

Caryn Hartglass: Good. I like multipurpose things. And the other really interesting ingredient, which is brilliant, in this recipe is the mushroom crust. Did you come up with that or did you see it? I’ve never seen that before.

John Schlimm: Over the course of, I think this is cookbook number nine or ten for me, I’ve really developed a great team that I work with, and every cookbook author does this, and a really good test kitchen because, naturally, these recipes need to be tested and sampled. People have the luxury of walking into the book store and, “Oh, there’s this great cookbook, I’m gonna buy it.” A lot goes into it so I really worked closely with my team, and we developed this recipe. Again, pushing the limits to give people not only simple, delicious food but a few things in there that they might not have heard of before, and the mushroom crust is certainly one of those. And, it is something you can use with other things once you try it once with this recipe, and that’s some fun.

Caryn Hartglass: Yea, well all it is is dried mushrooms that you pulse and make a coarse-ground of in a food processor. Mushrooms have so much flavor, I’m just so excited to try this.

John Schlimm: Mushrooms are so underrated among vegetables, and they are some of my favorites, and there are so many different kinds, and you can have so much fun experimenting with them. And certainly those people out there that have trained themselves to go out there to pick wild mushrooms, which you do need to be trained to some degree because there are some out there. And that is one of my goals to learn exactly how to do that. Think about using some of those delicious wild mushrooms. Or maybe find someone who does that and ask them if maybe you can have some.

Caryn Hartglass: Let’s just take a moment here and talk about the mighty mushroom. I remember people thinking that there wasn’t anything of nutritional value in a mushroom, and mushrooms are amazing. I like to call them natural chemotherapy sometimes because there are so many immune system boosting things in mushrooms and anti-cancer fighting things that people are now starting to take, concentrated mushroom supplements. Not the ones that we eat, other mushrooms, but all mushrooms are really packed with really good stuff so eat up.

John Schlimm: Absolutely. We as a society feel like we need to load down our foods, specifically vegetables, with all these different sauces and butters and seasonings. Of course some of that can be really good, but I love to just take a raw or lightly cooked vegetable and just have a mindful moment where I plop it in my mouth, I chew it, and I really concentrate on the flavor. I think if you do that with a mushroom. Corn on the cob does not need all this butter and salt and all that fat. I have two grilled corn on the cob recipes in the book that have really great sauces, but I often love just eating it as is. When you really focus on the flavors just as it is without anything on it, you’re going to be surprised. You know this, I know this, I’m sure a lot of your listeners do. You’re going to be so surprised at how flavorful all of these vegetables are.

Caryn Hartglass: Corn can vary depending on where you get it and what farm and what time of the season it’s from. I picked up some corn recently from our brand new farmers market in my neighborhood, and I thought, “Did they add sugar to the soil?” This corn was the sweetest thing I had ever tasted. It was crazy.

John Schlimm: We are at the pinnacle of our farmers market here, of course. We have a very short growing season in [Pennsylvania]. We just had corn from our farmers market on Sunday at a picnic, and I thought the same thing. I’m like, “This is like candy.” And again, all on its own. What was great is that, of course I don’t use butter anyway, but the others around the table, my cousins and aunts and even my parents, who always have to slather up their cobs, they forgot to bring the butter out. And I said, “Just try it without anything on it.” They couldn’t believe it, they couldn’t believe it. They ate it without any butter or anything else. But you’re right, corn is one of those things that you can get corn that is really, really bad. So if you get a bad cob, don’t judge corn based on one cob.

Caryn Hartglass: Yeah, but definitely eat it when it’s fresh and in season. Speaking of fresh and in season, let’s just talk a moment about tomatoes, which should only be eaten fresh and in season. Unfortunately, I talk a bit, probably too much, about tomatoes from time to time, but they grow tomatoes all year round in Florida, and they don’t have any flavor and they’re grown really horrifically. The thing is, catch them when they’re in season and ear as many as you can and then move onto something else.

John Schlimm: Absolutely, which of course this brings me, and I’m sure you, to my grilled tomato suns recipe on page 78 of the book. Super, super easy. Cut the tomato into halves crosswise, scoop out the seeds and some of the pulp. And then, with just a little salt, a little pepper, a little olive oil put it cut-side down on the grill for a few minutes and you have an amazing, amazing, simple dish. A side dish, a luncheon dish, whatever you want. Yes, the tomatoes right now are really in season, and we are just enjoying them by the mouthful from the farmers market and from all different relatives, whose gardens are overflowing with them. And if people don’t understand the difference in taste, I challenge them to have one in season and then, in January, find one, and you’re going to notice the difference big time.

Caryn Hartglass: I used to live in the south of France, and this was a dish that you found in many restaurants, and I would make it at home a lot, but it’s just so simple and amazing. Grilled tomatoes.

John Schlimm: And talk about health benefits of tomatoes. Oh my goodness, we just keep learning about those, don’t we? Amazing.

Caryn Hartglass: Okay, we just have a few minutes left so let’s go to the sweeter side. I think most people don’t realize that they can grill fruit and how spectacular it is.

John Schlimm: It really is. We talked about the watermelon, which is fantastic. But strawberries and peaches, there’s a party on south peach salsa. It’s just so yummy. Just peaches grilled on their own and combined with a great sauce. Even different berries, other than strawberries, you can grill. Coconut, the grilled coconut recipe. Pineapple rings. It just goes on and on. Again, if you find some fruit that is strange and mysterious to you, pick it up and toss it on the grill. Put a little oil and just throw it on the grill and go with it. I think a lot of this is about experimenting and having fun. Especially with grilling, every grill is different so you have to stick close by, but you can have so much fun transforming dishes. I like to think with Grilling Vegan Style and the vegetable and fruit dishes in there, it’s just a starting point.

Caryn Hartglass: Have you heard of this? I heard that the first bite of anything you eat is the one that’s most flavorful, and then, as you continue to eat it, you don’t get all of the flavor of that first impression. I’ve read it many times, and I don’t believe it because when I’m eating delicious fruits and vegetables, every mouthful is spectacular. I’m wondering is it just because I have a clean palate, and maybe this is only true of the people that are eating all the wrong things, that the first bite is only interesting. But, every bite of a good, grilled vegetable or any of these things is spectacular.

John Schlimm: I have to say and admit that I am a great observer of the way people eat, which I can say because not everyone at a dinner party with me is going to be very self-conscious. Now, if you’ve ever noticed most people, it’s no wonder the first bite is the only bite they taste because five minutes later they’re done. I don’t think they even chew anymore, they just gulp it and swallow it whole. I’m always the last one done. I always chew, chew, chew my food, which really is the healthy way to do it because our stomachs don’t have teeth. So I think you and I are, and I’m sure a lot of your listeners are very mindful eaters and really appreciative of what their eating and the flavor and where it came from. Eating, to me, is almost an exercise in meditation sometimes. I think people need to slow down and make every bite count and really be grateful for that bite of the delicious food that they’re having. The flavor will then follow.

Caryn Hartglass: John, thanks for joining me on It’s All About Food. I really love what you’ve done with fruits and vegetables. Spectacular. Grilling Vegan Style, these recipes really are fired up and worth celebrating.

John Schlimm: Thank you so much. I can’t wait to do it again with you.

Caryn Hartglass: Okay, thank you. I’m going to take a break now, and we’ll be right back with Jenny Brown from the Woodstock Animal Sanctuary. She’s got a really beautiful story to tell in her book, The Lucky Ones. We’ll be right back.

Transcribed by Steven Lee-Kramer, 2/13/2013

TRANSCRIPTION PART II:

Hello I’m Caryn Hartglass you’re listening to It’s All About Food. I talk all the time about food, about how plant foods can be delicious and literally save your health, save your life. I talk about the environment and about how factory farming of animals is so devastating. Read more »

Episode #103: Food System Regulation, Weight Status, Blood Tests

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Today’s show began with a discussion about regulation. Does our food system need more or less or? I review the “surprising” results of the new Pediatrics report “Weight Status Among Adolescents in States That Govern Competitive Food Nutrition Content”, published online August 13, 2012. Also I present some information on blood tests and things New Yorkers should know about blood drawn in the state. I offer this week’s recipe postings for Red Cabbage Ginger Stir Fry and Ginger Kale with Scallions

Episode #102: Yes to Labeling!

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Prop. 37 is coming up for a vote in California and I talked about the importance of voting “Yes” and who is willing to put in lots of cash to get you to vote “No.” After prerecording an IT’S ALL ABOUT FOOD interview with Jenny Brown I spoke a bit about her new book LUCKY ONES. I invited listeners to view our latest video on the Take Back Your Health Conference we sponsored in April 2012. I talked about who is behind the “New Yorkers for Beverage Choices” campaign and why we want to support Mayor Bloomberg’s ban on large soda sizes. And I discussed the importance of buying things made in the United States and congratulated myself on fixing my water distiller. After visiting the 911 memorial I shared what it meant for me. Coming to an end of National Farmers Market Week, I reviewed the latest recipes added to the website, made with mostly Farmers Market ingredients: Spicy Black Bean Soup, A Mid Summer Night’s Salad, Farmers Market Pasta Salad with Arugula Pesto.

Interview with Julie Guthman 8/15/2012

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Episode #162

8/15/2012:

Julie Guthman
Weighing In, Obesity, Food Justice and the Limits of Capitalism

Julie Guthman (Ph.D., Geography, University of California, Berkeley) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Community Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She has written extensively on contemporary activist efforts to transform the way food is produced, distributed, and consumed. Her book, Agrarian Dreams: the Paradox of
Organic Farming in California (University of California, 2004), won the 2007 Frederick H. Buttel Award for Outstanding Scholarly Achievement from the Rural Sociological Society.

TRANSCRIPTION:

Caryn Hartglass: Hello, I’m Caryn Hartglass and you’re listening to It’s All About Food. And it’s the 15^th of August 2012. Thanks for joining me today. We’re going to have a lot to digest today so I hope you’re ready to do some serious chewing.

We talk about food on this show and all things related to food, health, the environment, and animals. And I’m always learning something, which is one of the things that I enjoy most about doing this program. I learned an awful lot from the last book that I just read and I’m going to be talking about that today and bring on the author of this book, Julie Guthman. Read more »

Interviews with Nava Atlas and Alan Goldhamer 8/8/2012

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Episode #161

8/8/2012:

Part I Nava Atlas
Wild About Greens

Nava Atlas is the author and illustrator of many books on vegetarian cooking, most recently Vegan Express, Vegan Soups and Hearty Stews for All Seasons, The Vegetarian Family Cookbook, and The Vegetarian 5-Ingredient Gourmet. The Vegan Holiday Kitchen will be published in the fall of 2011, and a book on leafy greens will be on the shelves in the spring of 2012.

In addition to cookbooks, Nava also produces visual books on family themes, humor, and women’s issues, including The Literary Ladies’ Guide to the Writing Life (2011), exploring first-person narratives on the writing lives of twelve classic women authors, and commenting on the universal relevance of their experiences to all women who love to write. Secret Recipes for the Modern Wife (2009) is a satiric look at contemporary marriage and motherhood through the lens of a faux 1950s cookbook.

8/8/2012:

Part II Alan Goldhamer
Bravo! Health Promoting Meals

A New Dietary Paradigm for Transforming Health! Book Publishing Company is delighted to release a dynamic new cookbook that offers a revolutionary and holistic approach to healthful eating. Most of us would balk at the idea of a SOS-free diet—one completely void of salt, oil, and sugar. And trying to prepare meals without these basic ingredients would be daunting. With BRAVO! Health-Promoting Meals from the TrueNorth Kitchen, executive chef Ramses Bravo has successfully mastered the art and science of healthful cuisine and delivers palate-pleasing food that also serves as the optimal diet for health. Read more »

Episode #101: The BIG Picture

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In this program I reflect on a number of issues in the news regarding Chick-fil-A, Hazing in the military and Animal Testing. I point out the importance of stepping back and seeing the BIG picture, connecting eating animals, violence and exploitation with the major problems we face today. On the lighter side, I give some tasty tips for Kale Salad and Gluten-Free baking. Listen below.

Vegan Burger on a REAL Gluten-Free Bun

Interview with Susan Prolman 8/1/2012

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Episode #160

8/1/2012:

Susan Prolman
Sustainable Agriculture

Susan Prolman, Executive Director of the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, guides the organizational development and implementation of NSAC’s strategic vision. She is a graduate of Georgetown University Law Center and a member of the DC Bar. She has advocated for a more sustainable approach to agriculture for a decade.

TRANSCRIPTION:

Caryn Hartglass: Hello, I’m Caryn Hartglass and you’re listening to It’s All About Food. Thank you for joining me. It’s August 1^st 2012. August 1^st. Here we are, in the middle of summer, feeling it in different ways depending on where you are: maybe it’s too hot, maybe it’s too cold, maybe it’s too dry, maybe it’s too wet. I don’t know, is it ever just right?

Well, here on this show we talk about food. I like to say each food has its own story. One of the foods that’s in front of me right now, with all kinds of story, is corn. We’re seeing corn connected to so many different things, not just feeding us and whether it’s healthy or not to eat particular kinds of corn, but it’s associated with drought and energy and relations with other countries. It’s connected to so many different things. And I know that so many of use are overwhelmed with our own lives and all these different things that are going on in that it’s really hard to think past today but we need to. We all need to take part, to take responsibility in what goes on all around us, not just for today and for today and the next month but for years and decades ahead, to make sure things are sustainable. The key word: sustainable. We’re going to be talking a lot about sustainable agriculture today and that Farm Bill thing that’s running around in our government that’s kind of overwhelming and confusing. And perhaps we’ll going to bring a little clarity today.

And I’m going to bring on my guest, Susan Prolman, who is the executive director of the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition and she guides the Organizational Development and Implementation of their Strategic Division. She’s a graduate of Georgetown University Law Center and a member of the D. C. Bar. She has advocated for a more sustainable approach to agriculture for a decade.

Welcome to it’s All About Food, Susan!

Susan Prolman: Thank you very much, Caryn! I’m so happy to be here.

Caryn Hartglass: Thank you and thank you for joining me with not very much notice.

Susan Prolman: Oh sure, it’s not a problem. I appreciate it.

Caryn Hartglass: But I have been so wanting to talk more about sustainable agriculture and the Farm Bill on this show so I’m glad we’re finally going to do that. Can you tell me a little bit about National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition? I love when people work together. That word coalition, I love.

Susan Prolman: Yeah. And we are a true coalition. So we have a staff of 10 people here on Capitol Hill. We’re right across from the Capitol Building. We go and we speak with members of Congress and also with people from the agencies, including leaders at the USDA. But we’re also a coalition of over 90 member- organizations form around the country. These are organizations that work with and represent farmers from around the country. They get out to the grassroots and they tell them what’s going on in Washington in terms of federal agricultural policy. And they get people to weigh in with their members of Congress and with other opinion leaders and decision-makers at pivotal times. So we are a coalition; we do form our policies in a democratic way based on the feedback we get from farmers and consumers about what’s working for them on the ground.

Caryn Hartglass: Okay that sounds really good. I think part of the problem, sometimes, with our government is most of us are so busy that we just like to leave it to them and they’re not doing a very good job, certainly not with our food.

Susan Prolman: And one thing I would say is that every taxpayer is contributing to the Farm Bill. The Farm Bill is this large legislative vehicle. It’s what sets most agricultural policies in this country and the current Farm Bill that Congress is now debating costs $1 trillion over the course of 10 years. It’s your money so you have a lot at stake and you have a right to be heard.

Caryn Hartglass: Yeah, and when we’re paying … I wish when I was filing my federal income tax return every year that there was a box, a bunch of boxes, of how I could select where my taxes would go but unfortunately, that doesn’t happen because there’s a lot of things I wouldn’t be supporting with my taxes.

Susan Prolman: And the way you do that … I mean, the mechanism that our Founding Fathers gave us is you get to vote members of Congress. You are their constituent and you get to let them know how you feel about the job that they are doing and how they should vote on questions that are arising in Congress.

Caryn Hartglass: We’re going to talk more about that but let’s get into some of the nitty gritty possible about the Farm Bill. So my understanding is … maybe we can talk a little bit about the history. In its inception it really was doing wonderful things and over time and re-scripting of the bill, it’s kind of gotten a little out of control.

Susan Prolman: Yeah. So the Farm Bill, just to give an overview, this is the big piece of legislation that sets agricultural policy for the federal government. It comes up about once every 4 to 7 years, something like that, and it spends a lot of money. Now, the number one place it spends money currently is in nutrition programs. But it also spends money for programs like direct payments and crop insurance, which subsidize a small handful of real crops and these are things like corn, soy, cotton, rice, wheat, things like that. And then there are other programs like energy programs and world development programs and research programs. So all of these are encompassed within the Farm Bill.

Caryn Hartglass: The thing is, people will say, “But why do I care? Why should I care?” There are a lot of reasons why we should care.

Susan Prolman: There are a lot of reasons why people should care. First of all, some of the smaller programs in terms of dollar amounts do a lot of great work on the ground. So there’s a program in the current Farm Bill called The Farmer’s Market Promotion Program; this helps to get farmer’s markets into communities. And it also helps for low-income Americans who are receiving SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Benefits, which were formerly called Food Stamps; it helps them to use those at farmer’s markets. So there’s a lot of great things that the Farm Bill does. The Senate version of the new Farm Bill, it’s still working its way through Congress, but the Senate version contains a provision that would give you double benefits if you are a SNAP recipient at farmer’s markets. In other words, encouraging people to eat healthy locally produced fruits and vegetables.

Caryn Hartglass: Oh, I like that.

Susan Prolman: So it’s a hodge podge of some things that make people deeply concerned and other things that a lot of people greatly support.

Caryn Hartglass: You mentioned, just briefly, crop insurance. And I understand that there are some movements from subsidies to crop insurance. Can you explain a little about crop insurance and why some people are going in that direction?

Susan Prolman: Sure. There are different titles of the Farm Bill. One title is the Commodity Title; that’s where direct payments are housed. Another title is Insurance. And we believe, in fact, in having a safety net for farmers. Farming is a risky business; there’s weather, there’s price fluctuations, there are reasons to have some sense of certainty in terms of farming. Traditionally, in past Farm Bills, the Commodity Title with its direct payments has been a much larger title in terms of money going out the door than the Insurance title. However, that’s changed: now Insurance is significantly bigger than the Commodity title. There’s been a drumbeat by some of the top opinion leaders around the country that the direct payments are not a good system and they should go. And Congress is hearing that message to a certain degree. But the concern is, are they just shifting that same amount of money from direct payments into insurance payments? The way that the insurance works in the Farm Bill is the USDA has a handful of, maybe 13, private insurance companies. Taxpayers subsidize part of the premiums that the farmers pay for for insurance and they also subsidize the private insurance companies for some of their administrative costs of running the Insurance program. What we at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition say in regard to these types of payments is they should be fair and they should reward good action. We want them to have reasonable limits so that some of the wealthiest farmers don’t get obscenely huge payments at the taxpayers’ expense. We want them to be coupled with basic conservation requirements so that we’re not inadvertently giving people incentive to break out new land or to farm on sensitive and marginal land that harms the environment and cost the taxpayers a lot of money.

Caryn Hartglass: Obviously, you’re recommending these things because it’s a good policy but also because there is a bit of abuse that goes on with the Farm Bill. There have been larger, high revenue farms that are … the mega-businesses that aren’t these cozy, individual farmers we have in our mind, image, where they take advantage of the Farm Bill; they find the loopholes and find ways to get … I want to call them subsidies but sometimes it’s insurance and the pet farms out there getting it.

Susan Prolman: Well, insurance is a subsidy. And you’re exactly right. First of all, the system is designed to allow what some people would consider abuse to start with. And then there are loopholes that we say that are big enough to drive a tractor through. So you’re right on; you’re right there.

Caryn Hartglass: Yeah. So it needs to be fair.

Susan Prolman: Yes.

Caryn Hartglass: So the question is, there are coalitions like yours that are making recommendations and you go across the street and you talk to people, what are their responses?

Susan Prolman: Well, we were very pleased in the Senate that we were able to get a lot of helpful reforms. So the process starts with the Senate Agriculture Committee, where we were able to get some good some language in there. Then it went to the Senate floor and there were some good amendments passed and also some bad amendments fended off. Let me make a point that the current Farm Bill … so the Farm Bill is a nickname; it’s not the true name of the piece of legislation. The current law is called the Food Conservation and Energy Act of 2008. The Senate’s current bill for the new Farm Bill is called the Agriculture Reform, Food, and Jobs Act of 2012. The House Agricultural Committee’s bill is called the Federal Agriculture Reform and Risk Management Act of 2012. The point I’m making there is that both of them say “reform” in their title. The question is, how much reform is there? We were able to get some good reform through the Senate, less so on the House side, so far.

Caryn Hartglass: That’s not surprising. Okay. So what have been some of those reforms on the Senate side? And ultimately, everybody’s got to agree in order for them to happen.

Susan Prolman: Yes. Right. Ultimately, everybody has to agree and it’s hard. Again, the basic reforms that we want to see are payment limitations so that some of the wealthiest farmers don’t get unlimited payments under the various subsidy programs, and linking, receiving subsidies to taking some basic care of the environment and not doing harm to wetlands, native grasslands, etc. and a variety of other reforms that we have. Those are what we’re hoping to achieve at the end of the day.

Caryn Hartglass: Now, I was reading about the history of these farm bills that have had different titles over the years for different reasons. And originally it was, I guess, after World War II … oh no, it started before, like in the ‘30s, I think.

Susan Prolman: Yeah. So Farm Bills were initially a reaction to the Great Dustbowl, during the Great Depression.

Caryn Hartglass: And so it was helping with all of the problems associated with the Dustbowl and then trying to prevent things like that from happening in the future. And then here we are, not quite 100 years later, but a lot of things have changed: our technology has changed; our type of farming has changed. And to get the laws to support our needs and come up to the current time is what’s really difficult.

Susan Prolman: Yeah. And also, if I might jump in and add, that for a good chunk of time there was a philosophy in federal agricultural policy: get big or get out. And policies were written around that and, to a great degree, are still written to benefit some of the largest producers at the expense of small and medium-sized producers. We believe that there’s a role for producers of all sizes but we don’t support a system that squeezes out small and middle-sized producers; they should be able to thrive and contribute healthy foods to their communities. And the best part of where we see a lot of room for improvement in agricultural policy.

Caryn Hartglass: Well, we’re seeing the negative effects of not having small farms. Our economy is a mess and many small farmers have been pushed out of their business because it wasn’t economically feasible for them to produce a small amount of whatever that was they were growing. As a result, these mega farms are using less people and finding ways to minimize their expenses so they can sell food very cheaply but it’s had a very expensive cost to employment, to jobs, and what’s really important to me is, the quality of the food isn’t even as good.

Susan Prolman: Yeah. And I would say that some of the economic efficiencies are truly illusions, that some of the ways that the largest farms support themselves are through subsidies from government and that could be federal, state, or local government. Plus, through being able to externalize some of their costs on to others by not being strictly enough regulated and that could be anything from pollution costs of water, air, and all kinds of pollution. But it also can be unfair business practices that harm others. And so in the House Agriculture Committee’s Farm Bill, there was a really bad amendment that was added during the mark up, it’s a term of art that makes it less competitive. So the USDA has been trying to implement some regulations to improve competition so that segments aren’t dominated by some the largest producers. And so in the case of poultry, the poultry industry of vertical integrators that have unfair advantage over producers that fall under them in those sectors of the market. People have been trying to fix this problem but you have some in Congress, including the House Agriculture Committee, that are trying to go the opposite direction.

Caryn Hartglass: Well, the whole story behind animal agriculture is a nightmare, from my point of view; I’m a vegan and I promote a plant-based diet and encourage people toe at more plants as much as possible. But certainly there’s been a lot of problems with factory farming, with CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations) and so much abuse, so much pollution, and so much unfairness and yet they have a tremendous amount of power. I understand the whole vertical integrated thing is crazy, how we allowed it to happen, where small farmers can’t get their animals slaughtered or they can’t get their animals distributed and these bigger operations that treat the animals so much more horrifically and do so much more polluting get all the benefits.

Susan Prolman: Yeah. That’s part of what I’m talking about. We have to have a system that allows small and middle-sized producers to be able to thrive and survive. And a system that, for example, if you have all of the federal-inspected slaughterhouses owned and operated by large integrators that don’t allow some of the small and mid-sized producers to add their animals into those slaughterhouses then they’re going to push themselves out of business. So Congress and the USDA have been doing some things to try to address those problems but again, we take some steps forward and we take some steps back there.

Caryn Hartglass: I was talking earlier about corn. Corn is connected to so many crazy things these days; it’s just unbelievable. So I remember reading a few months ago that the farmers planted a record number of acres of corn and everybody was jubilant. Then later on that day I read about the droughts that were coming and all the acreage that were lost. And it’s all connected: overplanting, and corn that’s being used, not only a very small amount to feed people. Hello! Most of it, either to feed animals, to feed people, and some of it goes into energy.

Susan Prolman: Yeah, that’s right. The two biggest uses of corn … and again, corn is heavily subsidized in a lot of different ways through our Farm Bill. And the number one way it’s used is ethanol production so there are a lot of federal government promotions of ethanol and therefore, of corn growing, and also for the use of animal feed. They’re used in animal feed. And it’s an open question that people are asking is should we keep pushing ethanol production so hard if we have a corn shortage or the prices of corn are rising so high that it makes it unaffordable for many? But I can go back to your original point that when people hear about things like corn and soy, their mind goes to the corn on a cob that they bought at the farmer’s market or the tofu burger that they’re eating, something to that effect, or tofu, but a lot of this isn’t going to human food directly.

Caryn Hartglass: Yeah. Human food is a drop in the bucket.

Susan Prolman: And by the way, one of the interesting facts about the Farm Bill is that things like fruits and vegetables are called specialty products.

Caryn Hartglass: Don’t you love that?

Susan Prolman: Yeah.

Caryn Hartglass: They’re special to me but …

Susan Prolman: The things that I eat, the food, those types of things are some of the specialty items in the minds of the people who craft the policy.

Caryn Hartglass: Yeah, we need to change the way we think about food, that’s for sure; at least get our government to change. So the thing about ethanol is really interesting because I know that a lot of Congress people are waving this flag about how great it is because we need to become energy independent and yet I’ve read some crazy numbers that it takes 2/3 fuel, either coal or other non-sustainable sources, to make energy from corn. So it’s not very efficient; it uses a lot of other energy. And it’s not as green as we think it is and of course, it competes with our food supply.

Susan Prolman: Yeah. So there are definitely energy input costs that go into the production of corn. So if you have vast acreage in mono cropping row crops, fence row to fence row, as they say, and they’re having fossil fuel-based fertilizers and a lot of energy-intensive farming techniques. The question arises and people have done analysis these days is how efficient is this of a way of producing energy?

Caryn Hartglass: But that information really isn’t getting out there. A lot of people think this corn for ethanol is a good thing.

Susan Prolman: Yeah. That’s an interesting point about the public messaging around that.

Caryn Hartglass: The public and Congress so …

Susan Prolman: But in Congress, if you look at the motivation of the folks, if you come from a corn belt state you want to bring home the bacon for your state so the more federal support you can get for corn production, the better, if you are from a district of state that is a big producer of corn.

Caryn Hartglass: But I think, maybe, some of that wealth isn’t really from the sale of corn; it’s from the government subsidies related to the corn because the more we grow, it’s that supply and demand thing, the cost goes way down and we don’t sell the product for very much.

Susan Prolman: It depends on demand so in the case of corn, demand’s been very high because of the ethanol requirement so it really varies. But I take your point. The bigger question, if you sort of step back from specific crops and ask the bigger question is, what do we want our federal agriculture policy to deliver to the American people and how do we craft policies that do that? One of the things that you don’t see much of in the Farm Bill consideration is we have an obesity epidemic in our nation.

Caryn Hartglass: Yeah, healthy, affordable, sustainable food.

Susan Prolman: Yeah. And how do we deliver the kinds of foods that people should be eating, to them, in an affordable way? Those are really good questions to be asking.

Caryn Hartglass: Well, those specialty products have to become a lot more special.

Susan Prolman: We’re a lot less special. Some of the things that the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition supports are farm-to-school programs, where we connect farmers with children in schools. This serves a lot of purposes: one is just to get them fresh locally produced healthy fruits and vegetables and other kinds of foods, but also to have them engage in school gardens and to get out to farms, meet farmers, and learn where their food comes from, to establish lifelong healthy eating habits.

Caryn Hartglass: Okay. So someone in their neighborhood wanting to get a farm-to-school program going, do you know how one would do that or where they might go to get more information?

Susan Prolman: Well, if I were in such a situation I would go to my child’s school and talk with their administrators and say, “We’d like a farm-to-school program.” There is some federal funding and there is an open-grant cycle and it will become open again for those proposing farm-to-school programs to get funding to get them off the ground. But there may also be state and local money available for that. I have to say it’s a very popular project and it’s really spreading around the country and I think people should have them in their communities.

Caryn Hartglass: Absolutely. Well, it comes back down to each one of us being responsible for our lives and our communities and we have to move our butts a little bit to make it happen.

Susan Prolman: Yeah. What do we care about more than the food that we, as a society, eat, that we personally eat, that we feed our families, and that people around us are eating, and the impact of that has on the health of everybody?

Caryn Hartglass: I would like to think that our elected officials want the same thing that we want. Doesn’t everyone want healthy food that’s affordable? That’s kind of what confuses me. And then I think, what is it that’s confusing our elected officials? Are they hearing or they’re being lobbied by big ags so much that they get confused?

Susan Prolman: I think it’s that if you look at the realities of the situation, if you want to get a bill passed so for example, the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition very much would like to see the new Farm Bill passed this year, in 2012. What does it take to get that passed? And people, again, have interest in their state or district, whatever type of growers it is that they have to try protect their concerns. You have to figure out how do you get the votes to pass what you need to pass? I’ll give you an example of that: again, the number one biggest expenditure of the Farm Bill is nutrition benefits and that includes the SNAP benefits, formally known as Food Stamps. Well, the House is approached but we’re in, as I’m sure you know, a big deficit- cutting atmosphere up here on Capitol Hill. So the House that’s approached wants to cut a lot of money out of the nutrition benefits and SNAP benefits. They don’t know right now; they haven’t scheduled a time to bring the House Agriculture Committee’s bill to the floor because they don’t know if they can pass it and part of the reason for that is cutting so much money out of that nutrition program is controversial and a lot of people might vote against it.

Caryn Hartglass: I was reading your most recent blog post from your website, nationalsustainalbleagriculturecoalition.net, about how the House is trying to get the current Farm Bill extended.

Susan Prolman: Yeah. What happened there, the House Agriculture Committee, which is chaired by Congressman Lucas with ranking member Congressman Peterson, passed a bill out of the Committee. And we would like to see that bill go to the House floor so it can be debated and amended in a normal process; however, the leadership of the House, including Speaker Boehner, wanted to just pass a 1-year extension and kind of circumvent the House Agriculture Committee. Fortunately, that attempt appears to have failed, which we think that was a good thing. We were arguing against that kind of extension.

Caryn Hartglass: Yeah, we would like to see some action and get some changes made.

Susan Prolman: Yes. We’d like to see some real reform. Everybody’s putting the term “reform” in their title but let’s get some real reform.

Caryn Hartglass: Yeah. Okay, lots more to talk about but I want to take a quick break so Susan, stay with us and we will be right back to talk about probably more about the Farm Bill and other food-related issues.

Susan Prolman: Great! Thank you, Caryn.

Caryn Hartglass: Hello, I’m Caryn Hartglass. You’re listening to It’s All About Food. And thank you so much for joining me on this 1^st day of August in 2012. And I am speaking with Susan Prolman, the executive director of the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition.

Susan Prolman: Thank you, Caryn.

Caryn Hartglass: You’re welcome. And thank you. So the big chunk of the Farm Bill is the food security portion, the SNAP program, and the good old food stamp program and that’s changed a bit over the years too. And hopefully … there’s a lot of talk but it’s not moving very quickly; we don’t do anything very quickly. But I would think that if we were giving people who were food insecure, people who were hungry, people who didn’t have access to enough food with their own financial, and they needed help that it should be healthy food. Unfortunately, we’re seeing more people that are using the SNAP system that they are overweight, obese, and are not making the right choices.

Susan Prolman: Well, one comment I would make to that is that if you look at the American population as a whole, we’re becoming heavier and we’re making some bad food decisions. And I don’t know if it’s that the people who are using SNAP benefits do that more than the average American. I think it’s of a great concern right across the board. Now what some folks is trying to do is give incentives fro people to choose healthier foods. So Senator Stabenow, the chairwoman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, included in her Farm Bill a Double-Up Buck Program so that if people take their benefits to the farmer’s market they get twice as much value; they double the value as compared to purchasing other foods. And that’s an incentive way; it’s a carrot way of getting people to make some really good food decisions.

Caryn Hartglass: Now, there are lots of people in this country who are taking advantage of this program. It just blows me away how many people use it.

Susan Prolman: It’s grown a lot in recent years and that is due largely to the recession.

Caryn Hartglass: Yeah. So it’s really good that it’s there, even though some people might want to get rid of it or reduce it but it really is important and one of the benefits of living in a wealthy country that can provide security in numerous different forms. But it has its problems, the program, and there had been some improvements.

Susan Prolman: Yeah. It does but let me say that there are other programs in the Farm Bill that have a lot more institutional problems built into them than the SNAP. I hear a lot of verbiage on Capitol Hill about abuse of the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program and clamping down on abuse. I wish I heard that much discussion on abuse, for example, of the crop insurance program.

Caryn Hartglass: The crop insurance is a smaller portion of the Farm Bill but the people that abuse it really abuse it big.

Susan Prolman: It is smaller; that’s true that the Nutrition Program is, by far, the biggest slice of the Farm Bill. But I would also argue that’s a reason why everybody’s invested in the Farm Bill. If you are a taxpayer, you’re contributing to it; if you are a consumer, it impacts you; and if you care about poverty in this country and whether low-income people, including those who are working jobs or multiple jobs, are getting the support that they need. I think that everybody has a stake in the Farm Bill fight.

Caryn Hartglass: We have our problem with food deserts in this country. Is the Farm Bill … does it deal with problems like that?

Susan Prolman: Yeah. There’s a Healthy Food Financing Initiative that we’re trying to get off the ground to address some of the food desert problems. Also, the National Sustainable Agriculture works really hard to develop local and regional food systems. We have a marker bill that we’re strongly supporting. It was put in by Congresswoman Chellie Pingree of Maine and Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio; it’s called the Local Farm’ Foods and Jobs Act and it’s trying to rebuild everything from farm, to distribution, to consumer to get that healthy food to people, including vulnerable people who are located in places that don’t normally have access to healthy food.

Caryn Hartglass: I was reading in Dan Imhoff’s book, Food Fight, and that’s where I got a lot of better understanding of what’s going on in the government. There are different … The money that is in the bill that goes to different places, there are two kinds: some of it can be permanent, others are sort of soft and can be changed. But it seems like all of it can be changed anyway but some are more permanent than… temporary permanent and others are temporary.

Susan Prolman: Bingo. You got it right. So Congress seems to have changed the rules; if they’re playing the game, it can be frustrating sometimes. But you have two different types of money. So the Farm Bill is an authorizing bill and it authorizes funding for programs in two ways: one, with mandatory money and two, with discretionary money. So the premise of mandatory money is that Congress has passed that amount of money and that’s going to be in the program, no questions asked. Whereas the amounts that are appropriated, they’ll say, “We want $50 million appropriate X-year for X-program” but that has to go each year through the annual appropriation cycle. There are appropriations committees in both the Senate and the House of Representatives and they make those calls, sort of like, “Here’s so much money we have.” They couldn’t, in theory, appropriate more; often, they appropriate less. But what we’ve seen recently is a mechanism called CHIMPS. CHIMPS stand for Changes In Mandatory Programs. So Congress has been doing, in recent years, something that one would think they wouldn’t have done, which is they’re taking mandatory funding out of programs, for example, in the Farm Bill Conservation Program; it was funded with mandatory money. They reward the best stewards of the land; they reward farmers for reducing pollution, reducing reliance on fossil fuels, etc. etc. and Congress has been pulling money out of those programs even though it’s mandatory money, in recent years.

Caryn Hartglass: So that should be a good thing.

Susan Prolman: No, that’s a bad thing. The conservation programs, in our opinion, are a good thing; underfunding them is a bad thing.

Caryn Hartglass: Right. But taking money from another program to fund them is a good thing, then that money gets pulled out of it anyway.

Susan Prolman: What we’ve seen happen is that Congress often goes to these good conservation programs as a go-to place, like an ATM to take money for other things. So the House is currently discussing how we pay for drought. Now, there are drought provisions in both the Senate and the House bills and we say if you want to address drought, pass the Farm Bill for here. What some of the folks are saying in Capitol Hill is, “Let’s pull money away from the conservation programs and put it into emergency drought relief. “So underfunding and always using the conservation programs as the go-to source of money for other objectives is something we cannot support.

Caryn Hartglass: Obviously, well, it’s obviously not obvious to some people but we wouldn’t have the droughts or at least not the magnitude that we’re seeing today if we had some really rigorous conservation policies in place.

Susan Prolman: Yeah. Part of being sustainable, if you are farming for the long term, so you’re trying to reduce your inputs; you’re trying to reduce the impacts of the agriculture that you practice; you’re trying to reduce soil erosion and water pollution run-off and things like that. Not only reducing energy used but in a renewable way producing energy in a way that benefits the environment. These are all exciting things; there’s a little bit of money for them in the Farm Bill and there could be a lot more.

Caryn Hartglass: Yeah. It’s so hard for us to look ahead and plan for the future. We want everything right now.

Susan Prolman: I’ve been hearing the energy conservation political speeches from Jimmy Carter on in the ‘70s.

Caryn Hartglass: I know. And gosh, I dream of what we could have had today if we had really made some significant differences back in Jimmy Carter’s time.

Susan Prolman: That’s, again, to get to the point why people should care about the Farm Bill. It’s your money and it’s an opportunity to invest in smart policies for the future and it’s an opportunity that Congress doesn’t make the most of. And that’s why they need to hear from you.

Caryn Hartglass: I absolutely agree. It’s just our society, not everyone, but many people are so shortsighted today and just want to take care of their immediate needs. There’s another big piece involved with commodities, commodity programs. What are in commodities?

Susan Prolman: Again, it’s a handful of crops like corn, soy, wheat, cotton, and rice that get payments. And there are different types payments through the commodity titles. There are direct payments and that may shift into a revenue program called ARK in the new Farm Bill. It’s basically supporting farmers to grow those row crops.

Caryn Hartglass: And how did those crops get so lucky?

Susan Prolman: Political cache.

Caryn Hartglass: Yeah. So that’s corn, and soy, and cotton, and wheat.

Susan Prolman: It’s a big part of what our country produces. But the problem is that there are disincentives in the system. So if you are receiving a lot of government subsidies to grow a large tract of land, mono crops for a crop like corn or something, you actually can get penalized if you also grow fruits and vegetables on that land. There’s a provision we’re trying to fix through the new Farm Bill where if you are an organic producer and you seek insurance, you pay a higher premium than conventional production on the theory that organic is more risky. And then if you have a lost, you get paid out at conventional prices. So it’s like a double whammy against organic production. So we’re trying to sort of fix some of the disincentives in the program.

Caryn Hartglass: I have to take very slow, deep breaths from time to time because this stuff really can make my blood boil; it is just so awful. We could just be so phenomenal if we would make some very simple changes but then a few people would lose.

Susan Prolman: I would say that most people, and more and more people, really care about food and they’re thinking about where their food comes from and there’s a lot they can do. So there are a couple of things that I’ll refer folks to right now. You mentioned our website, sustainableagriculture.net. If you go to sustainableagriculture.net, you can sign on to our citizens’ petition. And that basically says we want policies that help sustainable farmers. You can also sign up for our action alerts. And everywhere where there’s something as important happening in the new Farm Bill, we’ll let you know and give you an opportunity to weigh in with your members of Congress.

Caryn Hartglass: Now let me ask you, what do you do with petitions that people sign?

Susan Prolman: We are gathering thousands of signatures of people from around the country and letting our folks on Capitol Hill know that but also letting those folks know when they have opportunities to weigh in. So if the Farm Bill comes to the House floor, we might send you an action alert saying, “Today’s the day. Call your representative and tell him or her to vote for organic” or something to that effect.

Caryn Hartglass: Right. And we have to believe that if they get lots and lots of calls, it will make a difference in how they vote on the floor.

Susan Prolman: Yeah. An optimistic example is when the Senate floor took up the Farm Bill; they made a lot of really good improvements to it. They voted for a lot of good amendments and against a lot of very bad amendments. And they did so because they heard form their constituents.

Caryn Hartglass: Right. So we have to be noisy.

Susan Prolman: Yup. For sure.

Caryn Hartglass: Yeah. So going to sustainableagriculture.net will keep us on top of the things we need to be noisy about. That’s good to know.

Susan Hartglass: Yup.

Caryn Hartglass: What else can we do?

Susan Prolman: Well, one fun thing people can do is to be aware that this upcoming week is farmer’s market week. So if you can, visit your farmer’s market.

Caryn Hartglass: This week? The first week of August?

Susan Prolman: The first week in August. It starts on Sunday and goes through the week.

Caryn Hartglass: Okay. I didn’t know that.

Susan Prolman: Yup.

Caryn Hartglass: So what does that mean? I guess different farmer’s markets will be doing different things, if at all. It’s their week.

Susan Prolman: Yes, exactly. Different farmer’s markets around the country are doing different things to celebrate farmer’s market week. But you, as a person who cares about good food, can celebrate by going with your friends to the farmer’s market and talking with your local farmers and asking them questions about how they do, what they do, and buy their products.

Caryn Hartglass: Yeah. It really is up to us to make a difference and definitely getting to know our farmers, going to farmer’s markets, talking to people, even if you don’t have access to a farmer’s market, going to your neighborhood grocery and talking to the manager about the food that they’re offering.

Susan Prolman: And you can even say to your local supermarket manager, “Do you offer local food and do you label it as local?”

Caryn Hartglass: Labeling, there’s a good word.

Susan Prolman: Yeah.

Caryn Hartglass: Labeling. So it’s been a painful process to get the information on our food. And I remember some stuff was passed in 2008 that was a bit of a struggle but we’ve gotten, for example, to know where our meat comes from.

Susan Prolman: Yes. So labeling is a complicated issue and frankly, I think that there’s so much room for consumer confusion. There are different labels that producers can put on their own food. There are words like “wholesome” that mean something close to nothing.

Caryn Hartglass: Nothing. Natural. Nothing.

Susan Prolman: So “natural” is a USDA term. For meat, for example, that is labeled “natural” what that currently means is that after laughter and after it’s been cut up into pieces, there was no post-slaughter processing or it’s minimal; it’s minimally processed after slaughter. It does not mean that the animals were raised in an organic way. It doesn’t mean that they were raised in a humane way. So an animal that was kept in a cage for part of its life, that was fed antibodies, and other disturbing types of things …

Caryn Hartglass: It could still be “natural.”

Susan Prolman: …could still be labeled “natural.”

Caryn Hartglass: But natural is not irradiated or it doesn’t have that ammonia process to make it pink slime of something like that.

Susan Prolman: Well, it basically means that some additives weren’t added at the end of the process. It’s not fully meaningless but I would, as a consumer, disregard a “natural” label entirely. Now, there are some food companies that really do have better standards that label their food “natural.” And in their term, it’s meaningful but not because of the government; the government’s actually hurting them, not helping them, by allowing competitors who aren’t engaging in good practices to also label as “natural.”

Caryn Hartglass: Okay. But part of the labeling was to find out where food comes from.

Susan Prolman: Right.

Caryn Hartglass: And that’s been a bit of a struggle. And I think it’s a little easier with produce because produce really only grows in one place but then it can be processed somewhere else but …

Susan Prolman: This is again something out of my role as the executive director of the National Sustainable Agriculture and I’ll just talk to individual consumer.

Caryn Hartglass: Okay.

Susan Prolman: I like to buy foods that are produced locally or regionally, if I can.

Caryn Hartglass: Yes.

Susan Prolman: And if I know that they have some good standards like not using a lot of pesticides, things like that, I really appreciate it; using conservation practices, I really appreciate those and try to reinforce them. I think with fruits and vegetables, things can come all over the world. You could get fruits and vegetables in from China. A lot comes from the proverbial salad bowl in California, which is not necessarily bad but people … You should think about where your food comes from. Sometimes …

Caryn Hartglass: It’s just really nutty that the majority of our food might come halfway around the world.

Susan Prolman: It can be really confusing. I’ll give you an example of that. So there’s country of origin labeling. For a time, pigs that were raised in Canada were being trucked to California and then shipped to Hawaii and slaughtered in Hawaii and there was a Hawaii-fresh label put on it. And the argument was part of the process, the slaughtering part of the process, was done in Hawaii; therefore, we can put a Hawaii-fresh label on it. But I think that’s very confusing to consumers because they don’t understand that these pigs came from Canada and endured many days of transport to get to Hawaii.

Caryn Hartglass: Yeah. And believe me, it wasn’t first-class.

Susan Prolman: No.

Caryn Hartglass: That’s probably a horrific journey and probably many of them died in the process.

Susan Prolman: Yeah. Long-distance transport of animals to slaughter is a concern. That’s, again, why supporting local and regional food systems is helpful. And, again, why advocates for sustainable agriculture have been trying to get it so that smaller- sized producers have access to slaughterhouses.

Caryn Hartglass: Yeah. So I think your point as a consumer is important. I know many people complain about the cost of their food. Unfortunately, they don’t really realize the true cost of their food. And when we’re spending the extra money on … Sometimes, farmer’s market food is less expensive; sometimes, it’s more expensive. Organic food can be the same, more or less. You just have to be paying attention. And in some areas, certainly, we have access to more organic and locally grown food than some places but the cost of quality food is worth it from so many points of view. And I think that the government and the farmers need to hear our voice by what we’re paying for.

Susan Prolman: Yes. I would also say to your listeners that, if you haven’t done this yet, I recommend going out and visiting a farm, like a local farm where people are really doing things by hand. They work very, very hard and they make very, very little money. When I go to a farmer’s market or when I go to my supermarket manager and say, “Is this produce local? If so, could you label it as local?” I view all of that as an investment in the way that I want my food to be produced. It’s a better system and for society as a whole, that costs less over the long term.

Caryn Hartglass: You’re making me think of a lot of things as we just have a few minutes left. I don’t like to get into any kind of doom and gloom scenario but the state of our agricultural system is really fragile. We’re losing a lot of topsoil. There’s going to be areas that won’t be able to grow food soon. We’re depleting our aquifers very quickly because of the way that we grow a lot of food. And we’re not caring for what we really need to care for in order to continue to be able to feed all of us. And then we have this disconnect in our community with so many things; not just with food but certainly with food and farmers. Many of us aren’t mindful; we just grab some fast food, we eat some of it, we throw some of it away. We’re not realizing all of the impact of it. It’s so important that we need to definitely get to know our farmers; they’re working so hard. And there are some people that are farming, like migrant workers and people coming from other countries, legally or illegally and that’s a whole another story; but they really work hard for so little.

Susan Prolman: Yes, absolutely. Let me touch on a couple of things there. So among your doom and gloom about depleting aquifers and soil loss, all true; another item to add in the mix there is climate change.

Caryn Hartglass: Oh, climate change, yes. I don’t like to mention it because some people believe in it and some people don’t but there are so many other environmental devastating things happening that that’s just one more thing.

Susan Prolman: The good news is that the sustainable systems are more resilient. They use less water, they use less energy, they pollute less, and they add nourishment back to the soil more. So that’s really the direction we need to go and that’s why we advocate for more USDA research into sustainable systems. You raised another really important topic that I’d love to talk about, which is socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers and these include immigrants, minorities, and women. There has been a series of lawsuits at the USDA, successful lawsuits, discrimination claims that pertain to African-American farmers, Hispanic farmers, and others. I should mention, by the way, among socially disadvantaged includes Native American Indians as well. So there are programs that, because of historic unfairness to these producers, have been trying to level the playing field and make it so that producers can be farmers, workers can be farmers in their own right and those who own their own farms are able to thrive and to contribute good healthy foods to their communities. By the way, a disproportionate amount of minority farmers are producing fruits and vegetables, the so-called specialty crops, on smaller farms. Again, they’ve been recipients of systematic discrimination and unfortunately, in the new Farm Bill there’s jeopardy of cutting their funding, which is a real problem.

Caryn Hartglass: Big problem. Susan, thank you so much for joining me. I learned a lot. And I really appreciate you coming on the show today. And you know what, it is; it’s all about food.

Susan Prolman: Thank you, Caryn.

Caryn Hartglass: Okay. Susan Prolman of the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition. Go to sustainableagriculture.net for more information. And I’m Caryn Hartglass with Responsible Eating and Living. Thank you so much for joining me. Have a delicious week.

Transcribed by Diana O’Reilly, 3/21/2013

Interviews with Christy Morgan and Rich Roll 7/25/2012

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Episode #159

7/25/2012:

Part I: Christy Morgan
Blissful Bites

A vegan macrobiotic chef, Morgan offers environmentally-conscious eaters a variety of easy, palate-pleasing, healthy, and environmentally-friendly recipes in her cookbook, Blissful Bites: Vegan Meals that Nourish Mind, Body, and Planet. Also known as The Blissful Chef, Morgan helps home cooks make healthy, delicious meals with seasonal produce, many of which cater to raw and gluten-free diets.

Passionate about helping people change their lives and helping save the planet through a healthier, plant-based diet, Morgan’s work has been esteemed by bestselling authors of Skinny Bitch, Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin, and president of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, Dr. Neal Barnard. Blissful Bites has also been featured in VegNews, Diet and Nutrition Magazine, Green Child Magazine and on Martha Stewart Living Radio and PETA.org.

7/25/2012:

Part II: Rich Roll
Finding Ultra

Rich Roll has been featured on CNN and has been named “one of the world’s 25 fittest men” by Men’s Fitness Magazine. He is a graduate of Stanford University and Cornell Law School. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and four children and, when he isn’t training or competing, manages the entertainment boutique Independent Law Group, LLP.

TRANSCRIPTION PART I:

Caryn Hartglass: Hello, I’m Caryn Hartglass, and you are listening to It’s All About Food. Thanks for joining me, it’s July 25, 2012 and if you have been listening to me on a reasonably regular basis, you know that I’ve been in California and I just got back to New York this morning. I was traveling on a red-eye flight and it’s always a surreal experience after being somewhere for three weeks or so and then coming back to a place that you are very familiar with. But, I’m really glad that the weather here is quite pleasant because when I left, it was quite horrible. And, yeah, so I’m back here in New York and I got here early in the morning and I’m really tired because it was on a red eye and so the first thing I did was make myself one of these great fruit smoothies with some green powder and all kinds of wonderful healthy food to get me a little energized. And, ah… {laughs} this is my story for the day…I don’t know what motivated me or didn’t motivate me, but I didn’t put the cover on the blender and a whole bunch of purple-ly, dark goo splattered all over the place and I cleaned it up and then I did it a second time {laughing!} And, then, finally, there was some left and I had my smoothie and then just before starting the show, I thought I’d make myself a cup of mate and I don’t know what motivated me, but I looked upon on the ceiling and I don’t know how it got there, but a lot of what was in the blender was now on the ceiling! It would have made Jackson Polack proud. That’s what happens when you don’t get enough sleep! Sleep is so important and if you’re wondering why you’re tired, one of the first things I like to ask is: Have you been getting enough rest? And, I hope you have and I’ll get some later—I’ll be fine. And…I wanted to remind you before we get on with our first guest, that I have a non-profit called Responsible Eating and Living and my website is www.responsibleeatingandliving.com. I do another broadcast called Ask a Vegan and I just did my 100th episode last Sunday and I wanted to let you know because it was a really fun show and you might want to check it out. I interviewed a 13 year old boy who was quite interesting and articulate. So you can go to www.responsibleeatingandliving.com., go to the Real Radio tab and you can see the It’s All About Food Archive which has all of my 158 shows and counting and the Ask a Vegan Archive, as well. So, check them out!

Okay, one of the things I like to do about this show, you know I love talking about food and it’s all about food. And, I have an agenda and that is, to help people eat more plant foods because it’s so important for the planet and I think the most effective way to do it is to tell stories. I like people to come on and tell their stories. So, were going to hear a bunch of stories today and hear about food and the first guest is Christy Morgan. She’s a vegan, macrobiotic chef and she offers environmentally conscious eaters a variety of easy, palate pleasing, healthy and environmentally friendly recipes in her cookbook, Blissful Bites – Vegan Meals That Nourish Mind, Body and Planet. Also known as The Blissful Chef with a website www.theblissfulchef.com. Morgan helps home cooks make healthy, delicious meals with seasonal produce, many of which cater to raw and gluten free diets. Welcome to it’s All About Food, Christy!
Christy Morgan: Hi! Thanks for having me!
Caryn Hartglass: Yeah, well you sound like you do everything that is really important to me.
Christy Morgan: {Laughs} Awesome.
Caryn Hartglass: Making vegan meals that nourish the mind, body and planet that’s all there is. That all about food and that’s what it’s all about! Now, what is your story? In brief. How is it…
Christy Morgan: {Laughs}
Caryn Hartglass: …you became inspired to make vegan meals and share them with the world?
Christy Morgan: Well, I moved to Los Angeles after college and I went vegan after watching this really graphic video on animal food production.
Caryn Hartglass: Which one was that?
Christy Morgan: So…ah..Meet your Meat…
Caryn Hartglass: Meet Your Meat…yep…that’s a good one. Or, a bad one…yeah.
Christy Morgan: …and I went vegan overnight…
Caryn Hartglass: Yeah.
Christy Morgan: And, so it’s a whole new way of cooking and looking at food. So,I had to teach myself. This was 10 years ago, almost. And, back then, there wasn’t really a huge amount of vegan restaurants, or vegan products so I had to teach myself how to cook.
Caryn Hartglass: Mmmm…Hmmm!
Christy Morgan: And, I met up with other vegans in the vegan community and went to potlucks and started cooking for other people and I just really loved it and so, decided to go to culinary school.
Caryn Hartglass: Oh, good for you. Where did you go?
Christy Morgan: I went to a macrobiotic, natural foods cooking school in Austin called The Natural Epicurian.
Caryn Hartglass: Ok, were they supportive of a vegan diet?
Christy Morgan: Yeah. It was macrobiotic so it was mostly vegan…
Caryn Hartglass: Mmm…Hmm…great!
Christy Morgan: …and now…now, the program actually is vegetarian, vegan, macrobiotic and ayurvedic, and raw foods. The program has expanded to include all kinds of plant based foods and the plant based food movement..
Caryn Hartglass: Hmm…Ok. Austin is a pretty hip community. I know Whole Foods started there and for Texas, it’s probably pretty evolved for the rest of the surrounding community.
Christy Morgan: Yes. People are very conscious of their food choices and environmental choices. Lots of people bicycle and they’re into outdoor sports. It’s a great town.
Caryn Hartglass: Yeah. I notice in the beginning of your book…one of things I wanted to mention is that the vegan world is really a community. And…ah…I don’t know how to explain this exactly, but a lot of us are on a mission, just like the title of your book…the subtitle: Vegan Meals That Nourish Mind, Body and Planet. We have a mission, we want to make this world a better place, we want people to be happy and healthy, we want the planet to be clean and healthy for generations to come. And, as a result, vegan chefs just tend to be part of a big community and I notice in the beginning of your book, you have a number of comments, testimonials or support for your book and it’s from a number of other vegan chefs in the movement and it’s really nice to see that they all come out to support each other.
Christy Morgan: Yes, it’s a very supportive, especially, anytime you go to a new city, you just basically google: vegan and your city and you will have a wealth of people waiting with open arms {laughing}.
Caryn Hartglass: Yeah. Thanks to the Internet for that. I think that’s what’s really helped our mission, the Internet.
Christy Morgan: Definitely.
Caryn Hartglass: Yeah.
Chritsty Morgan: Yeah. It’s really helped educate people on…because there’s this old school…these old school myths and old school knowledge of nutrition and how nutrition works and we’re really stepping away from that and people are…their eyes are being opened to the fact, that you know, dairy isn’t really that good for you. It’s causing all this inflammation and all these issues you may be having or maybe you should check it out. We’re just opening minds. And, through the Internet, all these people are writing articles and just educating each other. It’s really amazing.
Caryn Hartglass: And, it does help that every week we hear about more and more celebrities that are going vegan.
Christy Morgan: That doesn’t hurt, for sure. I don’t like to look to celebrities, necessarily, because I mean, they’re people, too, who are going to make mistakes and they get more publicity on the mistakes they make sometimes.
Caryn Hartglass: Yeah. That’s true.
Christy Morgan: But, it definitely helps to get veganism out there. Vegan eating mainstream.
Caryn Hartglass: Well, you know…I think a lot of people are afraid. They’re afraid of change, and when more people are doing something, it makes it seem more ok to many people…
Christy Morgan: More normal…it’s not weird anymore! {Laughing}
Caryn Hartglass: Not weird anymore! No! {Laughing} Ok, now there are lots of different vegan diets and that’s something that really surprises people when I talk about vegan diets because there are many kinds. There are some unhealthy vegan diets and there are some that are healthier and there are just different kinds and science hasn’t told us whether one is better than the other. There’s just a range of different ones and macrobiotic is one of them. Now, why is it you decided to focus on the macrobiotic style?
Christy Morgan: Well, macrobiotic is not inherently vegan. The vegan diet means specifically to exclude animal foods from your diet and try to reduce harm to animals as far as entertainment, clothing, animal testing and all of that. So, being vegan isn’t just really a diet, it includes all of that.
Caryn Hartglass: Mmm…Hmm.
Christy Morgan: So some raw foods and some other kinds of things that look vegan are vegan just in the diet. They don’t, necessarily, include all the ethics that go behind the vegan diet. So, I just wanted to clarify that.
Caryn Hartglass: Mmm…Hmm. That’s good.
Christy Morgan: Macrobiotics is, actually, not inherently vegan. A lot of people who study macrobiotics eat fish and some of them eat other animal foods because it’s not a one size fits all diet.
Caryn Hartglass: Mmm…Hmm.
Christy Morgan: So, I had no idea what it meant before…what the word meant…until I went to the culinary school.
Caryn Hartglass: Mmm…Hmm.
Christy Morgan: So, I, actually, had no idea, but I feel really blessed that I did that culinary school and I learned about it because it taught me more about the whole foods diet. It taught me more of a holistic view of health. So, it wasn’t just about the food, it was about health, how it affects the planet, how it affects your organs, your mood, everything about you, your relationship with others. So…it’s more than just fuel to nourish us, it’s everything…to me {Laughing}.
Caryn Hartglass: Mmm…Hmm…Well it is!
Christy Morgan: Well, so, that’s what that taught me and it taught me about balance. It taught me about eating in season, it taught me about organic food…so…I really feel blessed…because I learned how to cook in a natural foods way. I never learned how to cook junk food. I never became a vegan who was a junk food vegan because I was exposed to all of this wonderful whole foods.
Caryn Hartglass: Mmm…Hmm…yeah, that’s lucky! You know, I’ve been doing this for decades and it’s been a lo-o-o-ng journey! {Laughing} of learning and ultimately coming to a very, very clean, whole food place.
Christy Morgan: And that’s what I try to share with even vegans because…just because it’s vegan doesn’t mean it’s healthy. So my mission is to help everyone, but especially, help vegans to actually learn to cook and to eat whole foods. Because it’s so easy these days to just buy packaged foods or buy Tofurkey dogs and all that stuff which is delicious, but you don’t want to make that all of your diet, right?
Caryn Hartglass: You know, you said that what moved you to the vegan diet was watching the video Meet Your Meat for people who aren’t familiar with that video, it’s put out by PETA and it has some very difficult to watch scenes of animals in factory farms. And…ah….that’s what moved me to this diet is the pain and suffering of animals that I don’t want to support. And, so, many people see videos like that and decide they’re not going to eat animals anymore and they end up eating a diet that isn’t healthy. And, I’m with you, Christy, because personally, I used to say vegan was a lifestyle, but now after an interview I had a few weeks ago with Gary Steiner, I’m now saying it’s a moral imperative, the vegan diet. It’s more than a lifestyle, it’s a moral imperative because of what we’re doing to our planet, the environment, animals and our own health. We need to change the way we eat and it’s important, to me, that all people that are promoting a plant diet look good, and feel healthy and look healthy because we are our own marketing.
Christy Morgan: Yeah. I mean, it’s a touchy subject that I’ve talked about before on my own blog and with other people…it’s a tricky subject….because just going vegan does not mean you’re going to get healthy, does not, necessarily, mean you’re going to lose a ton of weight and transform your whole life. It can happen, it happens for many people, but there’s a fine line we have to walk between promoting veganism for vanity and promoting it for health and the health of the planet and animals. So, it’s so much more than food, obviously, and it…and…a lot of people go into it because they think it’s going to help them, but I really hope that people dive deeper than that. That they experience the true passion that comes from not eating animals.
Caryn Hartglass: Well, we’re all on our own path and the range of how deep we’re going to go or the pace at how deep we’re going to go is really an individual thing, but…
Christy Morgan: Of course…
Caryn Hartglass: Yeah…but I believe that first eliminating animal foods from our diet and knowing that you can survive without eating animals really, I think, opens a crack into a whole other world and then you can go deeper and you can learn more. It’s first knowing that we don’t need animals to live!
Christy Morgan: Yeah, that’s a pretty big battle for people in and of itself…
Caryn Hartglass: Big battle!
Christy Morgan: …yeah…I applaud anybody who takes any steps to reduce the harm that they do and the animal foods that they eat. You know, I think it’s important that we are flexible and understanding of other people and support people on their journeys. Because, it’s really…not everyone is going to go vegan overnight….at least not tomorrow. So, if we can get people to make small steps, those accumulative small steps really become a massive tipping point and that’s what we need right now. In order to save ourselves and our planet, we need to end factory farming. It’ is so detrimental to our planet and our health. We all know that, right?
Caryn Hartglass: Yeah…
Christy Morgan: I support anybody who takes any steps…Meatless Mondays…Vegan ‘til 6:00 p.m….whatever you want to do, just do something. Right?
Caryn Hartglass: {Laughing} There is momentum definitely happening. More people know the word vegan and they’re more open to it. It’s not a foreign word anymore. We hear about it in movies and on TV and everybody knows people who are vegan and so, there’s this momentum going on which is great. But, at the same time, there are other movements happening, as well, that are counter to what’s happening in the vegan movement. There’s so much promotion of eating pork and bacon and ham and making it trendy and hip…
Christy Morgan: Gormet…foodie…
Caryn Hartglass: Yeah! It’s kind of crazy. I was just thumbing through Prevention magazine. I haven’t looked at it in so long and they showed two different recipes. One had bacon and one had ham with some fruits and vegetables and I’m thinking: “C’mon, this is 2012, you still don’t get it? “ {Laughs}, but there we are!
Christy Morgan: Yeah….
Caryn Hartglass: But, you have…I wanted to mention, in your book…one of things that I really like to do and I’m glad to see you have a recipe for it…is tempeh bacon!
Christy Morgan: Yeah, that’s one of my most popular recipes, actually…
Caryn Hartglass: Yeah.
Christy Morgan: …and you can find it…people can find it on my website, as well.
Caryn Hartglass: Oh, that’s good. Now, you can buy it in the store, but what I like about making it at home, is that you can really adjust the flavors to the way you like it. I don’t like using a lot of salt and the tempeh bacon in the stores is r-e-e-e-ally salty for my palate.
Christy Morgan: Yeah, it is…
Caryn Hartglass: But, making tempeh bacon, it’s so good and tempeh is such a great food!
Christy Morgan: I love…yeah…I love tempeh.
Caryn Hartglass: Tempeh…they use a lot of tempeh in macrobiotic cooking, don’t they?
Christy Morgan: Yep! Yeah, that’s where I learned about it in cooking school. I would choose tempeh over tofu any day!
Caryn Hartglass: Well, what’s great about tempeh is that it’s more of a whole food, because tofu is more processed. Tofu is just curdled…the juice from the soybeans…pressed out of the soybeans. It lacks fiber and then it’s curdled and made into a cheese. But, tempeh is the whole bean, fermented, which makes it more easy to digest.
Christy Morgan: Exactly.
Caryn Hartglass: And, it has a nice flavor. I’m not exactly sure why this is, but I find people either like tempeh or they don’t like it.
Christy Morgan: Yeah! That’s what I find, too, in my cooking classes, but thankfully, I like…every time I do a class on tempeh, there is at least one person in the class who says, “I hate tempeh!” “I can’t stand it, but I like yours.”
Caryn Hartglass: Oooh…so what’s your secret?
Christy Morgan: Somehow, I’ve created tempeh dishes that turn people on to tempeh. But, I’ve had people say that about other things. People will come in and say, “I hate Brussels sprouts!” And, they have mine, and then they like it. So…
Caryn Hatrglass: Well, I think..yeah, that’s great…I think one of the important things with tempeh, especially, for people who don’t naturally like that fermented, mushroomy, nutty kind of flavor that it has, is to marinate it in something. And, it’s so good with a variety of marinades and when…plus I think it’s good, too, to hydrate it a little bit. It makes it moist and chewier and gives it a nicer texture. That’s what I like to do with tempeh.
Christy Morgan: Yeah. You should really try my tempeh bacon!
Caryn Hartglass: Okay! Definitely will! And you know they’re popular…there’s so many things you can do with tempeh bacon. You can have a BLT and just so many different things and, probably, you could put it on ice cream. Just they’re doing at Burger King right now! Did you hear about that?.
Christy Morgan: No-o-o…
Caryn Hartglass: Oh gosh, they’re putting these bacon bits on ice cream as a new sundae sensation. It’s like really?
Christy Morgan: Oh…that’s gross! {Laughing}
Caryn Hartglass: Yeah! But, maybe tempeh on a coconut, banana frozen ice cream or something…who knows…maybe your next book!
Christy Morgan: {Laughing} Okay, you’re giving me some ideas!
Caryn Hartglass: {Laughing} Another thing is that you have one of my favorite quotes in here by Joseph Campbell: “ Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors where there were only walls.” And this is so profound and this is really one of the wonderful things about this diet, this lifestyle, this moral imperative, there are some many things going wrong in this world today and this is such a wonderful, joyful, delicious thing that you can do that’s RIGHT! That makes a difference!
Christy Morgan: Yeah. That’s why it’s called Blissful Bites that’s why I’m called a Blissful Chef because eating this way really does make me feel bliss and it makes me feel so good every day that I can live my true self and my compassion with everything that I do. People don’t realize how important it is to eat this way because it is something you do the most. Like, we sleep and we eat. That’s what we do the most and you can make the most profound difference with your fork! And, people think, “Oh, it’s just food and I just need to feed myself so that I can have energy to work all the time” or something. But, it’s like: No! It’s much deeper than that!
Caryn Hartglass: Mmm…Hmm. It’s, it’s…well…once you come over to our side, you’ll see how blissful it really is. {Laughing}
Christy Morgan: {Laughs} Exactly!
Caryn Hartglass: Did you have any specific physical changes when you transitioned your diet?
Christy Morgan: Well, I started when I was really young. I was right out of college when I started so I didn’t have any health issues, a lot of people go to this diet because of health issues, but I didn’t really have any because I was young.
Caryn Hartglass: Yeah. Mmm…Hmm.
Christy Morgan: What I have noticed is that over the years, I keep getting healthier and more fit, and younger as I age which is totally the opposite of what other people do. Most people who eat a standard American diet, they degrade as they age.
Caryn Hartglass: That’s right!
Christy Morgan: I stopped aging…I stopped AGING!
Caryn Hartglass: {Laughing}
Christy Morgan: I’m in better shape…I’ve become an athlete, now, later in life and I’m in better shape than I was when I was in college and I was an athlete. I can do more…
Caryn Hartglass: Yeah. What are you doing now? What kind of sports?
Christy Morgan: …I can do more with my body now. I can work out harder and longer and have super quick recovery times or there is no recovery time. I can just keep going. It’s amazing. I do everything. I love being active. I do Zumba, I do kickboxing, I lift weights, I run. I did my first triathlon last year in September…
Caryn Hartglass: Whoo!
Christy Morgan: …and I’m doing the Tough Mother in October which is one of the hardest obstacle races in the country.
Caryn Hartglass: Well, Good for You!
Christy Morgan: So, it’s so exciting…it’s like, Hey, I can be an athlete now! And…and…on a vegan diet! So, I love going to the gym wearing vegan shirts! {Laughing}
Caryn Hartglass: Mmm…Hmm! Oh, that’s really clever…that’s clever advertising!
Christy Morgan: My secrets out…!
Caryn Hartglass: Mmm…Hmm…yep…here’s my secret folks! Well, it’s funny that you mention that because in the next part of the show, I’m going to be talking to Rich Rowland…I don’t know if you know who he is…but he is…
Christy Morgan: Oh! Of Course!
Caryn Hartglass: …an AMAZING God! Who, in his 40’s started doing ultra marathons and all kinds of crazy physical stuff and he does it all on plant foods!
Christy Morgan: I know, he’s amazing. I love Rich Roll. Yeah! Yeah! There are so many amazing vegan athletes and they’re so inspirational and whenever I meet people at the gym who tell me about their diets, I tell them you should really look up Robert Cheeke, and Scott Jurek and Rich Roll and…
Caryn Hartglass: And Brendon Braizer
Christy Morgan: …and Brendon Braizer because there are so many amazing athletes. Although, there aren’t a lot of females that are that popular so I need to… Amy Dodes…she’s amazing and she’s a great athlete. But, we need to get some more females out there in the spotlight…
Caryn Hartglass: Okay, well, you’re training…so, you know… maybe you’ll have to be one of them.
Christy Morgan: I’m not training enough, I don’t think, but yeah! {Laughing} I like to talk to people about fitness that’s for sure.
Caryn Hartglass: It’s…it’s very important to exercise. It’s not just the food. You have to work your body and we just got ourselves into this crazy lifestyle of eating all the wrong foods, and sitting in an office and then coming home and then sitting and watching television and it’s all about convenience and it’s not healthy. We need to move, move, move. We need to be making things, we need to be moving our bodies and I just hope that we get there! But, you’re helping to do that with your very lovely Blissful Bites. {Laughs}.
Christy Morgan: Thank you!
Caryn Hartglass: I know that you’ve starred a bunch of your favorite recipes in here. Just before we go, did you want to mention any one in particular? To whet our appetite?
Christy Morgan: People always ask me this and I just love food so much it’s hard for me to pick. That’s why I actually put those Chef and Fan Favorite stars in there…
Caryn Hartglass: Mmm…Hmm.
Christy Morgan: … so that people could look for that. But, really, I just love breakfast and brunch food…
Caryn Hartglass: Mmm…
Christy Morgan: …I just love it! I’m working on the next book and that chapter is 3 times the size of the other chapters.
Caryn Hartglass: {Laughing}
Christy Morgan: I don’t know what it is, but I just love breakfast food! I love Tofu Scramble. I make a really good tofu scramble and I love pancakes so, all of that!
Caryn Hartglass: {Laughs} Yeah. It’s cozy and it’s comforting. It’s the best way to start your day with some really good food in your belly.
Christy Morgan: And, I actually eat smoothies. I usually have a huge, green smoothie every morning and that’s what I have for breakfast, normally, but I do love to splurge and make brunch for other people.
Caryn Hartglass: Yeah, I think, maybe weekends or for some particular festive time, I love taking out the pankcakes or the waffle iron and making a really satisfying, great breakfast. I think breakfast does it for me, too. So, I just wanted to thank you for speaking with me today, Christy, and best of luck to you with Blissful Bites. Thank you for joining me on It’s All About Food.
Christy Morgan: Thanks for having me! It was nice talking with you!
Caryn Hartglass: Okay. I’m Caryn Hartglass Bye-Bye. You’re listening to It’s All About Food. I’m going to take a quick break and stay with us because I’m going to be talking with Rich Roll and his book Finding Ultra. Be right back.

Transcribed by Gail Schriver, 6.9.2013

TRANSCRIPTION PART II:

Hello I’m Caryn Hartglass and you’re listening to It’s All About Food. Thank you for joining me and it’s time for Part Two of today’s show, July 25th, 2012. I’m going to bring on my next guest, Rich Roll. He has been featured on CNN and has been named one of world’s twenty-five fittest men by Men’s Fitness Magazine. Read more »

Interview with Josh De Mattei, Crohn’s Disease and Summer Foods

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7/22/2012 Episode #100: I had the opportunity to discuss vegetarian and vegan diets with 13-year-old Josh De Mattei. We had a lively discussion about dairy, where it comes from, soda, sugar, artificial sweeteners, salt, healing, factory farms and green vegetables. After the interview I talked about alternative therapies for Crohn’s disease and some of my favorite summer foods: seeded watermelon and gluten-free, vegan pizza.

Interviews with Jay Rosengarten and Dara Lovitz

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Episode #158

7/18/2012:

Part I: Jay Rosengarten
EVOO

Jay is the President of Olisur Inc. He is responsible for the marketing and distribution of the companies extra virgin olive oil in the US and Canada. He is the founder and President of The Rosengarten Group. He has over 35 years of hands-on management experience in the retail and food distribution industries.

He has served as Chairman of the Board of Directors and CEO of Shopwell, Inc., where he was responsible for the development and implementation of the company’s long range strategic plans. This included the creation of the Food Emporium store format. Jay has served as President of Springfield Sugar and Products Company, a large wholesale food distributor.
In addition, Jay was the President and CEO of several small retail companies. He is a featured speaker for NASFT, National Grocers Association and FMI, as well as other industry forums. Jay speaks on a variety of topics relevant to the food industry foods.
Jay is a graduate of Fordham University Law School where he received his Jurist Doctorate, and is a graduate of the University of Denver. He practiced labor and corporate law until his career change in the mid 70′s.

7/18/2012:

Part II: Dara Lovitz
Muzzling The Movement

Dara Lovitz is the author of Muzzling A Movement: The Effects of Anti-Terrorism Law, Money, and Politics on Animal Activism (Lantern Books). She is an Adjunct Professor of Animal Law at both Temple University Beasley School of Law and the Earle Mack School of Law at Drexel University. She was selected by the Super Lawyers Magazine as a “Rising Star.” Ms. Lovitz earned her B.A., magna cum laude, from the University of Pennsylvania and her J.D. from Temple University Beasley School of Law, at which she was the recipient of both the Law Faculty Scholarship and the Barrister Award. She was selected by her classmates to be the class speaker at Temple’s graduation ceremony. Ms. Lovitz was appointed Special Prosecutor by the Lancaster County District Attorney to prosecute the pivotal Pennsylvania case, Commonwealth v. Esbenshade, in which the Elizabethtown district court determined the criminal liability of a battery-cage egg production facility owner and supervisor under Pennsylvania’s animal cruelty statute. She is a board member of Four Feet Forward, an organization that helps grass-roots animal advocacy organizations with their legal and media campaigns by offering professional services at no cost; President of Peace Advocacy Network, an organization that promotes veganism, social justice, and respect for the Earth’s inhabitants and resources; and Legal Advisory Board Member of the Equal Justice Alliance, a coalition of animal protection and other social justice organizations formed in November of 2006 to defend freedom of speech and assembly. Ms. Lovitz has written extensively in law journals and trade publications on various animal law topics with a focus on eco-terrorism and frequently presents such topics in television, radio, and podcast segments as well as at conferences across the country.

TRANSCRIPTION PART II:

Caryn Hartglass: Hey, I’m Caryn Hartglass and you’re listening to It’s All About Food. Welcome back! It’s July 18th and this is the second part of our show.

Right now, I’m going to bring on our next guest, Dara Lovitz. She is the author of Muzzling A Movement: The Effects of Antiterrorism Law, Money, and Politics on Animal Activism. She is an adjunct professor of Animal Law at both Temple University Beasley School of Law and the Earle Mack School Law at Drexel University. She was selected by Super Lawyers Magazine as a rising star. Ms. Lovitz earned a BA Magna Cum Laude from the University of Pennsylvania and her JD from Temple University Beasley School of Law, at which she was the recipient of both the Law Faculty Scholarship and the Barrister Award. She was selected by her classmates to be the class speaker at Temple’s graduation ceremony. Ms. Lovitz was appointed special prosecutor by the Lancaster County District Attorney to prosecute the pivotal Pennsylvania case, Commonwealth vs. Esbenshade, in which the Elizabethtown District Court determined the criminal liability of a battery cage egg production facility owner and supervisor under Pennsylvania’s animal cruelty statute. And there’s so much more about Dara Lovitz; you can read it on responsibleeatingandliving.com website. But I just want to get talking to the amazing Dara Lovitz.

Thank you for joining me on It’s All About Food.

Dara Lovitz: Hi, Caryn! Thanks for having me.

Caryn Hartglass: Hi! So all those lawyer jokes do not apply to you.

Dara Lovitz: They don’t apply to anyone. I do take offense to all those lawyer jokes. I don’t find them fair.

Caryn Hartglass: No. But you are one person who is doing wonderful things for the world and I thank you for that.

Dara Lovitz: Oh, I appreciate that. Well, thanks for what you’re doing to educate the public on responsible eating.

Caryn Hartglass: Yup. And living.

Dara Lovitz. And living.

Caryn Hartglass: Because it’s all one package. So I’m really curious. I know about this law that came into being a few years ago and I was hoping you could kind of enlighten us a little more about it, the animal antiterrorism … actually, how does it go?

Dara Lovitz: It’s the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act.

Caryn Hartglass: There we go, the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act. I did read the law not recently but I found it a bit confusing. And I understand that there’s some kind of loose misinterpretations in it that has led to some problems.

Dara Lovitz: Yes, exactly. Generally, the law prohibits the disruption or the interruption of animal enterprises, specifically causing damage to them, either economic damage or causing fear in the workers at the animal enterprise. And animal enterprise is a very, very broad term. It includes any entity that, I guess the way I would define it is any entity that exploits animals, whether it’s for their flesh for food, their bodies for science, their skin for fiber, for leather and fur, and even entities that exploit animals for entertainment purposes; entertainment in air quotes, of course: circuses, rodeos, zoos. And technically, because the wording is so broad, it could include almost any company because almost every retail business in the United States, in some way, exploits animals or has some connection to animals so it is very broad and whom it protects. And it’s broad in the sense that it’s attacking anybody who opposes these entities for their exploitation of animals.

Caryn Hartglass: Do you know the history of how this law came about?

Dara Lovitz: It has so many iterations that go back to the late ‘90s. Originally, Congress was focused on environmental quote unquote radicals. And they started some laws, eco-terror laws, to combat the environmental radicals. At some point, they started to become fearful of a new burgeoning movement. And I wouldn’t say it was a new movement but it became more known, the animal rights movements specifically, when animal rights activists started to liberate animals from mink farms and fox farms. And when that happened, and economic damage started to become more widespread against animal entities, Congress put together a statute that then included animal rights activists in these eco-terror laws. So it’s had several different iterations: the Farm Animal and Research Facilities Protection Act, and then the Animal Enterprise Protection Act, which became the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act. So the history goes back. But the most offensive and most constitutionally insufficient statute is the current one: the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act. It has become so much more restrictive; the penalties are harsher; it protects so many more entities, and it really prohibits the free speech rights of animal rights activists.

Caryn Hartglass: We live in a world that does a lot of exploitation and unfortunately, there are laws that encourage it or at least don’t prevent or discourage it. A lot of people accept it as day-to-day activity but we know what goes on in the factory farms is … I don’t even like to use the word humane because I don’t know what it means anymore. But what goes on in factory farming is horrific. What goes on with animal testing for a variety of different purposes is horrific; so much of it is unnecessary. And so we’re dealing with something that is considered acceptable to some degree in our society and so it’s really hard to fight against it and get the law on your side.

Dara Lovitz: It is. And you’re absolutely right. The way the laws are written, it’s really to protect facilities that do this. And we have animal cruelty codes; in every state there’s an animal cruelty law. And it’s really good if you’re a dog or a cat but if you’re any other animal, those animal cruelty codes do very little to protect you. In each animal cruelty code across the country, there’s a common farming exemption, which basically says that while you can’t rape a dog, and that would be animal cruelty if you did so. If you rape a cow, that’s okay because it’s part of a common farming practice; that’s what they do on farms and that’s okay. So usually livestock, agricultural animals, are protected, I mean, are not protected under these animal cruelty laws. So yeah, the laws are written with a very species-ist slant and a very industry protective slant and that’s something we’re battling and we’ve always had to battle. But this Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act takes it a step farther by saying not only do these laws protect these entities that exploit animals but if you oppose the law, if you speak out against them, if you cause economic damage to these entities that are exploiting animals, now you’ve committed a crime of terrorism. So it’s really bring this … it raises it to a very scary level with regard to civil rights.

Caryn Hartglass: Now, I don’t believe in violence to achieve an end. And I know that lots of wonderful things have happened as a result of violence and lots of horrible things have happened as a result. Personally, I kind of take the Gandhi route. But there’s more to this act. It’s not just about violence; it’s about speech.

Dara Lovitz: Exactly. And you’re right to bring up violence because it does, technically, cover violence but it also covers speech; it covers economic boycotts, which is civil disobedience, non-violent civil disobedience. I would say most of the people that would be harmed by the statute are those that are part of the non-violent movement to educate the public about what happens on these facilities, what these entities are doing. The problem with it, the Constitutional problem with it, is it covers non-violent speech activities, which are Constitutionally protected. And technically, the animal rights movement has been a non-violent movement in principle, the principles of our hymns and like you said, the Gandhi route. It really is about non-violence; it’s non-violence to all creatures, human and non-human. So this definitely targets more so a non-violent group for non-violent activities.

Caryn Hartglass: Okay. Now, since the most recent revision of this law came into place, ha sit been used?

Dara Lovitz: It has been applied. The big one that’s been applied and … it was applied in California, in the Buddenburg case. And that was challenged and ultimately, those charges were dismissed because the police and law enforcement and, I guess, the district attorney or the U. S. attorney who was filing the charges, wasn’t specific enough. So it was thrown out not because the AETA is un-Constitutional but because the charges against the alleged criminals, the animal rights activists in this case, were not specific enough and you have to be very specific when you’re filing criminal charges. More importantly, the big case is the Animal Enterprise Protection Act’s application to the Shack 7 Stop Huntington Animal Cruelty, a non-violent animal rights group that was trying to expose the horrors that were taking place behind closed walls of the Huntington Life Sciences, which is the largest animal testing lab in Europe and had a branch in New Jersey of the United States. So that was where it was the most offensive because six activists, six animal rights activists who are non-violent and did nothing … well, there was no direct evidence that any of them did anything illegal. They were thrown in federal prison for an aggregate of about 23 years so each one served a couple of years in prison.

Caryn Hartglass: But wasn’t there some … I am remembering this goes awhile back. I remember there was some explosion or something in a parking lot or something in California?

Dara Lovitz: Oh, possibly.

Caryn Hartglass: Some pharmaceutical company or something like that related to this case? I’m digging into my vague memories.

Dara Lovitz: I’m wondering if it was part of the Walter bond. Yeah, and I’m not sure. I don’t know what happened with the prosecution because I didn’t hear anything further about that. Yeah, there were bombings and then there was an arson attack but again, I don’t know much about the prosecution and I don’t believe the AETA was challenged on a Constitutional level for that. The AEPA, its predecessor, was challenged Constitutionally and made its way to the Supreme Court for the Shack 7 case but the Supreme Court denied … in other words, they said, “We’re not going to hear this case and we’re not going to decide on it” and that basically upheld the highest court, which is the 3rd Circuit of the United States, their affirmation that the AETA was not un-Constitutional.

Caryn Hartglass: So is there anything happening to change this law or things we should really be concerned about with regards to it at this point?

Dara Lovitz: I think the concern is what I stated, that the Constitunion being rewritten to prevent equal rights for animal rights activists. As far as what to do to change it, the Equal Justice Alliance is a great nonprofit that working to undo the harm of it. I think a Supreme Court challenge would be a good route. We wrote a position paper for Dennis Kucinich, who was very supportive of repealing the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act and unfortunately, he’s no longer able to help us in that regard. So it would be great if we could find another Congressperson who would be willing to spearhead the effort to repeal it.

Caryn Hartglass: I guess we just don’t know because it’s out there so broad. We just don’t know when someone might decide to use it against something really innocent.

Dara Lovitz: Right. And honestly, a lot of people say, “Well, I’m scared because I’m trying to get people to stop buying this product and will my economic boycott result in a conviction under the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act?” I truly believe that if they used it against us in a very obvious way, in a way that’s very obvious for us that we have free speech protection, then it would get knocked down. So I think the police and law enforcement will be selective and are going to be selective in how they use it; they’re not going to convict us for standing outside and passing out flyers and causing economic damage in that way. So I think the more it looks like free speech activity, the safer we are. While the AETA technically might apply to the activity, if law enforcement actually uses the AETA to convict us I think that would be a huge PR problem for them and it would give a really good Constitutional challenge to the AETA. I don’t know if law enforcement will want to present that opportunity for us to then challenge them Constitutionally and say, “See, this is why it’s unacceptable.”

Caryn Hartglass: Free speech.

Dara Lovitz: Yeah.

Caryn Hartglass: And then the other one are these Ag- Gag bills. Boy, that’s almost a tongue twister. Ag-Gag. Ag-Gag bills. Agriculture Gagging bills. Can we talk a little bit about that because they seem to be cropping up all over the place?

Dara Lovitz: Yeah. And for years, a couple of states had similar laws. Ag-Gag Bills, that’s what we call them; obviously, they’re not known by the industry that way. They basically prohibit the recording, or they criminalize, the recording of video or pictures at an agricultural facility, where animals are being used or raised or killed for food. And it just creates a new criminal act; a new code specifically for people who do this and it obviously targets animal rights activists who have made a good history of going on to factory farms and other facilities to take video footage and then disseminate that footage to the public, or use that footage in an animal cruelty case against the actual facility. So it’s really targeting, again, the animal rights movement. So a couple of states have had them on the books for a while. And most recently, Utah and Iowa added Ag-Gag bills and other states try all the time to get them passed and they don’t pass. So thankfully, we’re only dealing with maybe about five states total that have them.

I think the issue is twofold. I hate the fact that it targets the animal rights movement. Again, here’s another law that says animal rights activists can’t do what they’ve been doing in the way that they need to educate the public and stop the harm that’s happening to animals in facilities. The other issue is that it is a public health concern. I think … I hope you find with your audience, generally, people want to know the origin of their food, where their food comes from …

Caryn Hartglass: Well, let’s just stop right there. I mean, that’s part of the problem in the food industry today because most Americans don’t care what’s in their food.

Dara Lovitz: Is that what you found?

Caryn Hartglass: Yeah. I think my audience cares but I don’t think most people care.

Dara Lovitz: Yeah. Or they don’t want …

Caryn Hartglass: Anyway, I interrupted your train of thought there. I’m sorry.

Dara Lovitz: Oh, no, that’s okay. Maybe I’m more optimistic about it. I think people want to be educated, generally. You know, with that pink … was it the pink slime?

Caryn Hartglass: Pink slime. But that’s just because all of a sudden the media was harping on pink slime. People have no idea what’s in their food but they started getting hysterical about pink slime because the media told them about it. But if they cared, they would know that it’s not just pink slime. Pink slime’s the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the horrible things that are in people’s foods.

Dara Lovitz: Yeah. I guess I was hoping that the public outcry about that was proof that the public does care. But I don’t know; you’re in a better position than I to know that. I guess, in the end, I was hoping that … What I don’t like about these bills is they prohibit more information from getting to the public. So any videos that support the pink slime argument or any videos that support that pigs are cruelly treated before they wind up on your plate as ham, those videos would not be disseminated to the public. I, personally as part of my journey to become a vegan, videos were huge for me; seeing the suffering. And I could hear about it but I’m a visual learner and that’s just the way I roll. But seeing the images, in pamphlets, and then watching videos, was so instrumental in my transition from an omnivore to a vegan. I think it’s important. I think those videos are important. So it’s not just important for animal rights and for veganism but also just for public health; making the public aware of where their food is coming from. It can’t hurt.

Caryn Hartglass: Oh, I really believe in those things. I think they’re very important. And I think we need to se them more frequently and then maybe people would be more concerned. But they’re not as concerned because they don’t hear enough. Occasionally, they’ll hear something in a 5-second sound byte or something on television. But if they heard it everyday, all of a sudden it would kind of be elevated in their list of things to worry about.

Dara Lovitz: Definitely. And if we get the right video produced the right way and we can disseminate it on Facebook or something and have people watch it. Or let the Today Show cover some 2-minute segment that we can show. But again, those videos would not be published because the those videos won’t be taken because of these Ag-Gag bills.

Caryn Hartglass: Now, I know the people are still doing undercover footage of different facilities. Have these bills, do you know, have they been used to prosecute anyone?

Dara Lovitz: Not that I know of because I actually don’t think anyone’s been caught yet in the states where they exist. And let’s hope that we keep it that way.

Caryn Hartglass: Right. Interesting, I was speaking with Sue Coe a few weeks ago and she’s done a lot of incredible artwork. She said that her … One of her strategies, I don’t even know if she realizes it’s a strategy, but she’ll talk to people and ask if she can … people who work inside these facilities with animals and she’ll ask if she can draw them. And is there anything in the law that says you can’t do paintings or drawings of what’s inside?

Dara Lovitz: Is she … Is she drawing … Oh, I thought … I’m sorry I misunderstood. Is she drawing the people that work there?

Caryn Hartglass: No. She’s drawing anything she sees in the facility.

Dara Lovitz: Let’s see … Yeah, that could technically … It depends how broadly the statute is written. But if it’s … A lot of the time it’s saying things like, “Recording images.” Technically, by writing it down you’re recording the image.

Caryn Hartglass: That’s a recording, yeah. But it’s not clear, I guess, which particular facility it’s in because it’s artist rendering but it’s really an interesting way the way she gets into these facilities because they basically just invite her: “So, are you just drawing?” And she says, “I can show you what I’m doing.” I don’t know if you’ve seen some of the images that are in her newest book, Cruel, but very fascinating work.

Dara Lovitz: Oh, that sounds great. And that might be a little different; if they’re inviting her into the premises for the purpose of recording then I think she would be clear.

Caryn Hartglass: Well, sometimes we have to be a little clever this way rather than …

Dara Lovitz: Exactly.

Caryn Hartglass: Anyway, what’s going on is horrible. And clearly the laws, in many instances, do not support what I think is really right and just.

Dara Lovitz: Right. We’re battling a bunch of people and lawmakers who just don’t see it the way we do and that’s tough; they have power. And frankly, the lobbying industries, the lobbying groups who represent these industries that’s tough on animals and exploit animals are so powerful and have so much money; unfortunately, that money goes a long way with influencing lawmakers.

Caryn Hartglass: I’m just curious. You teach animal law at two schools, two schools of law. What does that consist of, animal law?

Dara Lovitz: It talks about the conflict between laws that take into consideration the interests of humans and how they can balance the interest that’s non-human, animals.

Caryn Hartglass: Now, I’m imagining that people coming from different perspectives would present these courses in varying different ways.

Dara Lovitz: Yes, there is a lot of variation. The Animal Legal Defense Fund has a wonderful resource for animal law professors. We could technically all teach the same course the way we’d want too. But there’s a lot of leeway and I think we all put our personal spin on the way we teach the course. I know some animal professors don’t show videos; they don’t show videos of animal cruelty. They feel like it’s imposing horror and violence on the students and putting students in an uncomfortable position, having to watch them as part of the class. I’m the other way. I think videos are so powerful. I show them in class. I usually give them warning. But I also ask my students in the beginning of the class whether they’ve watched any violent movies like Gladiator, Saw, or Hostel. My feeling is, if they’ve been able to expose themselves to human suffering in these fictitious movies, of course; but if they’re okay watching blood and guts in the human context, in the movie, then they should be, in my mind and maybe my logic is flawed, but they should be okay with watching blood and guts on video when it’s about animals. Now, the difference is one if fictitious and one is real. And it’s hard for me to logically get over that issue but …

Caryn Hartglass: I think that’s part of the problem. I think because we view so much violence, fictitious or otherwise, it makes us really numb to the reality of it.

Dara Lovitz: It really does; we’re very desensitized. However, I find that people seeing video images of animal suffering are affected by it; they’re not desensitized to it. And that’s …

Caryn Hartglass: That sounds hopeful.

Dara Lovitz: That is; it’s hopeful. So anyway, the point is I do show videos to my animal law students and not every animal law professor does it. So we really do teach our classes with a very personal touch. But thankfully …

Caryn Hartglass: Do you know, are all animal law professors vegans or are they coming from different points of view?

Dara Lovitz: No. Yeah, they’re not. And you know, I battle this all the time. I’ll be invited to speak at animal law conferences and the lunch, the free lunch that’s given to faculty, has turkey wraps and tuna sandwiches and it’s … look, I’ll speak personally from the Pennsylvania perspective. The Pennsylvania Bar Association or the Pennsylvania Law Bar Institute has me speak and their position is animal law isn’t animal rights law. It’s animal law so technically, it includes lawyers who are defending farmers and lawyers who are defending breeding facilities; and technically, that’s true. So no, animal law is not animal rights law and animal law professors are not all vegan nor do they all teach from an animal rights perspective. And I, personally, am not allowed to teach animal rights. The deans in both law schools have been very specific that I’m to teach a very neutral animal law.

Caryn Hartglass: Now, that was my next question: how do the deans handle what you’re doing?

Dara Lovitz: Yeah, that’s it. They see who I am and they read my biography and that’s the first warning I get is “This is not a chance for you to stand on a soap box and preach.” And it’s very important that you allow … And I think that’s important because the students, and this is what the deans have said, they want to feel comfortable; they don’t want to think, “I’m not a vegetarian. I’m not a vegan; therefore, if I attend this class and speak in class, the professor will penalize me for my views” and that cannot be. I’ve been very careful about teaching the course very neutrally. The grading is completely anonymous. And in class, I do bring in our industry arguments. I realize that when I talk, I talk with a bit of an advocacy slant. I know that it comes out; it can’t not come out. It’s so a part of me; it’s so ingrained in me the way I discuss things.

Caryn Hartglass: Oh, we all do.

Dara Lovitz: Yeah. And that might not be fair to the other students who don’t necessarily agree with me on that position so I always make sure that I have the industry perspective represented, either I have students go to their websites, the Animal Agriculture Alliance website, or I’ll have a speaker come in who can give a position opposite of mine. So I try to make it as balanced as possible.

Caryn Hartglass: Have some of the students come to you outside of class to find out more about being vegan?

Dara Lovitz: Yes. I also, and this is a little … I hope you don’t think this manipulative but I always come to class with vegan cookies or vegan cakes, something that I’ve made. Because it’s a night class and my justification is, “You’re tired; you need sugar. You need something to stay up.” So I usually bring vegan desserts.

Caryn Hartglass: Yeah, manipulation; I support it. Why not?

Dara Lovitz: Yes. So a lot of times students are asking me for recipes or they want to know how did I get this to taste like this without butter or dairy. So there’s a little bit of vegan outreach that I try to do subliminally. And …

Caryn Hartglass: The most effective vegan outreach is by mouth. Vegan people make delicious food.

Dara Lovitz: I think so. I think it’s been helpful. And honestly, the videos have really helped the students see what they’ve never been exposed to before. I usually have at least a student or two go vegan after the course, which is so validating for me. And again, because I’m teaching the course from a very neutral position, it’s them just taking information and taking it a little bit further.

Caryn Hartglass: Do you have some favorite videos? Favorite may not be the right word but the videos that are the most provocative, most compelling.

Dara Lovitz: I’ve used Farm To Fridge the past two semesters, which I think is a Mercy for Animals DVD. It’s about 12 minutes long and I show most of that. I used to show Earthlings but one of my students pointed out and it didn’t even occurred to me but there’s a science portion of Earthlings and the scientists look like they’re from … the video footage must be from the ‘70s. The scientists are wearing Coke bottle glasses and they look so dated. The students’ interpretation of that was, “Well, if there’s no modern footage, how do we know this stuff is still going on?” So yeah, I didn’t think about that. And I like the ’70s style so maybe … but after I realized so I stopped showing that. I also show a lot of clips from sharkonline.org. Shark the group has some good clips on rodeo cruelty. I find little clips here and there that I find that are effective for the students. I try not to make it too long; it depends what the issue is. And honestly, Jon Stewart, the Daily Show, has some funny clips. I like to show them as well to lighten the mood so the students don’t think that every time I turn off the lights in the classroom something horrible is about to come on.

Caryn Hartglass: Right, that’s important. All right, we have about 10 minutes left and I thought we could touch on the things that you’re working on. I know in New York City we have one of the tourist attractions. Mayor Bloomberg, of course, thinks it’s a very important tourist attractions and that’s the horse-drawn carriages. Do you have them also in Philadelphia?

Dara Lovitz: We do, unfortunately.

Caryn Hartglass: How do you feel about that? Have they been there a long time? I don’t remember seeing them.

Dara Lovitz: Yeah. That’s a good question because people who defend them say, “It’s part of our tradition.” In fact, it wasn’t until the late ‘70s, with the Bicentennial Celebration, that the mayor brought them back to Philadelphia; otherwise, they weren’t part of our quote unquote tradition in Philadelphia. They weren’t a historical part of Philadelphia. And of course, that was the way of transportation centuries ago. That was how they transport, I understand that. We have very narrow streets in some parts of the old city, which show little … there are these little metal iron things where you wipe your foot from the horse dung. This clearly was a horse-traversed town but not for years and years. And the horse-drawn carriage industry as a touristy thing in old city just came in the late’70s. But they are a pretty big part of the old city, Independence Hall, in that area.

Caryn Hartglass: Right. Well, when I think of New York City horse-drawn carriages don’t come to mind; they’re not on my list of anywhere near the top. I’m thinking about culture, Broadway, the arts, Lincoln Center, Metropolitan Opera, all of the great museums, all of the great food, the Statue of Liberty and on and on and on. Horse-drawn carriages are just like some little speck that isn’t really important. I don’t understand why it’s such a big deal and yet it is. In the grand scheme of things I, personally, prefer talking about the factory farming of animals because there’s so many more that are involved. It’s true that there aren’t many numbers involved when it comes to horse-drawn carriages but it’s something that’s very visual and definitely unnecessary. And where are we in this movement of getting rid of it?

Dara Lovitz: Getting rid of factory farming?

Caryn Hartglass: No, getting rid of horse-drawn carriages.

Dara Lovitz: Okay. Yeah, and to your point it is a single-issue campaign. My nonprofit group, Peace Advocacy Network, generally avoids this. We really do try to promote veganism and educate about veganism. But it’s so obvious in Philadelphia and frankly, we’ve been able to get a lot of people to read our literature on veganism, who show up to our horse-drawn carriage demos. So we’ve used it as a way to do vegan outreach as well. I know that sounds a little counter-intuitive but there are a lot more Philadelphians who are opposed to the horse-drawn carriage industry than are vegans. So we can interest them in horse, to understand why it’s cruel to horses, and then educate them about animals that are also subjected to cruelty. In Philadelphia, we had this Councilperson who is very supportive of the industry. A lot of his campaign dollars came from the horse owners. There are two main companies that run these horse-drawn carriages. He is now out of office. And we have someone new who is pretty liberal and progressive and we’re so hoping that our letters and our efforts are going to be instrumental here. We’ve already drafted a ban. We have legislation at the ready. We have dozens and dozens of signatures from business owners because we know that’s where the money and the tax paying comes from, the business owners in old city Philadelphia. So we have letters from them, supporting our efforts to ban horse-drawn carriages; we have constituents. So we really are trying to create a very strong campaign to get this ban passed. And we recently have an accident, where a horse got spooked, surprise surprise, and bolted and then a car hit the horse and the horse became injured and the car driver was injured, which really is what gets the media’s attention, when the human is injured. Horses are injured everyday that they’re out there on the street and nobody covers it but the second a human is involved then the media get on to it. So we have a demonstration scheduled this Sunday to bring light to that accident and why horse-drawn carriages are just unacceptable and unwelcome in Philadelphia anymore.

Caryn Hartglass: Oh, I’m just taking a big deep breath here. There’s so much that we need to do and I never understand why people support exploitation, pain, suffering, and cruelty. So let’s all breathe together.

Dara Lovitz: Yeah, these are the things that keep us active as activists.

Caryn Hartglass: Yup. I mean, what else would we do? Gosh. I like to think about that. If we weren’t doing this work, what an incredible world this would be. And let’s see. So you have a nonprofit, Peace Advocacy Network. What’s going on there and who takes advantage of that?

Dara Lovitz: We have a couple of missions and we believe they’re all interconnected. One is to promote veganism; another is to promote social justice; and the third arm of it is protecting the Earth’s resources. We believe environmentalism, social justice, and veganism are all interconnected. And we have separate campaigns. We have an LGBTQ campaign for social justice. We have a human trafficking campaign and feeding the hungry. But they’re related to veganism. They’re related to compassion, and peace, and non-violence. And I think the environmental connections, I don’t need to explain as much with veganism. So we have a bunch of different campaigns running at the moment. We try to … People will show up at our gay rights demonstrations and they have no exposure to veganism and we’re able to give them some literature to help them understand or we’ll have a social event after the demo at a vegan restaurant. We connect all these issues because again, it has to do with compassion. Species-ism is not so far from homophobia and it’s not so far from these other social justice issues out there. With regards to feeding the hungry, we have contributions of fruits and vegetables to lower income neighborhoods because we believe we need to give them access. Right now, they have access to Burger King and the McDonald’s and that’s about it.

Caryn Hartglass: Right. About racism and homophobism and species-ism, sexism, I get it; I get that they’re all connected. But unfortunately, I think those who decide they’re being exploited under one of those somehow tend to want to slip into some hierarchy and feel that their issue is not the same as another issue and that you’re insulting them by saying that it is. I remember protesting at a Ringling Bros. circus event outside Madison Square Garden and there were people that were really annoyed when we tried to connect the issue of human slavery to animal exploitation and they were really insulted.

Dara Lovitz: I run into that too, with circus demos and we have a big placard that does make the comparison. I understand that it’s a very deep and personal topic and the people who are offended are usually ones who don’t think about animals very respectfully and they think that they’re being compared to animals, which to them is an insult. I, personally, would love to be compared to these brave sentient creatures, whom we’ve exploit and they love us unconditionally for some reason.

Caryn Hartglass: Yeah, isn’t that amazing? That’s what they do and how do they do that? Love unconditionally? It’s just something we really need to learn how to do.

Dara Lovitz: Yeah.

Caryn Hartglass: Is that why the animals are here to teach us that?

Dara Lovitz: I don’t know. They’re here to teach us something.

Caryn Hartglass: We’re not getting it.

Dara Lovitz: Yes, we’re not getting it. And yeah, I do find that once in a while. And you have to be very careful because I don’t want to lose audience members. I don’t want to lose people who might be open to our message otherwise, if we didn’t use that rhetoric. So we try to be very careful when we’re toeing that line.

Caryn Hartglass: Okay, we just have a few minutes left and I’m just looking in things I might talk to you about. And one of them that’s talking to me right now is breed discrimination. What is that and what are the animal laws related to that?

Dara Lovitz: Breed discriminatory laws are typically laws against certain breeds in towns; they’re really not, for the most part, they’re not statewide. It’s a town ordinance that says you can’t have a pit bull or you can’t have a Rottweiler within the city limits. And sometimes, it’s not saying you can’t have them but it’s saying that if you do, you have to have them muzzled in public or you can’t let them out, you can’t let them out of a leash in a public area. There are all kinds of restrictions and they’re specific to the breed of the dog, as opposed to just saying if your dog has bitten someone, regardless of its breed, then you have to muzzle the dog. That’s different; that’s the dog law and it’s pretty accepted across the country but it’s vague as to the breed; whereas these bred discriminatory laws say that if it’s a pit bull, if it’s a Rottweiler … and there are about, a lot, maybe a dozen different dog breeds that are criminalized specifically. And what’s ridiculous is that law enforcement has no clue what a pit bull is versus another non-pit animal. They’re so bad at identifying. There are so many studies done showing them images and the officers have to identify what’s a pit bull and what’s not and the fail rate are ridiculous. So it’s not even enforceable; these laws aren’t enforceable but they’re also just so harmful to pit bull owners. And they think people with pit bull would agree they’re such generally friendly dogs. There are pit bulls that attack just like there are Jack Russell terriers that attack. It all has to do with behavior and discipline and background, the history of the animal. It’s so ridiculous that a whole breed should be discriminated against one that’s…. It’s really dog specific not breed specific as to whether a dog is violent.

Caryn Hartglass: Sure. We have the same problem with human beings, okay? There are some who cause a lot of problems. What do we do about them? Okay, we just have a minute left. Anything you want to share with us before we sign off?

Dara Lovitz: Well, I really appreciate the time to discuss these issues. I encourage people to check out the Equal Justice Alliance and learn as much as you can about the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act. Anytime that there’s a broadcast, an email, saying, “Contact your Senator. Contact your Congressperson. Now’s the time,” do it. I think those things go a long way. And I just hope your listeners take action when they have opportunities to do so.

Caryn Hartglass: Yup. It’s up to each one of us individually; do as much as you can.

Thank you so, Dara Lovitz, for joining me on It’s All About Food.

Dara Lovitz: Thank you, Caryn. Take care.

Caryn Hartglass: Okay, have a great day. And thank you to all my listeners for joining me today. I’m Caryn Hartglass. Check out my website, resopnsibleeatingandliving.com. And have a very delicious week and please stay cool.

Transcribed by Diana O’Reilly, 3/29/2013

Feeding Kids, GMO Apples, Japanese Festivals, Bastille Day, FAO, Lyme Disease

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7/15/2012 Episode #99:

A listener who recently went vegan wants her child to eat vegan too. I give some helpful tips on how to feed kids vegan. I also recommend a couple of books by Ruby Roth for children to learn about why some people don’t eat animals.

I gave some thoughts on people keeping chickens after I read the following article:
“Backyard Flocks are the trendy new things” which you can find here by downloading the newsletter: http://www.mercurynews.com/rose-garden.

Yesterday was Gustav Klimt’s 150th Anniversary, and I recommend reading my story on Klimt.

I spoke briefly about the Obon Festival in San Jose, CA and having vegan treats from The Inspired Cookie Company at Roy’s Station, a local coffee shop in Japantown.

In honor of Bastille Day yesterday in France I spoke about the vegan restaurant Tugalik in Paris.

Apples continue to be in the news and it’s not all good. I spoke about the genetically modified apple by Okanagan Specialty Fruits designed not to brown when cut open.

I discussed the unfortunate news in the recent New York Times Mark Bittman blog on July 11 entitled FAO Yields to Meat Industry Pressure on Climate Change by Robert Goodland.

With Lyme Disease seemingly on the rise, I talk about some things to look out for to avoid it.

Breathing, Milk, Fall Gardens, Big Food, Apple Peels

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7/8/2012 Episode #98: In this program I discuss Mark Bittman’s recent blog, Got Milk You Don’t Need It, the Public Library of Science, PLoS, Medicine Series on Big Food, Planning Your Fall Garden, a new study on Ursolic Acid in Apple peels for weight loss, and another reminder about the importance of breathing, breathing correctly and taking time to smell the roses.

Healthy Eating While Traveling; Corn; New JAMA Weight-loss study

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7/1/2012 Episode #97: After spending a week traveling in Cape Cod I share how I ate and what simple dishes I created. I cover some news items, including corn: more corn planted than ever before, heat and droughts may damage crops, GMO corn and summer corn for eating; and a new study from the Journal of the American Medical Association claiming certain diets may help the body lose more weight.

Cape Cod, Lobsters, Hot Dogs, The Vegan Imperative!

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6/24/2012 Episode #96:

This week’s show is broadcast live from Cape Cod. I’m talking about animal exploitation and the vegan imperative followed by summer, Coney Island, Nathan’s hot dogs and superior vegan alternatives, ratatouille, and while here on the coast, the plight of lobsters and other sea life.

Interviews with Gary Steiner and Sue Coe, 6/21/2012

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Episode #157

6/20/2012:

Part I: Gary Steiner
Animal Rights and The Vegan Imperative

Gary Steiner is John Howard Harris Professor of Philosophy at Bucknell University. He is the author of Descartes as a Moral Thinker: Christianity, Technology, Nihilism, Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents: The Moral Status of Animals in the History of Western Philosophy and Animals and the Moral Community: Mental Life, Moral Status, and Kinship. He is the author of the NYT Op-Ed piece, Animal, Vegetable, Misery.

Additional interviews with Gary Steiner can be found at the links below:

1. A radio interview (in three parts) with Adam Roufberg for his program on the public radio station at Vassar College:

2. A shorter radio interview in Vienna. Scroll down and you’ll find the place where the interview (in English) starts:

3. A short videotaped interview in English in Vienna:

4. A podcast with Gary Francione for his Abolitionist site:

6/20/2012:

Part II: Sue Coe
Cruel: Bearing Witness to Animal Exploitation

Sue Coe was born in England and grew up next to a slaughterhouse. She studied at the Royal College of Art in London and emigrated to New York in 1972. Early in her career, she was featured in almost every issue of Art Spiegelman’s groundbreaking magazine Raw and has since contributed illustrations to the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Nation, Entertainment Weekly, Time, Details, Village Voice, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, Esquire and Mother Jones, among other publications. She is widely regarded as one of the best and most scathing artists of her time. Her paintings have been exhibited in galleries and museum around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art. Her previous books include Dead Meat, How to Commit Suicide in South Africa, X, and Pit’s Letter. Sue currently lives in a small cabin in upstate New York that she converted into a solar powered sustainable home, built largely from recycled materials.

View photos of some of Sue’s artwork in her book Cruel on Huffington Post.

TRANSCRIPTION:

Hello! I’m Caryn Hartglass and you are listening to It’s All About Food. It is June 20th. Happy Summer 2012. Thanks for joining me today. It’s going to be a very interesting program. I am the founder of Responsible Eating and Living. You can go to ResponsibleEatingAndLiving.com. That’s where I put up all kinds of information and recipes and videos to make it easy for you to live a plant-based, cruelty-free, environmentally friendly, lovely life. I like to make it happy and easy for you to do that. Read more »

Broccoli, Food Stamps, Tuna, Seeds, Bees

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6/17/2012, Episode #95: Under or over the Linden Tree by my terrace, now in bloom and so fragrant I talk about the Supreme Court’s twist on broccoli; food stamps and corporations; mercury in tuna; collecting kale seeds, the benefits of chia seeds: The Seed Experience; honey, beeswax and bee pollen; and the wonders of garbanzo flour.
garbanzo flour! Vegetable cakes

Interviews with Will Tuttle and Victoria Moran

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Episode #156

6/13/2012:

Part I: Will Tuttle
World Peace Diet

Dr. Will Tuttle is an award-winning speaker, educator, author, and musician. His music, writings, and presentations focus on creativity, intuition, and compassion. Dr. Tuttle presents about 150 events yearly at conferences, retreats, and progressive churches and centers throughout North America. A former Zen monk with a Ph.D. in education from U.C., Berkeley, he has worked extensively in intuition development, spiritual healing, meditation, music, creativity, vegan living, and cultural evolution.

For more insight from Will Tuttle listen to the last year’s interview on June 8, 2011 HERE.

6/13/2012:

Part II: Victoria Moran
Main Street Vegan

Victoria Moran writes life-enhancing books. “Self-help” is the genre and one of her passions to make self-help literature, too. In addition, she does keynote speaking and is a certified life coach, with in-person clients in New York City and telephone clients from all over. She hosts an Internet radio show, “Your Charmed Life,” on www.HealthyLife.net, and she does a daily blog on Beliefnet.com. She’s also been a guest on Oprah! twice — with her books Shelter for the Spirit and Lit from Within. Her best-selling book to date is Creating a Charmed Life—it’s in 29 languages and quoted on boxes of Celestial Seasonings teas—and it has a brand new sequel, Living a Charmed Life: Your Guide to Finding Magic in Every Moment of Every Day. For the first thirty years of her life, she struggled with overeating and dieting; she overcame that (from the inside out) and shares what she knows in her books Fit from Within and, newly revised and updated: The Love-Powered Diet: Eating for Freedom, Health, and Joy. You can keep in touch by subscribing to her newsletter, The Charmed Monday Minute at www.victoriamoran.com; follow her on Twitter or join her Facebook Fan Page .

TRANSCRIPTIONS

PART 1:

Caryn Hartglass: Hello, I’m Caryn Hartglass and you’re listening to It’s All About Food. It is Wednesday, June 13, 2012. And here we go with another hour, talking about something that I think is really very important: food. And I know that so many of us out there feel so frustrated. Read more »

Animal Sanctuaries, Egg Replacers, Silken Tofu, Banana Bread

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6/10/2012, Episode #94: In this show, Caryn Hartglass and Gary De Mattei cover a lot of ground. They talk about attending two Catskill Animal Sanctuary events this week – the 11th Annual Shindig at the Sanctuary and the Barn Raiser Event in NYC, and they go into the purpose of animal sanctuaries. They discuss the variety of egg replacers and their uses, the different types of tofu available and the latest recipes added to the REAL website including Stir-Fried Greens, Banana Bread and Corn Cakes.

Manhattan’s Veggie Pride Parade, Mayor Bloomberg’s Newest Ban, Rice Paper, Hibiscus Flowers.

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June 6, 2012: In this hour I reviewed last week’s wonderful Veggie Pride Parade in Manhattan. I discussed how the attitude towards cigarette smoking has changed in the last 50 years and compared what is needed to be done with diet. I gave my spin on Mayor Bloomberg’s new ban on sugary drinks and offered up lots of refreshing beverage alternatives. I answered some listener questions on the many shades of vegan – from raw to cooked. I shared my fascination with Rice Paper and all the delicious things you can do with it including Chef Roberto Martin’s fried chick’n recipe and briefly talk about the health benefits of Linden Tree and Hibicus flowers.

Interviews with Linda Riebel and Roberto Martin

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Episode# 155

6/6/2012:

Part I: Linda Riebel
The Green Foodprint

Linda Riebel, is a psychologist and environmental educator. At Saybrook University in San Francisco, where she has been on the faculty since 1993, she helped create the sustainability program. A graduate of Wellesley College, she is a member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, as well as of many environmental organizations. At SaveNature.org, she is program director of Edible EdVentures, which brings the message of earth-friendly food to classrooms around the Bay Area.

Linda was assisted by Ken Jacobsen, a researcher and planner for high-tech corporations, who has also catered, taught cooking, and written a cookbook. Their original edition of the book was Eating to Save the Earth: Food Choices for a Healthy Planet (2002).

The Green Foodprint draws from a variety of sources: books, government reports, scientific studies, newsletters and websites of environmental organizations, and personal communications with numerous experts. Newspapers, including the New York Times, were valuable in showcasing good news (such as growing food on rooftops), and keeping us up to date on unfolding stories, such as ocean depletion.

6/6/2012:

Part II: Roberto Martin
VEGAN COOKING FOR CARNIVORES

When Roberto Martin began working for Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi, he was not a vegan chef. He quickly discovered that the flavors that worked in his best non-vegan dishes – the dishes he loved and that were adored by his many celebrity clients — worked in vegan dishes as well. He learned how to make delicious, easy substitutions of animal-based products with plant-based protein to create perfect, familiar and comforting food that also happens to be easy-to-make, healthy and vegan!

In VEGAN COOKING FOR CARNIVORES, Roberto shares over 125 satisfying, meat-free recipes, such as Banana and Oatmeal Pancakes, Whole Wheat Waffles with Maple-Berry Syrup, Chick’n Pot Pie, Mac’N Cheese, Fajita Quesadillas, Avocado Reuben, Red Beans and Rice, Chocolate Cheesecake, Mexican Wedding Cookies and Chocolate Chip Magic Bars. The recipes are easy for the home cook to make with ingredients available at any supermarket. With Roberto’s goal in mind of encouraging Americans to eat at least one vegan meal per week, the cookbook will appeal to both die-hard carnivores and vegans alike.

Roberto Martin attended the Culinary Institute of America, became a private chef, and honed his knowledge of nutrition and health customizing meals to meet the dietary needs of his celebrity clients. Now, Roberto cooks exclusively vegan meals for the DeGeneres household, and appears frequently on The Ellen DeGeneres Show.

TRANSCRIPTIONS

TRANSCRIPTION PART I:

Caryn Hartglass: Hello, I’m Caryn Hartglass and you are listening to It’s All About Food. Thank you for joining me for another week where I get to talk for an hour about my favorite subject, food and all the things that are related to the food that we eat: our planet Earth, our health and animals. So, today I want to talk about food and food choices and how they affect the health of people and the health of the planet and I’m going to be doing that specifically with my new guest Linda Riebel, who wrote a book called The Green Foodprint. Read more »

Interviews with Jim VanDerPol and Jason Das

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5/30/2012:

Part I: Jim VanDerPol
Conversations with the Land

Jim VanDerPol farms and writes in a western Minnesota world very different from the one in which he was raised in the 1950s and 1960s. The small, diversified farms and tight-knit communities of his youth have been replaced by town jobs and gigantic equipment operating on huge tracts of land. The culture of the agriculture that Jim knew is almost entirely gone, and he wants it back. Through his farming, alternative marketing, writing and work with sustainable agriculture groups in Minnesota, Jim is making an important contribution toward efforts to resurrect that culture. Where others simply pine for days of yore and lament what has happened, in Conversations with the Land Jim offers a clear and down-to-earth vision for what each of us can do to return agriculture to something that can do better by the environment, the people who live within it, and even the nation as a whole. Those who are concerned that we have moved too far from the land will find much to think about – and draw inspiration from – in the pages of this book.

5/30/2012:

Part II: Jason Das
Super Vegan

Jason is a co-founder of SuperVegan.com. He is responsible for most of the design and front-end code on the site, and more than a little of the content. Along with Deborah Diamant, Jason is a co-founder and co-organizer of Vegan Drinks.

Jason is also a freelance web developer and an artist in various capacities. You can keep tabs on his various rackets at Jason Das.

TRANSCRIPTION PART I:

Caryn Hartglass: Hello I’m Caryn Hartglass and you’re listening to It’s All About Food. How are you doing today on this May 30, 2012? Well we get to talk about food on this show, my favorite subject and touch a lot of different subjects related to food, food and health, food and the environment, food and all life on Earth. I’ve been reflecting a lot lately on food, well I think about food all the time, but I’ve been realizing how many of us who are talking about the alternative food movement and trying to change the way our food is grown and how it’s grown, going from giant agribusiness to encouraging more organic locally grown farming, farming that is sustainable. I realized that a lot of us that are in this conversation really have a privilege to be able to make choices about our food. There are many people who can’t even make choices because either access to food or because of their financial situation, they just eat whatever they can and that’s a problem. We should all have access to affordable, healthy food and there is a wide range of that and what I’m really focusing on lately is aligning myself with other people that are in the alternative food movement. I was exposed to a great deal at the Brooklyn Food Conference recently. There were so many different panels, over 175 with people talking about all different kinds of issues when it comes to food. The thing is many of us disagree on some of the fine points and I think it’s so important that we align on the broad strokes, big issues: organic, fresh, locally grown, food that supports our communities. With that, I’m going to introduce my first guest. He’s an author, Jim Van Der Pol, he has a new book, Conversations With the Land and he farms and writes in western Minnesota, a world very different from the one in which he was raised in the 1950s and 60s. The small diversified farms in tight knit communities have been replaced by town jobs and gigantic equipment operating on huge tracts of land. The culture of the agriculture that Jim knew was almost entirely gone and he wants it back. Through his farming, alternative marketing, writing, and working with sustainable agriculture groups in Minnesota, Jim makes an important contribution towards efforts to resurrect that culture, where others simply pine for days of yore and lament what has happened in conversations with the land. Jim offers a clear and down-to-earth vision for what each of us can do to return agriculture to something that can do better by the environment, the people who live within it, and even the nation as a whole. Those who are concerned that we have moved too far from the land will find much to think about and draw inspiration from in the pages of this book. Thank you for joining me on It’s All About Food, Jim.

Jim Van Der Pol: Well I’m happy to be with you.

Caryn Hartglass: I read your book, I enjoyed it. I like especially in New York City, books that have short chapters, unique essays. So this is a collection of essays. It’s very convenient to read on a subway.

Jim Van Der Pol: Yes, good.

Caryn Hartglass: When you’re just sitting and you don’t have a lot of time, you can get a nugget each time and get back to it later. Very good. There’s a lot of passion in this book and a lot of different emotions and we might hit on some of them. The first thing I wanted to talk about was the beauty and the love of the land that you find over the seasons, the change that goes on, how dynamic it all is. How surprising it all is. There’s a number of different essays where you go over a number of situations like that. Well the seasons, farming is never ever the same.

Jim Van Der Pol: No, it’s not and it takes command of your life, basically. When you do it for as long as I’ve done it, because the day length constantly changes and because the work needs to fit the season and the seasons in effect chase the work so you get it done when it needs to be done instead of two weeks or two months too late, there’s that constant attention to basically the environment or the world that you’re living in. I think of it as a conversation and that’s part of the reason why I used the title I do. It’s a conversation, it’s a communication with the environment. I’m not exactly sure how to express it more fully than that.

Caryn Hartglass: I really like the title and it’s so important to pay attention and so many of us don’t pay attention to most things that pass us by. So that’s really an accomplished skill that you’ve developed that unfortunately many of us have lost through the generations.

Jim Van Der Pol: That’s right. One of the things I try to point out in several of the essays is that it’s important for us, whatever we’re doing, to live in the place we’re living and that starts with living in our own bodies instead of on television or on the internet. You don’t have to farm to do that, but farming, at least farming the way we do it here on this farm, kind of insists on it. I guess I feel pretty lucky, I’m not sure that with another occupation I would have been led into the kind of approach to my surroundings that I am.

Caryn Hartglass: Well there’s lots of things we can always imagine, oh I could have done that or what would have happened if I made that choice, but you’re definitely, you seem very well suited for farming.

Jim Van Der Pol: Yes, I think I am. It’s a curse sometimes of course, but most of the time it’s a blessing.

Caryn Hartglass: Well, you know, a lot of things in life, a lot of things that people have difficulty in life, any challenge that comes along, we tend to resist and that makes it so much more of a struggle no matter what challenge it is, it’s resisting. The feeling that I got with farming was that you understand that you’re not in control.

Jim Van Der Pol: Yes, that’s right.

Caryn Hartglass: You just have to go with whatever comes, try and be prepared.

Jim Van Der Pol: In order to operate a farm or to live on a farm and work on a farm, you need to be pretty steady temperament and strong minded, but at the same time you have to admit that everything that you think you’ve got planned for the plan or for the week or for your life or for this project or the other that has to do with the farm can be knocked awry and taken apart in an instant just by change in the weather, the biology of the plants or animals that you’re working with and by a number of other things, markets in the financial system for example.

Caryn Hartglass: Something that we are not doing, we as a global culture. When we evaluate wealth in the world we don’t really, I don’t think the equation has got it down at all. I’m not a doom and gloom kind of person, but if we had horrible crisis that made it really difficult for people in urban areas to access food, it would really, really be serious and we do not value people who own land and grow food on that land enough. If we ever come to a situation, we’re routed. Everything falls apart. Those that are on the farms with the food are the ones who are going to survive.

Jim Van Der Pol: Yes, that’s right. If we ever come to a situation where everything falls apart, I hope and I’m sure probably yours as well is that it falls apart a little slowly so that we’ve got time to react to it. We have ourselves in a lot of ways in a situation that would be a catastrophe if we’re facing a sudden change.

Caryn Hartglass: And so we don’t value farming enough or at all in some situations. People don’t even realize that we need to eat every day. We just take food for granted, many of us do and so now we’re in this situation where we have really given away our choices. We’ve given away our freedom when it comes to food by allowing giant corporations to take over and do what they will with our food system.

Jim Van Der Pol: That’s right, we have. And that’s the situation I was talking about where we’ve put ourselves in a position where a change could be a catastrophe. When you put that kind of control in the hands of so few people, so few powerful people that have a kind of a truncated goal having to do with making lots of money generally. Just under the theory that things are going to work out. We approach food almost as a religious belief that is that, our modern food system is all automatically going to be able to adjust immediately to whatever changes might be forced upon it. and we all might be able to find what we need in the grocery store and I don’t think that’s true.

Caryn Hartglass: You write in many different essays there are some continuing themes, if you were the emperor who was in charge of the entire world, I get a feeling for how you might change things, but it’s clear that we have trouble with the economy, many people are out of work, and we’ve created this situation by taking away jobs, especially on farms, by having these big corporations grow in really unsustainable ways. Maybe you could talk a little bit about that. How important it is for kids to grow up in a farming environment and participate.

Jim Van Der Pol: I’ve written in a few places, in a few essays in the book about that subject because when you life in a rural area, you’re always almost automatically needing to be concerned about the kids because we’re in a situation where we have steadily shrinking populations, our towns are smaller and smaller each decade. Our schools are needing to consolidate and the school buses travel more and more miles to get enough kids together to actually operate a school and we have all too many cases with both parents working some miles away from home. Often the kids are not seen to as well as they should be because the income from the jobs that the parents have just really isn’t enough because that’s not paid well enough. As a matter of fact we should as a nation in an area like this, we short our kids because we do not honor what the entire working people do. Including farming and a lot of other things as well that make our economy and our society run. I have one essay in the book entitled “Boys” and it simply is my reflection on what it seems to be to grow up male in this day and age compared to what it was when I grew up some 60 years ago on this farm that I’m operating today and the difference as I wrote that essay, the difference became really startling to me. I grew up wanting to demonstrate my value to my elders and that was economic value as well as a social value and that I would fit in and so on. It was a great joy to me when the day came that I could keep up in terms of physical work with my own father and with my uncles and hired hands and neighbors that got together to do the work. When I really arrived at that stage of young male adulthood where I could do that, I could sense acceptance all the way around the circle of men that were working, that I was working with. I don’t think very many boys have that chance today. I think the closest that we get with it is high school athletics and of course that’s only a minority of the kids that participate in that. I end that essay by saying something I believe, if I’m remembering it right, something of girls to the effect that I wasn’t speaking of girls because they didn’t grow up wanting to be a man and I wouldn’t be able to speak intelligently about it. I think as a general rule, we can only do a good job with our kids by needing them in a lot of ways. One of them is economics, that’s important. Needing them socially in terms of their view of what the world looks like and what they can tell us older ones who have got more experience than they do, but different perceptions because we didn’t grow up with the same surrounding social furniture that they have. I think we need to need our kids and I think when we can figure out ways and means of doing that in a real way, that is, I think our kids will have fewer problems growing up.

Caryn Hartglass: I agree with you 100 percent. We seem to be doing less and less in this country. So we’ve shift so much manufacturing oversees and even some of the farming that’s done with giant agribusiness I know that we have a lot of illegal aliens and very low paid foreigners that do a lot of the work mostly because people don’t want to do that work and the pay isn’t good for that kind of work.

Jim Van Der Pol: That’s it of course. In one of my essays, or two, I write about where I think this started. It started in the 70s when corporations caught on to the fact that they could benefit financially by disrespecting laborers and it’s been getting steadily worse ever since. I’m sitting on a phone talking now just six miles south of a dairy that milks 6,000 cows every day and they have built several bunkhouses to house the young men they get from Ecuador and Colombia in order to do that work. It’s not that that’s the most pleasant livestock kind of work that there is because it isn’t. Being in confinement, it’s not real attractive work really for anybody but the fact of it is that the young folks that are here from South America because the farm that gets them in can pay lower wages that way. That’s really the entire fact and there would be people in our society, people that have been here for some generations, that would take those jobs if they paid 50 percent more than they do.

Caryn Hartglass: Absolutely. Everything is so crazy in terms of where the subsidies go to pay for who benefits and who doesn’t and we pay for so much in our tax dollars that are invisible to us. If we could take some of that and put it towards paying better salaries for people would make such a difference.

Jim Van Der Pol: You make a wonderful point and that pops up here and there in my writing, which by the way is ongoing, this is a collection of columns and I read one every month but you make a wonderful point about that, that the money that we are spending helping all the victims would be better spent organizing an economy that didn’t produce so many victims. We don’t seem to get that, there doesn’t seem to be any political voice for that in our government, in our senators in power and so it just keeps getting worse and worse. Another thing I think that shouldn’t be ignored, that can’t be ignored from my point of view that I feel very strongly about this is that kind of situation where young men who are not paid enough money and are always away from home are caring for livestock is kind of in and of itself not a good situation for the livestock either.

Caryn Hartglass: I’ve heard so many horrific stories about workers that are brought in from other countries and some of them are treated almost like slaves. This is in our country America, but there are things that we can do, aren’t there.

Jim Van Der Pol: There are.

Caryn Hartglass: What can we do Jim? What can we do?

Jim Van Der Pol: Well, are you asking me for suggestions?

Caryn Hartglass: Help!

Jim Van Der Pol: I think you know what my answer’s going to be, if you don’t you will by the time I’m done giving it. That is that there’s this whole idea of a small change that I write about in the last essay of the book, which is 5 or 6 columns put together. We best change things by changing how we think and changing how we live and that requires going a little out of our pathway. It maybe requires buying food at a farmer market. Maybe it requires making a link with a farmer for some of the things that you want to buy. Or maybe it requires simply putting pressure on our grocery store or choosing a grocery store that is willing to be pressured to establish better communication between you the buyer and the people that are supplying the store. In parts of the world and I’m talking more about Europe here, there are postings on the supermarket or on the market walls leading you to an understanding who it is that brought the food and what some of the ins and out of producing it were. There’s a place for electronic communication in that. So I think that that’s the best place to start and you can do more that start. You can make up your mind to live your life that way. You can also, if you have access to some space, you can garden. Gardening teaches a lot about life and about what farming really is. Again, depending on your neighborhood, you might get in a few backyard chickens which are a wonderful kind of project because it teaches you about what really tastes good in an egg and that may teach you about some of the silly attitudes of your neighbors too, depending on your situation. Whatever I think, what it amounts to is paying more attention to what we eat and if we have the wherewithal to do it and if everybody does it as you pointed out in your lead in, but if we have the wherewithal to do it and be willing to pay a bit more for that kind of food.

Caryn Hartglass: Well it’s all about a long term perspective and that’s just something that’s unheard of in this country. Everything is short term. Pay the least amount you can without thinking of the long term impact of your purchase and where it comes from.

Jim Van Der Pol: Yes, that’s right. We talk in our circles here a lot about three part goals and double bottom lines and things like that, the double bottom line being not always catch profit but also that we produce quality. The idea that a profitable farm is not enough by itself, there has to be a high quality of life enacted with it and that there has to be a community connection connected with it. I guess what I’m saying is that we need to try whatever we can think of to do the best we can to encourage that kind of thinking and planning in the people that we buy from, instead of just the cash profit margin.

Caryn Hartglass: There are a number of really critical things that absolutely have to change. This is my vision. I would love to see all the giant corporations out of food production. I would like to see the return of small farms. I would like to see genetically modified food and seeds disappear and I think foods should be grown organically and for people to most of their food within a region that’s near where they live.

Jim Van Der Pol: I can’t argue with a single item.

Caryn Hartglass: I don’t know if you’re aware of this Jim, but I’m a vegan and I encourage people to eat plant foods and I know that you’re a livestock farmer. We might not agree on some things but we definitely can agree on some very, very big concepts and those are the ones that I just outlined and they’re so important.

Jim Van Der Pol: I think we can, I agree.

Caryn Hartglass: One of my favorite essays was in the beginning where you talk about the weatherman and weathermen on television.

Jim Van Der Pol: Weather reports sound different to a farmer than they do to most people I think.

Caryn Hartglass: It’s funny because I related to it and I never really thought about it the way you put it. Where for most of us the weather matters on the weekends.

Jim Van Der Pol: That’s true and I can see where that comes from.

Caryn Hartglass: I’m here in New York and I think it’s CBS where we get the weather with Lonnie something or other but we see him around New York City sometimes, riding his bike and he’s on television with his gorgeous suits telling us about the weather and it’s a joke. Ok, let’s see we just have a few more minutes. Have you ever experienced or been pressured by some of the giant agribusiness companies when it came to your own business? I’ve heard about so many stories about small farmers not being able to compete and sometimes actually being run off the land.

Jim Van Der Pol: The latest version of that is generally or often has to do with Monsanto and their efforts to protect their patented seeds and they’re pretty aggressive in court and don’t have too much trouble getting their way as far as cooperation with law enforcement. If they think some farmer has saved a seed of theirs they regard that as patent infringement so they pursue that person in court. That’s kind of the latest version of that.

Caryn Hartglass: You know people that have experienced this.

Jim Van Der Pol: I know of people. I don’t have any close friends and nobody in this community that I know of. What we do have in kind of a more general way is anybody that farms organically and our farmland is certified organic, you worry about general drift. Corn is very promiscuous and the pollen goes for miles on wind and if the pollen drifts from a neighbors GMO corn to my organic corn what I’m going to harvest at the end of the year is going to be something less than organic whether I wanted it that way or not. So you live in a little anxiety thinking that at some point the organic buyers are going to apply another test and they’re going to see that GMO amount in there and I’m going to not be able to sell my crop that year. Or maybe it might be possible that I might even be pursued by the company that thinks that I planted seed without buying it from them because I’ve heard those stories and I have every reason to believe they’re true. It’s not a personal experience as much of a generalized anxiety about that. Before the GMO controversy grew up over the past few decades, farmers my size have been encountered agribusiness largely through price discrimination and that has taken place not so much when we sold our products as when we bought our input, when we bought our seeds and so on. We can’t get the volume deals on seeds so we’re paying sometimes a good deal more money for the same seed. Sometimes on livestock particularly, it’ll happen that if you don’t sell enough animals at a time, you’re going to take a cut on the price on those. I’ve had that happen to me so that I’ve taken ten percent less price because I’m bringing in ten hogs instead of 100. So it’s those kinds of things that the agriculture business are always there, they kind of make the playing field in terms of our finances and our economy and it’s always a worry. Sometimes it really reaches out and hits you but most of the time you’re just living with that generalized worry.

Caryn Hartglass: Well thank you so much for talking to me on It’s All About Food, and I hope you don’t worry too much. Have some peace in your life.

Jim Van Der Pol: So do I.

Caryn Hartglass: Enjoy your farm and your family and thanks for writing Conversations With the Land. I really enjoyed reading it.

Jim Van Der Pol: Thanks for having me on.

Transcribed by Meichin, 4/18/2013

TRANSCRIPTION PART II

Caryn Hartglass: Hello I’m Caryn Harglass, we’re back! You’re listening to It’s All About Food. Ah yes, I can relax now! We’re going to be talking about fun vegan things with Jason Das who is the co-founder of Super Vegan. He is responsible for most of the design and front end code of the site supervegan.com and more than a little more of the content. Read more »

Interviews with Rae Sikora, JC Corcoran and Dreena Burton

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5/23/2012:

Part I: JC Corcoran, Rae Sikora
Plant Peace Daily

Jim (JC) Corcoran co-founded and served as president of VegMichigan, the state’s largest vegetarian organization, for seven years. He is a retired fire captain/paramedic/training officer, has a BS in Emergency Medicine and is certified in the Living Foods Lifestyle. Jim also is a certified fitness instructor and former softball champion/all-star. He has been leading life altering programs on health and the environment for over a decade now. His talks empower people to make informed and lasting changes in their lives. Since retiring from the fire service, Jim has been busy starting and developing several other successful outreach organizations. He co-founded Plant Peace Daily; founded Santa Fe Veg and co-founded VegFund, an international organization which helps vegan activist spread the word through food and other means.

Rae Sikora has been a spokesperson for animals, the environment and human rights for over 30 years. Her programs have been changing people’s vision of what is possible to create in our lives and in the world. Rae has worked internationally with participants ranging from teachers, students and prisoners to businesses and activists. As co-founder of the Institute for Humane Education, Rae created interactive critical thinking tools that are now being used by people around the globe. She holds degrees in Cultural Anthropology and Environmental Education from the University of Wisconsin. Rae draws from years of experience to help individuals and groups discover how implementing changes personally/locally can bring about positive change globally. She is co-founder/co-director of Plant Peace Daily and VegFund.

5/23/2012:

Part II: Dreena Burton
Let Them Eat Vegan!

Dreena Burton is the author of bestselling vegan cookbooks and an at-home mom to three girls. She has been vegan since ’95, when little was known about eating and cooking vegan. Not long after graduating with her business degree and working in the marketing field, Dreena followed her true passion of writing recipes and cookbooks.

The Everyday Vegan was her first project, following her father-in-law’s heart attack. When the cardiologist strongly advised a low-fat plant-based diet to her husband’s parents to reverse heart disease, Dreena knew there was information needing to be shared – most importantly, how and what to eat as a vegan. After having her first child, she wrote Vive le Vegan!, which represented her journey as a mom, and more wholesome, easy recipes. Then came eat, drink & be vegan, a celebratory vegan cookbook. The Everyday Vegan became known for its lower fat and ‘everyday’ recipes. Vive le Vegan became known for its healthy baked goods and easy but tasty family-fare. Eat, drink & be vegan became known for its entire chapter on hummus, as well as inventive flavor combinations and a mix of wheat-free and gluten-free recipes.

Dreena has also written for VegNews and alive magazines, True/Slant, and has been featured in other publications including First magazine. She has won several blog awards including VegNews VegBloggy and Vancouver’s Ultimate Mom Blog. Dreena starred on the Everyday Dish cooking dvd in 2007, and her “Homestyle Chocolate Chip” video from that dvd has become a signature cookie and has received over 200,000 YouTube views. More recently, Dreena’s “Frosted B-raw-nies” recipe won the Everyday Health Gluten-Free Recipe Contest (February 2011).

Dreena’s newest book is “Let Them Eat Vegan: 200 Deliciously Satisfying Plant-Powered Recipes for the Whole Family” This book represents an evolution in vegan cooking, with an emphasis on whole foods. Dreena utilizes her experience cooking with the ‘vegan basics’ – beans, nuts, seeds, whole-grains and whole-grain products, vegetables and fruits – to bring delicious, wholesome vegan meals, snacks, and treats to the table for everyday plant-powered eating. You won’t find any ‘white processed stuff’ in Dreena’s recipes… no white flour, no white sugar, and also no vegan substitutes like vegan cream cheese, sour cream, or vegan meat. And, these recipes are wheat-free and also largely gluten-free, and a sprinkling of raw delights for good measure. Let Them Eat Vegan dishes up plant-powered specialties for everyone!

TRANSCRIPTIONS

PART I:

Caryn Hartglass: Hello, I’m Caryn Hartglass and you’re listening to It’s All About Food. Hey, how are you doing today? It’s kind of a cool, cloudy thing happening here in New York City on May 23, 2012, but I’m liking it. It’s a good time to relax and put on some cozy clothes, make a nice pot of tea. I like organic, fair-trade varieties. Read more »

Gary De Mattei Interviews ASK A VEGAN host, Caryn Hartglass

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5/20/2012: Responsible Eating And Living Creative Director interviews the host of the Ask A Vegan show, Caryn Hartglass. Caryn talks about her journey from vegetarian to vegan. They discuss transition foods, farmers markets, CSA’s, locally grown food, grilling and vegan cheese.

Interviews with Ruby Roth and Aaron Bobrow-Strain

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5/16/2012:

Part I: Ruby Roth
Vegan Is Love

Ruby Roth is an artist, designer, and writer living in Los Angeles. A vegan since 2003, she was teaching art in an after-school program when the children’s interest in healthy foods and veganism first inspired her to write her first acclaimed book “That’s Why We Don’t Eat Animals,” which gained international attention and garnered multiple translations. Roth’s latest book, “Vegan Is Love: Having Heart and Taking Action” hits stores April 24th, 2012–just in time for Earth Day, though the author notes, “Every day is Earth Day when you’re vegan!” Complementing her degrees in art and American Studies, Roth has researched animal agriculture, health, nutrition, and the benefits of a plant-based diet for nearly a decade. Roth continues to share her special brand of gentle candor as a vegan consultant and speaker.

5/16/2012:

Part II: Aaron Bobrow-Strain
White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf

Aaron Bobrow-Strain, associate professor of politics at Whitman College, writes and teaches on the politics of the global food system. He is the author of Intimate Enemies: Landowners, Power, and Violence in Chiapas.

TRANSCRIPTIONS

TRANSCRIPTION PART I:

Caryn Hartglass: Hello, I’m Caryn Hartglass, and you’re listening to It’s All About Food. It’s May 16, 2012, and in the next hour, we get to talk about my favorite subject, food: and it has so many impacts on our everyday life here on Planet Earth. Food – who would think that every morsel we put in our mouth makes a difference? Read more »

Eating Trends Reflect Marketing Trends; Breathing; Mothering (nurturing) Our Own Bodies

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5/13/2012: Happy Mother’s Day. We are all mothers, in a way, creating all the time, especially the cells within our bodies. Let’s celebrate! I continued to talk about the subjects from the two panels I participated in yesterday: Corporate Power, Diet and Animal Agriculture, and Women, Feminism, and the Use of Animals for Food at the Brooklyn Food Conference. Also, I spoke about the importance of breathing and breathing well. Take a moment, think about your breathing. Take in a breath, pause, let it go! You deserve it.

Interviews with Ani Phyo and Richard Schwartz

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5/9/2012:

Ani Phyo
15-Day Fat Blast

Ani Phyo is a premier celebrity raw food chef who has appeared on numerous TV shows, including Travel Chanel’s Bizarre Foods. The author of six books, including Ani’s Raw Food Kitchen and Ani’s Raw Food Asia, she is also host of the online video series “Ani’s Raw Food Kitchen Show.” She lives in Los Angeles.

5/9/2012:

Richard Schwartz, Ph.D.
Who Stole My Religion?

Richard H. Schwartz, Ph.D, is Professor Emeritus, Mathematics, College of Staten Island; President of the Jewish Vegetarians of North America (JVNA); and co-founder and coordinator of the Society of Ethical and Religious Vegetarians (SERV). He is best known as a vegetarian activist and advocate for animal rights in the United States and Israel. His writings inspired the 2007 documentary film, A Sacred Duty: Applying Jewish Values to Heal the World, directed by Lionel Friedberg. His latest book, Who Stole My Religion? Revitalizing Judaism and Applying Jewish Values to Help Heal Our Imperiled Planet, can be read in the eBook form FREELY at www.whostolemyreligion.com.

TRANSCRIPTIONS:

PART I:

Caryn Hartglass: Hello I’m Caryn Hartglass and you’re listening to “It’s All About Food.” Hi! How are you doing on May 9th 2012? I’ve got a real interesting show for you today and I can’t wait to get started. Read more »

Walking the Walk, Farm Life in Costa Rica

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May 6, 2012: I spoke with my friend Beth Corwin who moved to Costa Rica with her family nine years ago from the U. S. She shares her reasons for leaving the U.S. and choosing Costa Rica, her joys and challenges with living in Central America. For more on Beth Corwin and her family visit their website VidaNatural.info

Broadcast from Costa Rica

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4/29/2012: I recorded this show while visiting a farm in very rural area of Costa Rica. Enjoy the background music by the birds and bugs!

Interviews with Amber Shea Crawley and Ryan Andrews

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4/25/2012:

Part I: Amber Shea Crawley
Practically Raw: Flexible Raw Recipes Anyone Can Make

Amber Shea Crawley is a linguist, chef, and author specializing in healthful vegan and raw food. Known for her flexible recipes and friendly voice, she was classically trained in the art of gourmet living cuisine at the world-renowned Matthew Kenney Academy, graduating in 2010 as a certified raw and vegan chef. In 2011, she earned her Nutrition Educator certification at the Living Light Culinary Arts Institute. Amber blogs at AlmostVeganChef.com.

4/25/2012:

Part II: Ryan Andrews
Drop The Fat Act & Live Lean

Ryan D. Andrews is a registered dietitian and strength and conditioning specialist who completed his education in exercise and nutrition at the University of Northern Colorado, Kent State University, and Johns Hopkins Medicine. He’s written dozens of research articles on nutrition, exercise, and health, authored Drop The Fat Act & Live Lean, and coauthored The Essentials of Sport and Exercise Nutrition Certification Manual. Ryan is currently a coach with Precision Nutrition, offering life-changing, research-driven
nutrition coaching for everyone – www.precisionnutrition.com.

TRANSCRIPTION PART I:

Caryn Hartglass: Hello I’m Caryn Hartglass and this is “It’s All About Food”. Good afternoon. It’s April 25, 2012 and have we all recovered over Earth Day this past weekend? It was a great weekend for me. It was my birthday and I really appreciate all of the lovely messages that I got from people. Read more »

Going Vegan, Is It Really That Big A Deal?

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I reviewed the recent New York Times blog post, The Challenge of Going Vegan, especially the over 1000 responses (and counting) to it. I debunked popular myths and covered the most popular topics including vegans being “preachy”, the connection behind rainforest destruction and soy beans, needing a chef, requiring scientific knowledge to eat vegan and, going against tradition.

Interview with Peter Seidel 4/18/2012

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4/18/2012:

Peter Seidel
Invisible Walls: Why We Ignore the Damage We Inflict on the Planet and Ourselves

Before obtaining a MS in Architecture from Illinois Institute of Technology as a student of architect Mies van der Rohe and planner Ludwig Hilberseimer, Seidel worked as a farmhand, factory worker, Alaska salmon fisherman, and carpenter. In 1957, while working in Chicago on the most environmentally damaging office and institutional buildings, he read a book entitled “The Challenge of Man’s Future,” by Harrison Brown. It described the dangers of excessive population growth, food and mineral shortages, and over consumption that threatened our future.

It was clear his work bore a heavy impact on these problems, he changed direction and became a committed environmental architect planner. During this period, and after, he spent time teaching at five tuitions of higher learning including one in China and one in India. His work at the University of Michigan on directing urban expansion into a system of pedestrian oriented new towns led to his being hired as the master planner for an environmentally sound socially integrated community of 80,000 to be built outside of Cincinnati. When this failed to materialize, he took to developing, designing, and building eco-friendly, urban infill condominiums in Cincinnati.
Peter Seidel, environmentalist

When Ronald Reagan became president, and the Arab oil boycott was call off, public interest in conservation evaporated. It was clear that his efforts, and those of others, were directed toward a dead end. A question kept haunting him: “When we see that our future is threatened and we know what we can do about it, why don’t we act?” Thinking about this led to another abrupt change in his career. He turned to writing. After failing to obtain production funding for a television documentary, “Invisible Walls” addressed to this problem, in 1998 “Invisible walls” came out as a book . Since then Seidel has devoted his time producing books and articles, related to examining this problem of inaction.

TRANSCRIPTION:

Caryn Hartglass: Hello, good afternoon, I’m Caryn Hartglass and you are listening to It’s All About Food. It’s April 18, 2012, and we have a lot of work to do. You know on this show I try to connect the dots between our food choices and, really, all life on Earth; the life of humans, our personal health, the health of our families, the life of other animals on the planet and the life of the planet itself. There are so many things that are involved with the food we eat, each bite has a story, almost. And yet, there’s a bigger picture, and we are going to be talking about that today. I really am looking forward to this conversation. I’m going to invite my guest Peter Seidel who’s the author of a book I just finished reading, Invisible Walls: Why We Ignore the Damage We Inflict on the Planet and Ourselves. He’s an environmental architect and planner who studied with world-renowned Miles van der Rohe and Ludwig Hilberseimer, both of the Bauhaus in Germany. Welcome to It’s All About Food, Peter!

Peter Seidel: Thank you! Thank you, I’m glad to be with you.

Caryn Hartglass: I don’t believe in coincidences, and I found this book which actually came out in 1998, and I’m always looking for interesting topics and things to kind of connect the dots for me in terms of how to make this world a better place, and I was looking over at Prometheus books and found your book and read it and… good! Sometimes the world seems so overwhelming, and there are so many things that need to be done, but the first step is just to put it all down on paper. And I’m really glad that you gave us this guidebook on what we need to do. I’m wondering how you got to write Invisible Walls. What was the motivation that caused you to put all of this information in a book?

Peter Seidel: Well, I had been… I was originally an architect, I suppose doing the worst of all the kinds of things environmentally. I worked on the Air Force Academy and all-glass office buildings and things like that for the leading firm at that time, and somebody gave me a book called The Challenge of Man’s Future, and it was about world population and resources and so on. That startled me, and I thought, Oh my gosh! So, I had to remake my life, and I started teaching, and then, through that, I developed some system of building new towns, and I got a job to design a series of new towns down here in Cincinnati, or one new town. It was going to be for 60,000 to 80,000 people. Unfortunately, it fell through. At that time, then there was a real developing interest in environmental architecture, solar energy, energy conservation… So, I fit right into that and I was doing things here and developing projects here on that. Then, all of a sudden, it happened when Ronald Reagan became president. He ripped the solar collectors off the White House and efforts to conserve energy and all that went out the window and I sat and thought, My gosh, here… trying to do this doesn’t make any sense. Why? Why is it we know all of these things that are so wrong and that are happening… why do we now just disregard all of this? And, I’m thinking about that, well it ended up with a book.

Caryn Hartglass: Mm-hm. Well, it’s a good one. That Ronald Reagan era, a lot of people point to it as a real turning point in our society and not necessarily a good one, although he has a great many fans that loved him as the president. I was never one of his fans, and there are a lot of things that he put into place that have had such detrimental effects on our society, and we are really just realizing them now. But I didn’t know that he ripped the solar panels off. I can’t believe that.

Peter Seidel: He did. Carter put solar panels on the White House, and he was trying to do what he could to conserve energy and make more fuel-efficient cars. And all that… out the window it went.

Caryn Hartglass: I don’t like to look back too often, because I want to keep moving forward, but we can, if we want to, learn things from the past. I think, gosh, what a world we could have had today if we had started in the Carter/Reagan time period of really trying to become energy-independent and moving forward with solar energy and other energy, oil-free alternatives.

Peter Seidel: It would all different.

Caryn Hartglass: It would be! It would be such a beautiful place. Okay, but I’m going to hold back my tears, and I’m going to take a deep breath, whatever kind of air I’m breathing right now and try and get enough oxygen out of it. I want to talk about the beginning of the book where you talk about the limitations of our brain, because it really helped me feel better to understand at least why we do some of the awful things that we do.

Peter Seidel: We have to understand this. We have to learn what our… where are problems are within ourselves. This is absolutely essential, if we’re going to overcome these problems, we have to understand where they are within us, because it’s from us all these problems evolve. [Caryn: Right.] We can’t point to “them.” It’s actually… these are things in all of us, the way we’re constructed, the way we’re made.

Caryn Hartglass: It makes me feel a little better understanding and understanding the weaknesses. On the other hand, as we get later on into the book, it gets a little scary to realize that we all have the potential to do great good and we also could turn in the opposite direction and just do horrific things, and it’s within all of us.

Peter Seidel: Yeah.

Caryn Hartglass: Oh, that’s chilling!

Peter Seidel: Well, the chilling part is… well I’ve just gone over all of this and then when I got to the point where I made suggestions: well, these are the problems; here’s what we should do, and I started reading about that, and then I began to really get startled. All these suggestions… are no place; we’re worse off now than we were then.

Caryn Hartglass: Yeah. There are so many things I want to talk about. Can you just talk about in our brain this filtering that we do that is so helpful and yet limiting?

Peter Seidel: Well, filtering is… there’s a psychologist and he says that we take in about one trillionth of what’s going on around us. When you think about what’s going on around us there’s as far as electromagnetic waves. There’s a vast spectrum of them, and our eyes only take in a little piece of this, and we are not very good at smells. We are not very good at many, many things, so we just take in a tiny portion of this. Of what we take in, we can’t remember it all either, and, of course, a lot of it doesn’t make sense to us in our brain. Our brain has to… we have to deal with things that our brain will make sense of and be able to do something with. And then, when it does that, there is still so much information out there that we would get totally confused by it unless we filter out and pick out things to pay attention to and remember. So, of all the things that are going on out there, around us, only a little bit of it draws our attention and gets remembered.

Caryn Hartglass: It’s fascinating thinking about it, because we perceive… we have this idea of what the world is and we really have no idea what the world is really about; we perceive so little of it.

Peter Seidel: Yeah. We do perceive a little bit of it, but, of course, it’s in our viewpoint. An interesting thing: the world as we see it is totally different than what the world really is. For instance, the world has no color, at all.

Caryn Hartglass: Ooh.

Peter Seidel: The color comes from different wavelengths that are reflected off of objects, and these wavelengths come into our eyes, and then different wavelengths get transferred into different meanings to us, and that’s colors. So all of a sudden these things that had no colors begin to have, which is all inside our heads, where these colors occur.

Caryn Hartglass: That’s just starting off all kinds of other things that I don’t even know if I want to go there, but I’m thinking about those people who are colorblind who might feel stigmatized that they’re colorblind, but actually they’ve got their own unique way of seeing the world.

Peter Seidel: Yeah, and they are just a little bit more colorblind than the rest of us.

Caryn Hartglass: Mm-hm.

Peter Seidel: The color of course is in one sense an illusion, and in another sense it’s not, because the colors represent different wavelengths.

Caryn Hartglass: Ok, this is all really interesting. Then the other part of the filtering thing helped me understand why it’s so difficult to communicate, even with the people that we know, because we’re all taking in information; we’re not remembering every word that everyone is saying to us, and we’re kind of interpreting it, and that’s what we are remembering, our interpretation. And that can lead to a lot of misleading information.

Peter Seidel: It does. It does. We all build up… the world we think we see is really a world inside our minds. We each build up in our minds a model of the world, and we interact with that model that’s in our minds. This can be, of course, different for different people. So, of course, when you have one model in your model and another person sees something different, then there is a communication problem, sure.

Caryn Hartglass: Ok, so we’re dealing with our limited brains, and as a result, we make all kinds of decisions and obviously many of the decisions today are not the best ones that we could make for ourselves and for the future of the planet.

Peter Seidel: I’m afraid not.

Caryn Hartglass: But we do have hope, right? Now, you wrote this book in 1998, and I think that most of the information in here, if not all of it, is very fresh and very applicable to what’s going on today. The only thing that’s missing in here is, so here we are, what is it, like 14 years later, and we now have the internet, and we have social networking. I think that’s just exaggerated a lot of the things that you talk about in your book.

Peter Seidel: It’s opening up a whole world, a whole space of some things that are very different that I don’t think we totally understand yet, but it’s also closing up things too, because we have only so much time per day to think and to absorb things and store things, and when we put something else, we’re replacing something else. So, one thing is replacing another. For instance, a lot of things, a lot of information we are getting is not from newspapers. We are getting it from the internet now. There are certain advantages to that, but there’s also newspapers…I’m from Cincinnati. My local newspaper had a whole staff of reporters who would hang around City Hall. They really got to know… there was a reporter on education, one on religion, a whole series of them. Now, this has so been cut back, and a lot of people don’t get the paper. A lot of these things from the local community no longer reach the people who live there.

Caryn Hartglass: And people are looking, for the most part, for very select information.

Peter Seidel: Yeah. That’s what you get on the internet, so the internet… what we’re doing is we are communicating, connecting more with people all over the world, and less and less with people who live right around us.

Caryn Hartglass: Mm-hm. What’s the danger of that?

Peter Seidel: That…

Caryn Hartglass: That’s a loaded question.

Peter Seidel: That’s a big question. I think it requires a lot of thought… a lot. It would take a lot of time to think about it and talk about it, so I won’t dare.

Caryn Hartglass: Ok. So, let’s move a little further into this book. Now, what I really like about it is it was explaining… I don’t listen to the news all the time, because I find it’s very sensational, I find it’s very one-sided, I don’t find that it’s really “news.” A lot of time, I call it the “olds” because I’m hearing things that I knew about already! But I always get anxious; I get frustrated; I get disappointed, because I’m not hearing what I really want to hear and what happens is most people that are listening are kind of numbed and dumbed down into … like, one thought. Everyone’s getting the same information. We all have the same thoughts. Some of them are a little sided to the left and some of them are a little sided to the right, but we all start thinking about the same stuff, and most of it is so trivial. On the news, when they’re talking about makeup and fashion, and they’re not talking about poverty and hunger and environmental problems… how does this happen and why is this happening? And this is part of what’s in our human nature.

Peter Seidel: That’s true. I listen to NPR while I’m preparing food and eating and so on. So I get a lot of information from that and an awful lot of it is about, as you could say, the latest this and that, and rock music or sports, or the latest thing that has been going on is the political campaign, which has been taking so much, so much time. And it’s all like a horse race: Who’s ahead? And not real substance.

Caryn Hartglass: That’s right. No, there’s no substance. I like what you said later in the book… I don’t want to jump right into what we can do. I kind of want to save the good stuff for later, but you talk about maybe having an exam or something that politicians need to pass in order to qualify to be a politician, and that is a brilliant idea.

Peter Seidel: Yeah. Oh, would they fight that though.

Caryn Hartglass: Well, they fight everything. We shouldn’t have these Super PACs. It shouldn’t be just the rich who can run for office.

Peter Seidel: I know. One thing is that politicians spend so much time campaigning. There’s an interesting quote in the book from Kenneth Boulding, economist, and he said, basically the things that qualify or enable people to run for office disqualify them from running for it. And that’s true, I think. They should be learning things and understanding how the world works and understanding… they should be learning something about science, because we don’t have enough people who… the people in all these places, they don’t have respect for science.

Caryn Hartglass: You mentioned something about science that was intriguing to me, and I’ve been reading articles about some of it where a lot of the decisions we make, a lot of the work that we do is really tainted in some way by our own perceptions, and even science, that we want to think is true and pure, comes with a lot of subjectivity. There’s even been some articles talking about different studies that have been done and the results that they got and then later, they repeated the studies, and they have diminishing returns somehow, and this is related to the people that are doing the experiment, who think that they are really objective, still have some degree of subjectivity in anticipating some of the results.

Peter Seidel: Always. A good scientist… to be any good, you have to be as objective as you possibly can and not put in any of your own wishes or thoughts or anything like it. And when results are come up with, all results in science are tentative. In other words, they all stand there to be ripped down if other evidence shows that this is not correct. This is something very important for people to understand about science: the law of gravity, if all of a sudden things started not falling down, it would have to be wiped out and we’d admit we were wrong. Basically, this is the way that good science works. People do objectively try to go through it and learn the truth, or learn reality (because what’s truth?) to get the evidence so they can get as much evidence as possible, and then it’s usually peer-reviewed, so it isn’t just one person comes up with something, but then they put it out. Then other scientists will go over the same experiments and do them, and if they don’t come up with the result, they come back and say that.

Caryn Hartglass: Mm-hm.

Peter Seidel: This is the way it has to be. It’s all standing there, and it’s all waiting to be challenged.

Caryn Hartglass: There’s a lot of ego involved, unfortunately, and you talk about the difference between being right and being correct, and how difficult that is for many people to not admit that they are no longer right!

Peter Seidel: Yeah. There’s too many of us running around saying that we are right.

Caryn Hartglass: Ok. So, we’re moving along in history, and we’re doing things left and right… You bring up different points in history. Certainly, Nazi Germany is a popular one because so many things went wrong there. Something that I always found interesting was the fact that Hitler wanted to be an artist, and apparently he wasn’t very good, and he didn’t do well enough to get into the art school that he wanted to go to.

Peter Seidel: Wasn’t that a shame.

Caryn Hartglass: Excuse me?

Peter Seidel: It was a shame that he didn’t get in.

Caryn Hartglass: Yeah. And look what happened as a result. We can learn so much from that and yet we haven’t. Individuals at a very young age should be encouraged to be creative, encouraged to be imaginative and encouraged to pursue the things that seem interesting to them, whether they are good at them or not.

Peter Seidel: Well, sometimes when people are not good at things, I’ve taught architecture, and it’s not good to keep encouraging someone who has no ability or no talent for it. It’s better that they find something else for themselves to do… because in the end, if they are not good, they’ll be unhappy also with what they are doing.

Caryn Hartglass: Sure. But maybe there is a nice way to do it, so that you don’t end up trying to wipe out a race.

Peter Seidel: Yeah. Well Hitler had some other characteristics that were not so good. There are a lot of other people who couldn’t get into art school who didn’t do what he did.

Caryn Hartglass: Oh sure. The idea of encouraging creativity and imagination, you talk about the importance of imagination and…

Peter Seidel: Yeah.

Caryn Hartglass: I’m really frightened about the future because of how we have limited our children in terms of imagination development, with television and just how children spend their time is more with… less with being creative and imaginative and more with taking in what’s being given to them.

Peter Seidel: I know, and it’s becoming a special problem now with Facebook and Twitter and social networking. They spend so much time… I watched a program on public television about I think it was the “Digital Age” or something. In one place, it showed a class of students, I think they were at Harvard maybe, and they were all sitting in the lecture with computer screens and I thought, oh these guys are all taking notes. No, they weren’t. They were communicating with each other.

Caryn Hartglass: Mm-hm. And they were probably one desk down from each other, right?

Peter Seidel: Yeah. So the professor in front, he was standing there lecturing away and I think half the students didn’t hear what he was saying.

Caryn Hartglass: Well, I’m going to admit that when I was in college back in the late 1970’s, I used to write little paper notes to some of my friends while the professor was talking [Peter: Oh dear.] and I didn’t catch all of it. So probably texting and working on a computer, communicating is probably not that much different.

Peter Seidel: Well, you had certain limitations on how many of those notes you could send around. They don’t seem to have any limitations.

Caryn Hartglass: Absolutely. I had to be really clever about passing that piece of paper… Your title, Invisible Walls, what does that mean?

Peter Seidel: Well, it meant obstacles that we don’t see. In other words, there are things that are holding us back from doing what makes sense, and we don’t see what is holding us back. So the book is trying to explain what those things are.

Caryn Hartglass: Yes, and you do such a good job doing it. For the most part, I felt… I want to say inspired, but I also felt comforted. Understanding really helps. It’s just like when people have emotional issues and they go to therapy or something and understanding their problem is like the first step in healing… that when we understand it, we can start to work towards making improvements.

Peter Seidel: Yeah. One of the problems now is a lot more people need to understand those things.

Caryn Hartglass: But the problem is so many people are numb, and so many people don’t care, and so many people are in their own worlds, and they are comfortable enough that the status quo is fine, while all this horror is going on around us. Do you think we can institute these changes before we really have to?

Peter Seidel: Well, I think we already have to. In fact, I think we had to some years ago.

Caryn Hartglass: Yeah. Thirty, forty years ago.

Peter Seidel: Yeah. So I think we’ve got to do these things and the sooner the better and right now, on global warming… people, scientists and so on in the 350.org say we have maybe five years. If we don’t turn things around in five years, it’s going to be too late.

Caryn Hartglass: Mm-hm.

Peter Seidel: Then we will start on a non-reversible plunge. So, if we look at where we are right now, it doesn’t look good at all.

Caryn Hartglass: No. There are little pockets of people and organizations doing things, but it’s not enough.

Peter Seidel: That’s right.

Caryn Hartglass: Yeah. Okay… I’m not going to worry about it right now. I just want to understand the problem and then do whatever I can to encourage everyone else to do whatever they can to do whatever we need to do to turn it all around.

Peter Seidel: I think one thing that’s necessary is for people to know how serious our situation is. I think that has to get and then the people have to take it seriously. Then, from there, they can go on. First, people have got to see that we are in trouble.

Caryn Hartglass: You talk about violence in this book and how different things can turn a seemingly nice person, like your neighbor, into someone who does some incredibly violent things, which is frightful. Since you’ve written this book, we’ve had this explosion of reality TV, which I don’t know if you’ve watched any; I try not to, but I’ve seen…

Peter Seidel: I haven’t. I would like to, somehow, but I’ve always got something else to do.

Caryn Hartglass: Something better to do, absolutely! Well, occasionally…

Peter Seidel: I would really like to watch it to see what it is.

Caryn Hartglass: I’ve watched a few shows, but only because I knew people who were on them, so that was my motivation. What’s really scary about it, okay, number one, reality TV really isn’t reality because they do a lot of filming and editors come along and edit clips to make a sensational story, and it can really change the way someone looks and appears in a story. But aside from that, these people… most of the time what makes one of these shows so interesting is that people do get violent, and people do get selfish and people do things that don’t benefit the group, that only benefit themselves, and what makes a lot of these shows really popular is that type of nature, which is frightening.

Peter Seidel: I have to watch one…

Caryn Hartglass: Yeah. The one I’ve never watched is Survivor. I will not watch it, but little bits and things creep in every now and then, and you get a gist of things. For the most part, except for the one, I forget the name of it, where they build a house for a family in need, which is, you know, a nice story, most of them are very competitive, not cooperative, and they can get really violent and bring out the worst in people, which, in your book, you talk about how it’s in all of us: the best and the worst.

Peter Seidel: Yeah. Without knowing what all this is, I can see one other thing that’s happening and that is people’s attraction to watching such stuff.

Caryn Hartglass: Well, it reminds me of so many different things. In the Roman times, people used to watch these people go at each other and kill each other, and even as recent as here in New York City on Broadway, when Spiderman first came out and wasn’t doing very well, and different actors were having accidents, falling and hurting themselves, people were flocking there because they wanted to see something go wrong.

Peter Seidel: Oh geez. I’ve been told that’s one reason that some people go to auto races.

Caryn Hartglass: Yeah. Ok. So, I want to take a break, Peter, and come back, and we’re going to talk about all the good things that we can all do to make this world a better place. How about that?

Peter Seidel: Ok.

Caryn Hartglass: Ok, we’ll be right back.

***Break***

Caryn Hartglass: Hello, I’m Caryn Hartglass and you’re listening to It’s All About Food. I’m here with Peter Seidel, talking about his book Invisible Walls: Why We Ignore the Damage we Inflict on the Planet and Ourselves. Peter, when I asked you to do this interview, you were saying that your book wasn’t exactly about food, and I think it is all about food. Everything in your book certainly affects all of the systems we have in place that give us the food we have today, most of it which I don’t even think is food, which as a result is giving us the horrible wellness or sickness that so many people have today, and it’s all related to everything you talk in the book about corporations and politicians and doing things for profit and not for well-being.

Peter Seidel: Yeah.

Caryn Hartglass: Yeah. Ok, so let’s talk about what we can do about it. There’s a number of different areas that we need to address. There are things we can do ourselves; there are things that we can really try and get our government officials to do, although that’s really rough, and then there are the ways we need to educate our children and ourselves.

Peter Seidel: Yeah. Well, one thing I think… going through this book just for this program and looking at that part… this part is the hardest because a lot of the things that I suggested in the book actually take time to accomplish, and right now…

Caryn Hartglass: We don’t have time!

Peter Seidel: What?

Caryn Hartglass: We don’t have a lot of time!

Peter Seidel: We don’t have time. We’ve got to change things fast. And one way I can see this is first of all, people have got to see how serious our situation is. Once when people… we have to get enough people to see and to care, and this is one thing that’s been falling apart because the time that I wrote the book I think there were more people that cared then than there are now.

Caryn Hartglass: Yeah. You know what’s interesting? Your book was written in 1998, and then we had this catastrophic event on September 11, 2001 and you could almost say that you were predicting the possibility of something like that happening in your book. We had a great opportunity on September 12, 2001, and we really blew it.

Peter Seidel: I think so. I wrote… I sent 50 op-eds and letters to editors, and what I suggested was several things. One thing, of course we had to go after the people who had done it and who were planning more things like that, but the others were: we have to figure out why these people are doing it and get to the bottom of it. What are the reasons? Why are these people doing this? Maybe there are things we can do to reduce this. And another thing, we have to make ourselves less more vulnerable. And what have we done? We’ve just made ourselves more vulnerable.

Caryn Hartglass: More vulnerable. Yeah. You talked about something in the book, something that when I first heard about the concept, I felt a lot of peace, and that is the way things work on a microscopic and macroscopic level. So if we think about a living cell and how it combines with another cell and becomes a larger organism and then it combines with other similar size organisms and that whole group becomes a larger organism, and it goes on and on like that, and then we finally have plants and we have animals and people come together as a group and we have a village and a city and a nation. I found this to be beautiful. When I first read something that talked about this, I found that all of sudden life made sense to me. There was an order and there seemed to be an objective on the planet where we could all cooperate beyond borders and work together as one cooperative organism on the planet.

Peter Seidel: Yeah. You just think, this world… we could all live wonderfully on it if we all put our minds to getting along with each other and the planet and live accordingly. We could be living wonderfully on the earth, but we can’t seem to live with each other, and we can’t seem to stop brutalizing the planet.

Caryn Hartglass: Yeah.

Peter Seidel: If you think about all the things that are gone wrong, they are all basically caused by efforts of people to improve their own situation…gone wrong.

Caryn Hartglass: Ok. So, I have this vision of what the world could be, and that’s nice, and we have a long way to get there, but I like to think that if enough of us amass could really realize what’s going on today, I think we could fix things pretty quickly. And the question is how do we get to that point? I don’t have that answer. I can just hope.

Peter Seidel: I don’t either. But this is what we’ve got to do.

Caryn Hartglass: We have to do a lot of talking, fast.

Peter Seidel: Yeah. I think that people who know something, who care something, have to get out there and tell other people. Every year, I write a greeting to all the people I send Christmas cards to, and I put a lot of things in there. I tell what I think is… without waving my finger too much, of trying to make people aware of what’s happening. I think we have to tell people that. In the past, I was very meek about that. I didn’t want to turn all my friends and relatives off, but recent times I thought, my gosh, I better turn them on, or we’re not going to get to where we want to go.

Caryn Hartglass: Yeah. It’s a really delicate place to be, because I don’t know who you are sending these cards to, but I’m imagining that many of them are rolling their eyes when they receive some of this information, unfortunately.

Peter Seidel: I know it.

Caryn Hartglass: But what I know is I’ve been talking about a lot of this, especially with respect to food because that’s where my passion lies, with many people for decades, and I’ve discovered that people need to hear this information over and over and over and over before the light goes on.

Peter Seidel: Yeah.

Caryn Hartglass: And maybe that’s part of our limited brain… I don’t know.

Peter Seidel: It is. We are that way. If there’s a nice play in town that sounds interesting to me, and I hear about it, I’m likely to forget about it, so they’ve got to tell me over and over a number of times until it really sinks in and I go. We are that way.

Caryn Hartglass: Right. And that’s where media and advertising is so important and where they’re really not doing what they could and should be doing at this point, because they really have an audience. If the message was that doing certain things were hip and sexy and good for the planet, more people would be doing them faster. It’s not that hard. I don’t think so…

Peter Seidel: Yeah. The trouble is, advertising people, of course, are making a living and they are performing a function for people who want to sell something, basically. So this is what they’re doing. I came across…I was in a library, sometimes I pick things up that are interesting… This was many years ago and I picked up Advertising Age, I think it was called. I started looking through it and there was a full page ad. On the ad there was a big line that went across and it went up, and what it said was that the number of times you repeated something, the number of times it improves the sale. In other words, if you double the advertising, the sales double.

Caryn Hartglass: Money makes money.

Peter Seidel: This is the way we are.

Caryn Hartglass: Well, that says something about humanity, and I don’t really want to get all dark here, but are we really worth saving?

Peter Seidel: Oh, I think so.

Caryn Hartglass: Yeah, I think so too.

Peter Seidel: I think we are the ultimate peak of the pyramid, of things that exist in the physical world.

Caryn Hartglass: The thing is that those of us who are relatively privileged and have a job and have a home and can feed ourselves relatively well and have the opportunity to take a vacation and educate our children, and we work for some sort of company or business… it takes a lot of courage to speak out, to do something a little different, to say something isn’t quite right when everybody else is going in a different direction.

Peter Seidel: It does.

Caryn Hartglass: Yeah, we can watch a movie, for example, and we love the whistle-blower; we love the hero who does that sort of thing, but most of us are not like that.

Peter Seidel: Yeah. Well, it took me a while. I’m a very shy person and all of that, and it took me a while to really come out and say by golly, I’m going to tell all of these people, even if it turns them off and they turn their backs on me, I’m going to tell them! Because, up until that point, I didn’t want to turn off all my friends and relatives, and finally I said, “No. I better do it.”

Caryn Hartglass: Now, how do you live your life, if you don’t mind me asking that you think is beneficial for the planet? DO you have a certain lifestyle that you think might be helpful for others to emulate?

Peter Seidel: What I do for myself is, and now I’m a pretty old kanucker… I am, I’m 85 [Caryn: Good for you!] and I’m a widower, so I’ve always thought, the idea of living like a monk has always had an appeal, and I will just devote myself to trying to write things about what I think, and try to utilize what I write in the best ways that I can, and this is what I do. I spend my time trying to do that, but it’s difficult for me, because really I’m a visual person. I’m an architect, a planner, and not a writer, but I write.

Caryn Hartglass: Well, you write very well, Peter. You’ve made some very clear points

Peter Seidel: Well, I try to say things very clearly and understandably, and then I have the help of a very good editor, and maybe because of my background, too. Architects and urban planners need to look at a whole picture, because in a building or a city, everything has got to work together, so you sort of look at all of this at once, and you see it. You see how everything is connected, inter-functions and affects everything else, and I think that this helps. So, that is the benefit, and then the difficult part that I deal with is writing.

Caryn Hartglass: You mentioned in the book how so many of us are specialists now, and things have gotten so complicated and everybody knows their specialization, and as a result, we don’t have a good picture of what’s going on.

Peter Seidel: Yes. This is one of the really big problems is the fact that we are all living in these little boxes with tunnel vision, and society rewards people who do that.

Caryn Hartglass: Yeah. There are so many different issues we’ve got going on with the environment. We’ve got genetically modified food. In New York, we are getting hysterical about fracking. There are all these different issues going on, and when I think about my fellow engineers that are involved in working on a project, it helped me understand why they are developing something that really isn’t beneficial for the planet, and it’s because they’re not looking outside of their box, and it’s really unfortunate…

Peter Seidel: Yeah, yeah. So many people are just doing their job. They know that what they’re doing, if they think about it, they can see that what they’re doing is not necessarily helpful.

Caryn Hartglass: But they don’t want to think about it.

Peter Seidel: But they do these things. There are scientists who develop nuclear weapons and rockets for North Korea.

Caryn Hartglass: Mm-hm. Oh, goodness. Ok, well, I think it’s great that you’re doing what you’re doing, and you’re 85, and you’re writing, and you’re trying to make this world a better place. I think one thing that’s unfortunate in our society, and, especially as the economy is tanking in the toilet, we are not utilizing all the wisdom and knowledge that the older generations, 50 plus, have. So many people are losing their jobs and can’t find new jobs because they are considered too old, and yet they’re all very skilled, they’re all very knowledgeable, so we have this whole pool of stuff we are not working with. And then, we have another group of seniors who are just enjoying their lives and that’s fun, and they’re going to buffets and traveling around and enjoying their lives. That’s nice, but it would really be great if we could utilize all of this knowledge and talent.

Peter Seidel: Yeah, it would be, and unfortunately too often there isn’t an opportunity given to people to be able to do these things.

Caryn Hartglass: Yeah.

Peter Seidel: Also, like I think right now, all of us, I think everybody who does care and understands that we’re in trouble has to take it on themselves to expand this knowledge and concern. This is very important.

Caryn Hartglass: I don’t like to paint a gloom and doom picture, although it looks pretty gloomy.

Peter Seidel: It does. It does.

Caryn Hartglass: I want people to know that the changes we need to make are not going to make life unpleasant. I believe they are going to make life better. People think they’re going to be deprived, that they are not going to have their comforts, and I think people will be happier.

Peter Seidel: Oh, yeah. This is the interesting thing. We know a lot about, a lot has been learned about happiness, and they’ve tested people who win lotteries. They’re very happy at first but after about three months, they are exactly back where they were. And then we find that some people who have terrible diseases and handicaps, which of course are very upsetting at first, but after a while, they reach a level where they were about as happy as they were before they learned about this. And so, we have a certain level of happiness, and accumulating more stuff or refusing to give up things doesn’t have to do with that. The main things of happiness is that you have something that you feel… you’re doing something that you enjoy and that has worth; that you have good personal relationships, and these things, happiness takes care of itself. You don’t need all that stuff.

Caryn Hartglass: Mm-hm. It’s not big houses and fancy sneakers and all different kinds of consumables that people think they really need to have.

Peter Seidel: Yeah. In the book I mentioned about I was teaching in China, and the students in China lived in dorms that had no heat. There were no lights and they were in rooms, even graduate students were in rooms with six bunks. Six people in the bunks in one room where they studied, because at the time I was there, electricity was very scarce and the lights in the whole building would just go black at 10 o’clock so they couldn’t even study. There was no heat. The hallways, you had to feel your way around the hallways, and it was cold in winter. In China at that time, there were no elevators in buildings less than nine floors high. [Caryn: Oh!] But I found that these students were just as happy as students in the United States.

Caryn Hartglass: Wow. It’s really fascinating. That’s something people need to know, that we can make this world cleaner, we can clean up our environment and we can be happier, or at least as happy as we are now, but I think a lot of people are not very happy. The last thing we didn’t talk about, which I think is an important piece of this equation and we just have a couple of minutes, is population, and obviously part of the problem is there are too many people on this planet.

Peter Seidel: Absolutely. This is one thing that governments and people don’t seem to understand that as population goes up, well, there’s less of everything for everybody and the burden on the planet keeps going, and they seem to think that we can let it just keep growing and growing and growing, and the same with the economy. The economy has got to grow, and it can’t.

Caryn Hartglass: Growth is not necessarily a good thing.

Peter Seidel: No. You can’t continually grow in a limited space. We’ve already gone way too far. The Global Footprint Network tells us that as we live today we would need to be sustainable; we’re not sustainable; we would need one and a half planets to sustain us the way we’re living today. There’s about 15,000 children dying of things related to malnutrition every day, as it is now, and if everybody lived like we did here in the states, we would need five planets to supply us with what we need…

Caryn Hartglass: It’s something that we can’t even visualize. It’s crazy. Well, we could go on about talking about this for a long time, but what I want to tell my listeners is to pick up this book Invisible Walls: Why We Ignore the Damage We Inflict on the Planet and Ourselves by Peter Seidel. It is…it is the book to read. All of our politicians should read it. Everyone should read it. Thank you for writing it and thank you for joining me on It’s All About Food.

Peter Seidel: Thanks, I’ve enjoyed it, and I just might say that I wouldn’t change the book at all if I was writing it today.

Caryn Hartglass: No, it’s right on, all of it. Ok, thank you.

Peter Seidel: Ok, thank you so much.

Caryn Hartglass: Keep writing!

Peter Seidel: Ok.

Caryn Hartglass: Ok, I’m Caryn Hartglass and you’ve been listening to It’s All About Food. Earth Day’s coming up this Sunday, which is also my birthday, and so, if you want to do something for me go to facebook.com Responsible Eating And Living and give us a like. That’s my non-profit and we could certainly use your support. The following week is Veg Week. Check out usvegweek.com by Compassion Over Killing; they’ve got a Veg Pledge thing going on. Lots of good things going on. I’m Caryn Hartglass. You’ve been listening to It’s All About Food. Have a delicious week!

Transcribed by Maggie Rasnake 6/5/2013

Interviews with Jennifer Cockrall-King, Erica Meier and Alejandro Junger, MD

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

4/11/2012:

Part I: Jennifer Cockrall-King
Food and the City: Urban Agriculture and the New Food Revolution.

Jennifer Cockrall-King (Edmonton, Alberta, Canada) is a freelance journalist and food writer whose work has appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times, National Post, Canadian Geographic, Maclean’s, and other major publications. She blogs about food and her research trips at foodgirl.ca. You can also join her at facebook.com/FoodandtheCity and twitter.com/jennifer_ck.

4/11/2012:

Part II: Erica Meier
National Veg Week

Erica has served as COK’s Executive Director since 2005, after having been actively involved as a volunteer since 2000. Since taking the helm, Erica has taken the organization to new heights with continued growth and accomplishments for animals that include ending the egg industry’s use of the misleading claim “Animal Care Certified” and successfully working with BOCA foods to stop using eggs. Vegan for nearly 20 years, Erica has been working in the animal protection field since college. Before working at COK, Erica spent several years as an animal control officer in Washington, DC where she rescued sick, stray, and homeless animals as well as enforced anti-cruelty laws. National Veg Week

4/11/2012:

Part III: Alejandro Junger, M.D.
CLEAN

Alejandro Junger, M.D., is board certified in internal medicine and cardiology, having trained and now practicing in New York City. In addition, after completing his medical training, Junger studied Eastern medicine in India. He was the medical director of WE Care Holistic Health Center in Palm Springs, a world-famous center for fasting, cleansing, and detoxification. Currently, he lives in Los Angeles with his family, is writing his second book , CLEAN For LIFE and sees patients privately.

TRANSCRIPTION PART I:

Hello I’m Caryn Hartglass and you are listening to It’s All About Food, and guess what, it IS all about food. We hear so much gloom and doom with the economy and energy resources and things are difficult and everybody has less and there are too many people on the planet and so on and so on. We don’t’ talk about that here. What we talk about is all the wonderful things that we can do to make this world a better place and it’s all about food. And today I am really excited because we are going to be talking about some, I don’t want to say simple, but maybe they are kind of simple solutions that can make a difference on this planet and I want to introduce the author Jennifer Cockrall-King who is the author of Urban Agriculture and the New Food Revolution: Food and the City. I think I said that in reverse, Food and the City: Urban Agriculture and the New Food Revolution. Anyway, the message is important. She is a freelance journalist and food writer whose work has appeared in the Chicago Sun Times, National Post, and Canadian Geographic, McQueens and other major publications. She blogs about food and her research trips and www.foodgirl.ca from Edmonton Alberta, Canada. Welcome to It’s All About Food.

Jennifer Cockrall-King: Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Caryn Hartglass: Well, I just finished your book and I really enjoyed it. You know, we hear so many things about what’s going wrong and I wish more media outlets, more news, would focus on these things that real people are doing that make a positive difference on the planet.

Jennifer Cockrall-King: Good news stories rarely get the attention they deserve but I think there is a lot of enthusiasm about urban agriculture and gardening and food production in cities. So it seems to be getting out there, which is great.

Caryn Hartglass: Well what’s crazy is the fact that plants will grow just about anywhere and you have so many stories of that. You know, I live in New York City and you can see green things popping up from cracks in the concrete. Plants want to grow!

Jennifer Cockrall-King: You cannot let Mother Nature down.

Caryn Hartglass: With a little smarts and a little planning, we can all work together and do good things.

Jennifer Cockrall-King: You know, growing food is not as complicated as we have been led to believe. There is a lot of marketing spin out there that food needs to be very complicated and that it’s best left to the experts, and yes we definitely need farmers and we definitely need specialists in some areas of our food system, but seeds have everything that they need to do their thing. Nature has made it really easy for us to actually become gardeners. We tend to over complicate things and what I like about gardening is that it just strips it down. It’s just easy. It’s about sunshine, water, and seeds.

Caryn Hartglass: I primarily want to talk about all the good news, but before we get to the good news, just a little history because your book opens up with the history of how we got to where we are today and I think it’s important to touch on. One of the problems certain is the population. We wouldn’t be experiencing the problems we are experiencing today if there weren’t seven billion people on the planet.

Jennifer Cockrall-King: Right. That’s a lot of mouths to feed.

Caryn Hartglass: If there were just a million it would be a whole other story but I don’t think that makes things impossible and we just need to be smart about it and one of the things that I thought was interesting in your beginning history was all the things that were said decades ago about the problems we were going to have and how we wouldn’t be able to feed people and here we are decades later and we’re still not at that doom period.

Jennifer Cockrall-King: Right. The world has been ending for quite a long time.

Caryn Hartglass: Since the beginning maybe?

Jennifer Cockrall-King: Since the beginning of time, exactly. Since recorded history it’s been the end of the world that’s been coming. We certainly can be a lot smarter about using the resources that we have and we’re starting to see the consequences of our diet and eating the wrong types of foods and just the stress that it is putting on the environment and the planet and our own bodies.

Caryn Hartglass: Absolutely. One of the scary things that I find about our food system is that there are very few that really control most of our food supply today.

Jennifer Cockrall-King: That was a major issue for me. Not only do we have a handful of global corporations that control not just our food supply but our pharmaceutical supply and they are all rolled into one company but we have this illusion of abundance of food in cities because we can go to the grocery store and they look very well stocked and they are but grocery stores don’t carry a lot of inventory and they have become very good at just-in-time restocking of the shelves because that is where they are able to make a profit. If there was a problem getting food into the city for whatever reason, any major modern city in North America and Europe has about three days worth of food in it and then the shelves would start go to bare. It’s a real wakeup call that we have allowed just a few distribution chains to become so tightly controlled and if there was a problem we would all be scrambling in about three days.

Caryn Hartglass: The other concern is that, not just in the supermarkets, but our stores of emergency grains, we don’t seem to have that either like we used to.

Jennifer Cockrall-King: No. It’s anti-competitive apparently to look after our food security. Because what it does, it allows countries to not have to buy grains and food at the current market price if you have a reserve amount. There was a real push to have countries dismantle their grain reserves and some of their food stock reserves. It’s definitely something we’ve sort of opened ourselves to fragility within many different levels within our food system.

Caryn Hartglass: I’m not a religious person but I learned a biblical story a long time ago about Joseph’s dream and how the famine was going on and he dreamt of seven fat cows and seven lean cows and knew that they would have years of abundance and then years of famine and you need to prepare for that. I guess we never learn through history but hopefully we have a solution right here and it’s all in this book Food and the City. So let’s talk about Urban Agriculture. It’s hot. It’s sexy.

Jennifer Cockrall-King: It is. It’s like agriculture is the new little black dress right now. It’s kind of exciting. I think people have just started to realize the pleasure they can get from growing a bit of food in cities and I also think we let our cities become these fairly wooden, dead places where we weren’t out on the streets anymore and we were driving around in our cars a lot and we weren’t interacting with our landscape in a very healthy way and I think people just decided that if you can plant a garden and soften those sharp lines in the cement of the city, it really improves your quality of life on a block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood scale.

Caryn Hartglass: Absolutely. I’m just looking out my window and I love just to see the seasons go by and you can only see that from the plant life that is outside.

Jennifer Cockrall-King: Right and what I love about food gardens on street level is you see kids walking to school or walking with their friends and they are picking up on this seasonality. You don’t really think about the fact that they are absorbing all of this information but if they walk by a community garden every day throughout the summer they will actually learn about the seasonality of foods and they will start to taste some of and try to get some of the peas or raspberries or strawberries and they will learn that you have to wait until they are perfectly ripe.

Caryn Hartglass: Well this was one of the things that I was wondering about when I was reading the book. Now, I’m a vegan and I love my vegetables. There is no question about, that but there is a big part of the population, especially in North America, where they don’t know where their kitchen is, they don’t know how to prepare food and they are not interested in fresh produce.

Jennifer Cockrall-King: They are missing out.

Caryn Hartglass: This is another piece. I am all for urban gardening and I want to see more and more of it and I want to see more life but I am also kind of wondering if other people will jump on the band wagon as it becomes more hip? I hope so.

Jennifer Cockrall-King: I hope so too and I refer to tomatoes and basil as sort of your gateway drug to a better diet, frankly. If you start to grow food, you will eat it. If you grow fava beans, you will search through the internet and recipe books to figure out a recipe to use those fava beans.

Caryn Hartglass: Oh God I love them with garlic and oil.

Jennifer Cockrall-King: Yeah. It’s a great way to rebalance your diet because you realize that it is a lot easier to grow vegetables and to harvest them than to be tracking down a chicken for dinner every day or other products that are a lot more complicated.

Caryn Hartglass: So people are finding little nooks and crannies. There is a whole variety of different ways that people are growing food that I read about in your book either in an old parking lot or these vertical farms and old buildings. It’s really quiet fascinating. Where does this fit in with what we are allowed to do and what we are not allowed to do. Do we just get started and do it and see what happens?

Jennifer Cockrall-King: That’s usually the way public policy tends to change. It reacts to what people in the community are doing. Certain cities already have bylaws that allow urban chickens or urban bee keeping or for you to dig up your front lawn and plant vegetables. Some cities have bylaws against it but you just find there are usually a few people who push the envelope and if there is enough public support for, that’s what elected officials do. They govern hopefully according to the will of the people so it takes a while and sometimes it is frustrating but I am actually finding that city councils across Canada and in the US are really picking up on this energy and they are actually trying to facilitate this change. They see it as a huge positive. They are usually worried about garbage budgets and crime patrol among other things. This is actually a positive bright spot in their day when they can facilitate a community garden.

Caryn Hartglass: Absolutely. Our schools are so strapped financially and I love to hear when schools start to incorporate community gardens and classes in learning about food.

Jennifer Cockrall-King: Children are natural gardeners. They love the tactile nature of gardening and planting food and they are quite patient and quite nurturing. I think that it is just a really good, natural fit. It almost seems crazy that we haven’t been teaching food and gardening in schools up until now.

Caryn Hartglass: So what percentage of food do you think we can grow in an urban environment and we still of course need farmers as well?

Jennifer Cockrall-King: You’re never going to grow wheat fields in the middle of cities so if you want your bread, we still depend on farmers. In the Second World War, so in the 1940’s, the victory gardens movement…so when people were really engaged in home food production and canning and being self-sufficient, they estimate that 40% of the fresh vegetables were grown domestically in home gardens. So we can do a lot better than we are now. We think urban agriculture is hot now, but it was really hot in the 1940’s.

Caryn Hartglass: Unfortunately, as you have gone over in the beginning of your book, a lot has changed since the 1940’s and some of it has come out of chemicals and technology from those wars. I was so fascinated reading in the beginning of your book the history because you know I lived through a lot of it, at least the last five decades and you don’t realize what is going on when you’re in the middle of it. I was never really interested in history as a kid but now I am kind of fascinated by it and it’s like “Oh! That’s how we got here!” but it is amazing.

Jennifer Cockrall-King: When I think about even in my life time too, my grandmother used to can peaches and pears and apricots and it was a real treat to go downstairs in her house into the cellar and there was this rainbow selection of these beautiful fruits and we just don’t do that anymore. We shop twice a week and the fridge goes bare every couple of days. We’re just not very much in tune with planning ahead year to year or even week to week.

Caryn Hartglass: I think urban gardening can really solve so many problems and not just food security related issues although that is certainly obviously a big piece. So many people today are not fulfilled. They are depressed and they are not happy with their lives and we live with so much abundance and things are so convenient and so easy. People just eat because they are bored. You quoted Voltaire in the beginning of the book and I remember I performed in the musical “Candide” a few times which is based on his book and my favorite piece, the Leonard Berstein piece, Make Our Garden Grow. It is a beautiful song but the words are so meaningful to me and it is so important to work and to see the accomplishment, the food that grows up to nurture your body for yourself and your family and I think a lot of people are really missing that and it creates an emptiness in them.

Jennifer Cockrall-King: Everything is so convenient and there is nothing wrong with convenience, but you are right. We have lost that personal satisfaction of being self-sufficient and about seeing a project through. Just in terms of our healthy, you mentioned depression. We are not getting enough exercise and we are not outside enough and there is a direct link between the types of food we put into our bodies and our mental state because it is all connected. When you can have one solution that solves so many different problems, you just want to run screaming through the streets telling people, “Plant a garden! You can ditch your expensive gym membership and you can probably lose some weight. You can be happier and healthier and maybe get off some of the anti-depressants.” It’s all about building a social scene in your community too. I was talking to somebody last night and we were discussing how we just don’t walk up to a stranger and speak to them. That happens all the time when you are out puttering in your yard and your garden. It’s just an opportunity to engage with somebody in your neighborhood that you don’t know yet and that’s just the ice breaker. All of the sudden you have made that connection and you have a much more safe neighborhood too. If you have people out gardening in the early morning and late at night, criminals don’t really like that.

Caryn Hartglass: I like the way you talked about how drug dealers don’t like flowers in gardens or parks and they will stay away from that.

Jennifer Cockrall-King: It’s drug dealer repellant basically.

Caryn Hartglass: That’s hysterical. It just provides a pretty happy atmosphere and they just don’t feel like that is the place for crime?

Jennifer Cockrall-King: Exactly. There is too much activity that is not drug related. There is too much gardening activity.

Caryn Hartglass: Too many eyes on them! You have so many great stories in this book where we read about Paris and London and Los Angeles and Detroit and Chicago. There are lots of very different places and really great stories all along. I think my favorite though, and you saved it for last, is Cuba. I would never wish this on anyone where all of the sudden we are out of food.

Jennifer Cockrall-King: They went through Peak Oil in a very drastic way in the early 90’s and Peak Oil and no oil actually lead to a real food crisis on the island with 11 million people. So it was a very, very serious situation but they got out of it. They avoided mass starvation essentially through urban agriculture and through organic, low-tech but high skill, and heavy use of human labor food production.

Caryn Hartglass: Every culture has good things and bad things. Like last week, I was talking to this woman who was talking about how the French teach their children how to eat and it is so much better than how we raise our kids here in North America because we are so focused I think on empowering kids at two years old to make their own choices that we don’t teach them what the right behavior is. There are good things from every culture and not so good things. Not that I want to live in Cuba, although I hear there are some lovely things about it, but we definitely can learn from what they did. We don’t have to do everything that they are doing.

Jennifer Cockrall-King: They have a very difficult situation there still. Life is not easy in Cuba and they have a lot of challenges that are brought upon them and that they bring upon themselves, but what is nice about Cuba is that they almost have this little cottage industry of bringing people over who are interested in urban agriculture and sustainable technologies. They are also moving quite quickly into solar power, wind power, bio gas, and all sorts of alternative energy sources. They are really making lemonade out of lemons frankly and they have figured out how to create a social situation where farmers are extremely well respected. They are well paid and that is definitely something we could learn from.

Caryn Hartglass: Could we underline that because you said in your book that farmers were paid more than doctors and lawyers in Cuba? That’s crazy! That’s great!

Jennifer Cockrall-King: There is not nearly the economic disparity that we have in North America where we have certain segments of the population that get paid a lot more and teachers and other very important people like farmers are kind of low on the totem pole of pay. So they have their priorities in that sense kind of better aligned than we do and it doesn’t take a lot to give farmers more respect. It doesn’t cost us any more. We tend not to treat our farmers with a lot of respect and I think that that goes a long way towards making us feel better about paying our farmers more as well. Most farming families in North America rely on off-farm income.

Caryn Hartglass: We really need to change things in this country and I hope that it doesn’t require us to go hungry before we make those changes. We need to get back to the small farmer and they need to be supported with government assistance to grow the right kinds of food organically and I don’t like the idea that corporations are growing these mass fields of mono-crops and not even a lot of people involved per acre in those situations. A lot of things are automated and more people can get back to work taking care of the earth. It’s so obvious to me, why isn’t it as obvious to everyone else?

Jennifer Cockrall-King: It’s having a huge effect. We could talk about colony collapse disorder in bees. This is a huge problem in North America and Europe because of mono-crop fields and heavy chemical use where they dose the crops with pesticides and insecticides. Lo and behold, bees will actually die because they are also insects. When we have one in three mouths depending on bees pollenating our food we have to really think carefully about some of these choices that we make that give us lots of cheap food. It might not be Peak Oil. It might not be something else or we may fall into food crisis because we’ve killed the bees.

Caryn Hartglass: Everything is connected.

Jennifer Cockrall-King: We’re back to the doomsday scenario.

Caryn Hartglass: there we go! But that’s not going to happen because we are going to get all of these hot urban farmers coming in and saving the day and we are all a part of that and we all need to make our gardens grow. So do you have a garden?

Jennifer Cockrall-King: I do! I do! I’m not an expert gardener and certainly when I was writing the book I was working very hard and my garden never looked worse so I was a bit of a hypocrite. I am looking forward to this growing season because I’ll finally get some time to spend time in the garden. I like to grow things that push the limits of what I should be able to grow in my climate!

Caryn Hartglass: You’re in Canada. I was really interested to hear about some of the things people are growing up there. So what pushes the limits in your neighborhood?

Jennifer Cockrall-King: One of the things as you move further North, you get extremely long days. We get 16-17 hours of sunlight in a day in July and August so we have a long growing season in that sense because the plants can really grow a lot longer than in Southern latitudes. We can get ripe tomatoes in the garden to artichokes…I had some pinot grigio grapes growing and they even survived the winters. Now, I would never get grapes because there was always a late frost that would get the flowers but I had grape leaves and I made Dolmades all summer long. It was fabulous. It’s quite incredible and I visited a community garden up in Yellow Knife which is near the Arctic Circle quite frankly and they get 24 hours of sunlight in the summertime. The gardens up there are so incredible. It is so astonishing to see what true Northern farmers can grow. They have everything from quinoa, to kale, to brussel sprouts to beautiful turnips and lots of root crops and beautiful leafy greens.

Caryn Hartglass: That’s really inspiring. I’m glad to hear they can grow quinoa because I heard that was a very difficult plant to grow on our side of the equator.

Jennifer Cockrall-King: Yes. I think it likes extreme latitudes and I think it has to do with elevation more than anything but where there’s a will there’s a way and I think that’s why we have always escaped these little doomsday scenarios because we are self-destructive to a point but then we smarten up.

Caryn Hartglass: That’s right. Jennifer, thank you so much for joining me on It’s All About Food. Thank you for your book Food in the City. It is very inspirational and I really enjoyed reading it.

Jennifer Cockrall-King: Thank you. It’s been my pleasure.

Caryn Hartglass: Okay. Take care. Bye Bye. I’m Caryn Hartglass and you have been listening to It’s All About Food. We are going to take a quick break and be back in a moment.

Transcribed by Erin Clark, 1/29/2013

Reflections on Passover and Easter, Earth Day, Starbucks, VegWeek, and Slavery

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I shared my thoughts on the meaning of the current holidays, Passover and Easter, and of course, the food involved in the celebrations. I always connect the story of slavery and redemption in the Passover story to the unfortunate exploitation of people and animals today.
I shared the recipe for my first vegan, gluten-free matzah ball soup and talked about chocolate and eggs for Easter. Child slaves are still used in the Ivory Coast in cocoa production and most egg-laying hens are tortured with today’s methods of animal agriculture. I continued the conversation about raising kids in Europe versus here in North America, Compassion Over Killing’s upcoming VegWeek following Earth Day.

Interviews with Atina Diffley and Karen Le Billon

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4/4/2012:

Part I: Atina Diffley
Turn Here Sweet Corn: Organic Farming Works.

Atina Diffley is an organic vegetable farmer who now educates consumers, farmers, and policymakers about organic farming through the consulting business Organic Farming Works LLC, owned by her and her husband, Martin. From 1973 through 2007, the Diffleys owned and operated Gardens of Eagan, one of the first certified organic produce farms in the Midwest. To contact Atina or Martin Diffley, visit www.organicfarmingworks.com.

4/4/2012:

Part II: Karen Le Billon
French Kids Eat Everything

Born in Montreal and based in Vancouver, Karen Le Billon is an author and teacher. Married to a Frenchman, she has two daughters, and her family divides its time between Vancouver and France.

French Kids Eat Everything (HarperCollins) is Karen’s newest book, a memoir about family and food, inspired by a year spent in her husband’s hometown–a small seaside village in Brittany.

Karen has a PhD from Oxford University, and is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Rhodes Scholarship, a Canada Research Chair, and Canada’s Top 40 Under 40 award. She currently teaches at the University of British Columbia.

She is one of the Jamie Oliver Food Foundation’s Real Food Advocates.

TRANSCRIPTION PART I:

Hello I’m Caryn Hartglass and you’re listening to It’s All About Food. Hi and Happy April. It is April. I think it’s my favorite month. Not just because it’s spring but because I was born in the month of April and I’m celebrating my birthday all month. Read more »

Remembering Marti Kheel, Illness as a Vegan, Food and Culture, Organic Farming, Sunflowers

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Caryn discusses her brief meeting and conversations with vegan, ecofeminist, activist, scholar and founder of Feminists for Animal Rights, Marti Kheel before she passed in November 2011. Caryn talks about the health expectations involved in eating a healthy vegan diet and, why and what to do when those expectations aren’t achieved, i.e. we are diagnosed with disease. She covers the feedback on the all-white, male panel chosen for the New York Times Magazine’s The Ethicist column Calling All Carnivores
Tell Us Why It’s Ethical to Eat Meat: A Contest and the brilliant response by Lori Gruen, A. Breeze Harper, and Carol J. Adams; one’s culture’s impact on healthy eating; organic farming; Monsanto providing free “educational materials” to schools; and beautiful sunflowers and their delicious seeds.

Interview with Caryn Ginsberg

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3/28/2012:

Caryn Ginsberg
Animal Impact

After a corporate career that included senior positions in strategy and marketing, Caryn Ginsberg co-founded Priority Ventures Group which has helped businesses and nonprofits achieve better outcomes for over 16 years. Caryn brings over 20 years experience with clients ranging from the Fortune 500 to leading nonprofits and smaller organizations to her work with Priority Ventures Group LLC.

She has served on several nonprofit boards of directors and advisory boards. She has also taught marketing management and strategy in the MBA program at Johns Hopkins University, for Humane Society University, and for the Bank Marketing Association.

Caryn has spoken extensively at conferences in both the business and nonprofit sectors on increasing marketing and outreach effectiveness. She has also authored many articles, including for Executive Update, Vegetarian Journal and The Animals’ Agenda.

Caryn holds an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, as well as an A.B. in economics / mathematics from Dartmouth College, where she played varsity ice hockey. She earned an advanced certificate in marketing design from Sessions College for Professional Design.

Pink Slime, Pink Salmon, Methyl Iodide and Rhubarb

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Listen to the REAL voice of reason on pink slime (lean finely textured beef and ammonium hydroxide); hot dogs; methyl iodide, methyl bromide and strawberries; maple syrup; fish and sodium tripolyphosphate; salmon and canthaxanthin; and deforestation in Paraguay for beef production. The REAL food to try for the week: Rhubarb!

Celebrating The 3rd Anniversary of IT’S ALL ABOUT FOOD!

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On this show I celebrate 3 years of hosting the weekly IT’S ALL ABOUT FOOD program with the Progressive Radio Network. I started on March 25, 2009. Since that time I have hosted 145 shows, interviewing 155 unique guests. I am so grateful for this experience, I have learned a great deal and have been inspired by so many wonderful people, authors, activists, chefs, teachers, athletes who are doing so much to make this world a kinder, gentler, better place. I go over some of the highlights from these 3 years of programming.

Archives to all the shows, with information that is still NEWS and quite current, can be found HERE.

Red Meat; Sleep; Mood Improvements; Fennel and Daikon

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March 18, 2012: I reviewed the recent study from Harvard School of Public Health on “Red Meat Consumption and Mortality”, talked about sleep and sleeping pills, improving your mood with veggies; Broccoli Sprouts, Broccoli Juice; and what to do with Fennel and Daikon.
I discussed questions recently posed including: What about men and soy? Is it possible to diet, lose weight and feel full? Do plants have feelings?

Interviews with Kim Barnouin and Amie Hamlin

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LISTEN TO THE ENTIRE PROGRAM BELOW AT THE BOTTOM OF THE POST.

Listen to: PART I WITH KIM BARNOUIN

Listen to: PART II WITH AMIE HAMLIN

3/14/2012:

Part I: Kim Barnouin
Skinny Bitch Book of Vegan Swaps

She is the co-author of the New York Times Bestseller Skinny Bitch, and Skinny Bitch in the Kitch, as well as Skinny Bitchin, Skinny Bitch Bun in the Oven, and Skinny Bastard. She released her first solo book Skinny Bitch Ultimate Everyday Cookbook in October of 2010. She is the founder of her website www.healthybitchdaily.com, a fun and informative green living guide for women.

3/14/2012:

Part II: Amie Hamlin
NY Coalition for Healthy School Lunches

Amie Hamlin began as Executive Director of New York Coalition for Healthy School Food in when the organization was founded in 2004 and has worked to expand the reach of her organizations work over the years. NYCHSF currently partners with the New York City Office of SchoolFood and the Ithaca City School District Child Nutrition Program, offering plant-based entrees to over 17,000 students. NYCHSF also offers Wellness Wakeup Call, a nutrition education program available in K-5 and 6-12 versions, written by Registered Dietitians. Amie has worked in the non-profit world since 1996 when she was Director of a Tobacco-Free Coalition and then of two environmental non-profits.

TRANSCRIPTION PART I:

Hello everybody. I’m Caryn Hartglass and you’re listening to It’s All About Food. It is an absolutely gorgeous day here in New York City on March 14th, 2012. I am so happy to be here this hour to talk to you, especially about my favorite subject: food. It’s going to be a good one today, a good hour. Read more »

Online Shopping, Dairy Farming, Ensure, Ligans, Ginger and Shallots

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3/11/2012 – Join me on my second live broadcast from REAL Worldwide Radio where I give time saving tips with online shopping, talk about the economics of dairy farming, where to get your healthy lignans and delicious things to do with ginger and shallots.

Glutamate, GE Corn, Sugar and Bioplastics

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March 4, 2012: Responsible Eating And Living presents it’s first live broadcast featuring the ASK A VEGAN show. In response to a listener’s question regarding nutritional yeast being an excitotoxin, I talked about glutamate and glutamic acid including MSG, Monosodium Glutamate and other foods with glutamate, whether or not they are healthy or not? Next I discussed Monsanto’s newly approved GE sweet corn, GE corn in the United States, bioplastics, recylcling plastics, the new National Center for Health Statistics report on Consumption of Added Sugar Among U.S. Children and Adolescents 2005-2008.

Listen to the next LIVE broadcast here on the REAL Worldwide Radio very Sunday from 7-8pm Eastern Time.

Interview with Eric Weltman

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3/7/2012:

Eric Weltman
Food And Water Watch

Eric Weltman is Senior Organizer for Food & Water Watch in New York. He has over 20 years of experience leading social justice campaigns and building progressive power. Eric has helped direct ground-breaking coalitions, organize high-visibility media events, write influential publications, and manage successful initiatives to pass legislation, fund programs, and elect candidates. Eric also has extensive experience conducting trainings on media outreach, advocacy, organizing, and public speaking. He has taught urban politics at Suffolk University, and written for such publications as The American Prospect, In These Times, and Dollars & Sense. A native of New Jersey, Eric graduated from the University of Michigan and earned an M.A. in Urban & Environmental Policy from Tufts University. When he’s not changing the world, Eric enjoys being with his wife, Sarah, and son, Zach, reading history books, taking walks around New York City, watching “Burn Notice” and “House,” juggling, and eating Thai food.

TRANSCRIPTION:

Caryn Hartglass: Good day! I’m Caryn Hartglass and you’re listening to It’s All About Food. Thank you for joining me today and thank you for listening. And for those of you who have sent me little notes via e-mail at info@realmeals.org or posted something on Facebook, thank you! It’s always great to hear comments and they’re all good so thank you for that. Read more »

Interviews with Donna Michelle Beaudoin and Doron Petersan

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2/29/2012:

Part I: Donna Beaudoin
Sister Vegetarian

Donna Michelle Beaudoin is an Author and Motivator who inspires and puts the burning passion in you to lead a healthy, drama-free lifestyle as a vegetarian or vegan.

She is the author of Sister Vegetarian’s 31 Days of Drama-Free Vegetarian and Vegan Living. She is a 45 yr old Vegan who knows how it is to try for years to become a vegetarian and then a vegan. She is a a vegan who incorporates 20% to 50% raw vegan meals weekly into my vegan meals for optimum health benefits. She is a Certified Raw Vegan Lifestyle Coach and Raw Vegan Chef through Raw Vegan Network-Ekaya Institute of Living Food Education. She uses her certifications to help people transition to a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle by illustrating the importance of adding to weekly meals raw vegan and whole foods for increased health benefits.

2/29/2012:

Part II: Doron Petersan
Sticky Fingers Sweets

Doron Petersan opened Sticky Fingers Sweets & Eats in 2002 drawing on her dgree in Dietetics from the University of Maryland and years of experience working in restaurants. She lives with her husband, Peter and their recued companion-animals in Washington, D.C.

TRANSCRIPTIONS

PART I:

Caryn Hartglass: Hello! This is Caryn Hartglass and you’re listening to It’s All About Food. Hello and how are you today? We have a great show coming up. I’m looking forward to both of my guests today.

This whole vegan thing, it’s been going on for a long time. And what we talk about on It’s All About Food is certainly food and how food affects our personal health, the health of the planet, and certainly the animals that we choose to either eat or not eat. What’s really wonderful is we’re gaining a lot of momentum and people are thinking about vegans differently than they used to, thinking about vegetarians differently than certainly when I got started, seems like centuries ago, maybe 30 some-odd years ago. The thing that we find is that everyone’s on a different journey. And we discover the vegetarian diet, the vegan diet, in a unique way, each one of us, we react to it in a unique way. And some of us decide to eat this type of diet, some of us choose not to. But each one of us has a different life experience and a different journey and so our decisions to do certain things are different, and how we do things are different. Okay, difference is the theme here. But some people find changing diets very easy, most people have challenges. And different people’s stories and message will resonate with certain people and not with others. And so that’s the great thing about what’s going on right now because there’s so many vegetarian voices out there that are going to connect with certain people and help them move to a better place in the food continuum. And we’ve got one of them today. We’re going to be talking to Sister Vegetarian. We’re going to be talking to Donna Beaudoin. Or you could correct me if I didn’t pronounce it correctly but she’s the author of a new book, Sister Vegetarian’s 31 Days of Drama-Free Living.

Welcome to It’s All About Food, Donna!

Donna Beaudoin: Thank you, Caryn! How are you doing?

Caryn Hartglass: Good. How do you say your last name?

Donna Beaudoin: Beaudoin.

Caryn Hartglass: Beaudoin! Okay. I was trying to make it French, like Boudoir or something.

Donna Beaudoin: That’s fine, that’s fine. Just call me Donna.

Caryn Hartglass: Okay. I just realized when I made some posts on Facebook and Twitter today that I made it Sistah Vegetarian, and not Sister Vegetarian because I was confusing it with Sistah Vegan and I apologize.

Donna Beaudoin: That’s fine. I call myself sister vegetarian because I see vegetarians and vegans as a part of the same family. We all want to get healthy, we want to the environment, we want to save animals. So I thought of sister as “I’m just a part of your family,” I’m your sister, I’m your aunt, I’m like a mother-figure. We’re all part of the same family so that’s why we’re all sisters.

Caryn Hartglass: Well, I like it. Because people may not realize it but we’re all one family on this planet, we’re all connected, all of our actions, however insignificant they may seem, are significant to everyone else on the planet. We breathe the same air. It’s really powerful. I was watching a Deepak Chopra video just this week and he was talking about this concept. It really was profound, down to the cellular level, how deeply connected we all are.

Donna Beaudoin: That is true. Yes. And that’s why my book speaks to vegetarians and vegans. A lot of us start as vegetarians and moved to a vegan but it speaks to everyone in trying to help people to become a vegetarian or become a vegan. The recipes are vegan with a vegetarian twist, if that’s what you want to be.

Caryn Hartglass: A vegetarian twist, or with a vegan twist. Or a little lemon or lime.

Donna Beaudoin: Exactly.

Caryn Hartglass: Okay. The challenge is people have a hard time on diets, period. I’m always saying it’s not a diet; it’s a lifestyle. Or at least this particular path.

Donna Beaudoin: I agree. I agree.

Caryn Hartglass: And that’s part of the secret to having stability and success when it’s not something you’re going to do for a short time to lose a few pounds; it becomes your life.

Donna Beaudoin: it is a part of your life. It is a journey. It’s a lifetime journey.

Caryn Hartglass: But as you mentioned throughout the book there, it’s all these drama!

Donna Beaudoin: It is. And some people go through being a vegetarian and vegan easily and some don’t. It’s based upon my experiences alone, not being a medical physician or in the medical field, I base on my experiences and talking a lot to people. We go through different types of societal mess and things we hear, maybe among friends or family, at work, that when we start out being a vegetarian or vegan, good intentions, and we hear that little buzz in the ear and then we stop.

I mentioned in the book someone was a vegan for six years and then they just couldn’t deal with all the emotional things going around and then they just stopped being a vegan. So my book is addressing all the drama that we come across because I realize there are so many cookbooks out there and how to be a vegetarian, eating vegetarian or vegan but nothing really addresses the societal mess and drama we come across from friends and family and co-workers and just society alone. It’s just out there to address it, to help you to become strong. Because in the book, in the beginning of the book, I mentioned that you have to have a strong will; you have to have a strong mind. And that’s what you really need along in this journey.

Caryn Hartglass: Well, you need that to succeed in everything.

Donna Beaudoin: Exactly.

Caryn Hartglass: I think that’s what I hear about most, the societal pressures that people have. I’m continually thinking that it’s not necessarily the diet or this lifestyle that really the issue; it just sort of brings out or magnifies everything going on in someone’s life. So if there are issues with relationships, or with the family, or with a co-worker, this is just an opportunity to make it work or bring it out, bridge the way.

Donna Beaudoin: Yeah. The recipes of being a vegetarian are wonderful. I’ve never hear anyone complain about eating the foods. It’s always just the little issues they have to deal with and maybe being the only person that they know who’s a vegetarian or vegan. That’s why I came up with 30 days, to try to help people through the different situations that they come across. Because as I said, we need to have a strong mind to know that we can do this, we can get over the mountain. We can climb up and just be on the top of the mountain shouting, “I am here forever! I’m a vegetarian or vegan forever!”

Caryn Hartglass: Whoooo!

Donna Beaudoin: So changing …Just because some person buzzes into our ear. So I wanted to make people strong, men and women, strong in being a vegetarian and vegan. I know they can dust themselves off. Everyone falls down but you have to know that you can get right back up. Dust yourself off and get right back up and keep walking.

Caryn Hartglass: This is a positive, motivational book, disguised as a vegetarian journey. But it really is something that we should apply to everything, kind of re-scripting those crazy voices in our heads.

Donna Beaudoin: Exactly, exactly. And towards the end of the book I give ten energy bars, I called it: powerful tips to help you along your way.

Caryn Hartglass: Very good. You might even market them as in the shape of an energy bar.

Donna Beaudoin: Exactly.

Caryn Hartglass: People can put them in their wallets. When they want to eat something, “No, read one of these.”

Donna Beaudoin: Exactly. I thought of energy bars because I run races and my husband hike, and energy bars give us energy in between the meals. And I’m thinking, “You know what, we need some energy, just little tidbits of energy to keep us going through the day in between our meals.” And that’s how I came up with those 10 energy bars, or 10 powerful points, to get us started.

Caryn Hartglass: Can you remember or did you have particularly difficult social situations, either with your family or work, that you might share?

Donna Beaudoin: Just being the only vegetarian, initially, mainly at work. So it is kind of difficult, initially, and then I started to convert maybe two people at work and people were starting to realize that, “Hey, this is a wonderful lifestyle.” I think my family was more accepting. My husband took awhile and he was very supportive though and now he’s a vegetarian.

Caryn Hartglass: I was going to ask you that because that wasn’t clear in the book.

Donna Beaudoin: Yeah, he’s a vegetarian now. He became one in June.

Caryn Hartglass: Congratulations! Tell him I congratulate him.

Donna Beaudoin: He’s very supportive but I think it was more so the outside. He spent a lot of time outside the home, in work situations and other types of groups and you get more pressure from there.

Caryn Hartglass: I think it’s the hardest in a relationship if you’re not eating similarly because eating is such an important even everyday.

Donna Beaudoin: It is. It’s definitely important.

Caryn Hartglass: And when you’re in a relationship, sharing…that’s such a great way to share.

Donna Beaudoin: That’s true. Initially, before he became vegetarian, cooking two different meals and it got kind of hard sometimes. And a lot of people asked me, “Well, if you’re spouse is not a vegetarian and you are, how do you work that out?” I mean, you still eat together; you still cook together. It can be done. A lot of people don’t want to become vegetarian or vegan as their spouse or their significant other is not, I say go for it. Just do it. A lot of people like to wait for the other person but if you do it, the other person is more than likely follow your lead also. You have to be the person that starts it.

Caryn Hartglass: I think …I’m on to something here and it’s not coming out. But I think you can definitely get on the vegetarian path and if your partner isn’t interested, you can ultimately prepare one meal but the other person who isn’t interested in being vegetarian can add the animal products.

Donna Beaudoin: That’s true.

Caryn Hartglass: You can always grate cheese on top of anything. And you can crumble it or put some grilled chicken on top of anything. You can ultimately eat the same thing.

Donna Beaudoin: That is true. I find out that with me and my husband, he’s a vegetarian and I’m a vegan, so we’ll have, maybe let’s say I’ll put out something easy like a pasta dish. And he, maybe, will, on his plate, grate cheese and I will probably have nutritional yeast, maybe on top of mine. But sure, you can add little things.

Caryn Hartglass: I lived in France in the early 90s and I used to make a lot of vegan dishes. That’s cheese country. Many of my friends, before even eating or try what I would offer, they were just grating all the cheese all over it. Okay, fine, that’s fine.

Donna Beaudoin: Exactly. I used to be a cheese nut too. That was one thing that was hard to give up, switching from vegetarian to vegan, and it was hard for a lot of vegetarians to give up.

Caryn Hartglass: It’s addicting.

Donna Beaudoin: It is addicting.

Caryn Hartglass: There’s a lot of evidence now that shows that it does stuff in our brains that has addictive properties.

Donna Beaudoin: Exactly. And I’ve felt so much lighter and just so … I don’t know what the word for it but just on top of the mountain when I gave up the cheese and just became a vegan. Just felt so much more alive.

Caryn Hartglass: Well, you’re tiny. I caught some of your videos on YouTube and you can really see how fit and trim and slim you are.

Donna Beaudoin: Thank you, thank you. It didn’t start that way.

Caryn Hartglass: Well, that’s what you described in the book.

Donna Beaudoin: Yes. I was always small and then I hit 40. About five years ago, I started to gain weight and in three years I went from a size 4 to a size 14. And couldn’t figure out what was wrong. I started to have a lot of stomachache problems too and I would say, probably, even before that in a 10-year period, I was hospitalized for a time for stomachache problems. Doctors couldn’t find anything wrong with me so I put matters into my own hands. Last time I was sick I just said, “I’m just going to do it myself.” I gave up meat. I became a vegetarian. It was actually more so probably 90% vegan I was eating. And all my stomachache problems of over 10 years disappeared. My weight dropped immediately. That’s why I said it’s not a diet; it’s a lifestyle change. I didn’t even do it to drop weight; it just ended up dropping. And my stomach problems stopped. I went from a size 14 to a size 4. I always did love to hike and exercise. And I never had back pains until I started to get heavy. I no longer have back pains or stomach pains. I mean. It’s just great.

Caryn Hartglass: It’s magic.

Donna Beaudoin: Yeah, yeah. I healed my body. Yeah, it’s great.

Caryn Hartglass: One of the things people often talked about losing weight is making smaller portions and eating less. I scream when I hear this because it’s hard for people to do that and to feel unsatisfied, not feel full, and yet when you’re eating correctly, and when I look at the plates of food that I eat, it’s ridiculous. I can’t get a bowl that’s big enough sometimes for the salads or the soups that I eat.

Donna Beaudoin: Exactly. Yeah. And people can’t believe how much I eat but yet won’t gain weight because I’m eating healthy foods and my body is being provided with nutrients and healthy foods that is just helps me to sustain my weight at what it should be.

Caryn Hartglass: Whole, minimally processed foods are so full of fiber, especially when they’re raw, they’re filled with water, and that makes the belly feel full and makes the brain satisfied because you’re getting the vitamins and nutrients that you need.

Donna Beaudoin: That’s true. And I eat a lot of raw foods. I incorporate raw foods in my meals everyday. Usually, I eat a lot of greens, I eat a lot of raw greens: collards greens, mustard greens, and turnip greens, beet greens. I eat a lot of raw greens everyday, rather as a part of a lunch like a wrap or a salad. Sometimes I’ll eat a raw vegan lasagna or raw vegan pesto. Or I make the pesto …

Caryn Hartglass: I like the mustard green pesto recipe in your book.

Donna Beaudoin: Thank you. And sometimes I put the mustard green pesto on top of shredded, raw collard greens. Collard greens act as a more of like pasta, instead of using a pasta.

Caryn Hartglass: Right. They have a good chew.

Donna Beaudoin: Yeah. It’s delicious.

Caryn Hartglass: I can’t say enough about eating greens. I really think that’s the secret to life.

Donna Beaudoin: It is. I’m not a physician and I tell you, I have not been sick in three years since I switched from eating meat to being a vegetarian, now vegan. Never had a flu shot in my life. And in three years, I haven’t had any colds, flu. Nothing.

Caryn Hartglass: That’s pretty good.

Donna Beaudoin: Nothing whatsoever. I don’t even take supplements or vitamins. So it’s something about living a plant-based diet.

Caryn Hartglass: Now you live in North Carolina.

Donna Beaudoin: I do.

Caryn Hartglass: Right. There’s a lot of problems in North Carolina. There’s a wide ride of lifestyles, from very rich to very poor, and lots in the middle. And there are areas that are called food deserts. And there’s a lot of animal agriculture that goes on there, most of it hidden. It’s a very interesting place. It’s got a lot of things going on.

Donna Beaudoin: It does. And solely the vegetarian/vegan community is rising, mainly in the Durham, Chapel Hill, Raleigh areas. In the Asheville area also, which is towards the mountains. Still lot of ways to go. We’re not similar to the communities more up north, maybe above Virginia but we still have a lot of ways to go. And North Carolina is still more so of the rib capital. They still love their ribs and barbequed meat. But we’re working on it.

Caryn Hartglass: Yeah. There’s a lot going on there. One of the problems people have if they want to eat better, some people are in neighborhoods where it’s really hard to access food. I think you even …. Did you mention something like that in the beginning of the book? I think I was reading where you were buying from a store near where you work …

Donna Beaudoin: Yes, one of my local stores near my home.

Caryn Hartglass: Oh, now I remember what it was.

Donna Beaudoin: They did not have a great selection of, I’ll say, vegetarian/vegan products. The produce was good but they need a little bit more. They used to have, actually they still have it, it’s called “Talk To …”, I won’t say the grocery name but it was “Talk To That Grocery Store.” You email them after your grocery experience and write them and give comments. The next week I was going to the store, I was like “Wow, they added this!” I remember I mentioned it in my email. And then I emailed again because … I would give them positive feedback also. My husband and I have been shopping in that store for years. And I give positive feedback on the staff also. But another week, I mentioned something and they have something else there.

Caryn Hartglass: Nice.

Donna Beaudoin: So the grocery stores do listen to you. If you’re in a food desert areas, don’t think the stores won’t listen to you; they will. Email them, call them on the phone, and talk to the manager in person. They will listen; don’t think they won’t. You should have what you want to have in that store. They’re servicing you; you’re not servicing them.

Caryn Hartglass: There’s so many good points there. It’s so important for us to act as individuals because we do matter in everything we do.

Donna Beaudoin: That’s correct.

Caryn Hartglass: Make a difference. Just by simply asking. Ask and you shall receive.

Donna Beaudoin: Exactly, exactly. And the great thing is, it’s so funny, after coming in all the time, the manager even posted something to the staff to say, “Hey, people are commenting on the email about the stores. Keep up the good work.” So they do listen. The stores do listen.

Caryn Hartglass: That’s nice. Okay so we have, I don’t know, about eight more minutes. One of the things about the recipes in your book, they’re really very straightforward; they’re pretty easy. It’s a really good beginning for diving in here. It’s based on beans, vegetables, and spices. All of this stuff is really flavorful.

Donna Beaudoin: And I love world recipes. I wanted to just put a lot of recipes in there that I enjoy and people throughout the world eat. There are many countries that are vegetarian-based and I put these recipes on here to make it not so hard. As a working person myself I know how hard it is to work all day and want to come home and cook a nice meal for your family. But in the middle of that, you both can, and everyone in the family can, just sit down and talk and enjoy. I have an Ethiopian dish there that is easy to make when you come from work that’s less than 15 minutes. You can have it on your table right away and with leftovers. It’s just meals that everyone can enjoy and introduces you to the world of vegetarian or vegan.

Caryn Hartglass: I was in …when was it, last year? I went to Argentina. Buenos Aires. I was always looking for the veggie healthy places. And I was in one, I think it was a Mediterranean restaurant, and I ordered hummus; I eat a lot of hummus. And it tasted okay but it tasted different. And then I realized it had peanut butter in it, not tahini. And I had never that before. I kind of chuckled because you mentioned in your book if you can’t find or don’t have tahini, you can use peanut butter. You certainly can but you should know because if you’re expecting one and getting the other, it’s like “Whoa!”

Donna Beaudoin: Yeah, it is a different taste. And then a lot of places don’t have tahini. Especially in the South parts, shopping, it is hard to find but you’ve been there, so that’s a good substitute to use. And then also I love hummus. I tend to make it every week. And I also let people know, experiment with hummus. Do different things. Just don’t do the basics. I love to experiment in making foods so one time I put beets in it and, oh my god, it turned out perfect. It had beets, smoked sauce and it was creamy; it was great. Another time I tried adding some raisins, giving it a little sweetness to it. Just experiment with hummus. Have fun with it.

Caryn Hartglass: Well, you can experiment just with the basic hummus, a base of garbanzo beans, chickpeas, or you can use other beans too.

Donna Beaudoin: Exactly. You can.

Caryn Hartglass: So the idea is that it’s a bean of fat and some flavoring.

Donna Beaudoin: Exactly. I have used navy beans, red beans, to make hummus, black beans. You can experiment with so many different beans.

Caryn Hartglass: And then what’s great about it is it’s so versatile. People don’t even realize how simple the variety to be. So it can be a great spread on a sandwich. And the variations are infinite based on the beans that you use, the spice that you use, the fat that you use, or no fat. Some people just like to make a garbanzo bean, seasoned, and mashed.

Donna Beaudoin: Right, right. Sometimes I do it as a spread on one of my vegan sandwiches. I’ll grill a Portobello mushroom and use it as a spread.

Caryn Hartglass: Right. Instead of mayonnaise or something, you could use this flavored bean spread. It’s infinite. Or you could thin it a little bit more and then it becomes a dip or a dressing.

Donna Beaudoin: Exactly. You’re making me hungry, girl!

Caryn Hartglass: Or it could be even as is like a pâté or something.

Donna Beaudoin: Exactly.

Caryn Hartglass: I’m nuts over beans, or beans over nuts. Or something like that.

Donna Beaudoin: I am too. You can’t catch me without some type of bean stew on my stove, usually on a Sunday.

Caryn Hartglass: I don’t know what it’s like in North Carolina but here in nyc, the greatest city in the world, we have everything and more.

Donna Beaudoin: You do. Yes. I grew up in New Jersey, actually.

Caryn Hartglass: Right. There you go. And because there are so many different cultures here, there are so many different stores with different foods. One of my favorite is this Indian store in Queens, in Flushing, the Chinatown in Flushing. And there are so many beans that I don’t even know if I’ll ever get to try them all. They all have different sizes, colors, and shapes. They all have different subtle flavors, texture differences. It’s a celebration.

Donna Beaudoin: It’s wonderful. I love it. I love it. I love finding new variety of beans and trying them out. It’s great.

Caryn Hartglass: Yeah. And the other thing is the colors are phenomenal.

Donna Beaudoin: They’re beautiful, yes.

Caryn Hartglass: And we have glass jars. We don’t have a lot of covered spaces so they’re all out on display in glass jars and they’re just lovely: yellow, orange, and pink.

Donna Beaudoin: That’s true. The cranberry beans are beautiful. The azuki beans, oh my gosh, yes. Like I said, you make me hungry! I’ll have a pot of bean soup on.

Caryn Hartglass: And you compare that with, I don’t know, a burger on white bread and it’s kind of a gray-brown food.

Donna Beaudoin: Exactly. I love just putting varieties in my beans, such as in a stew. I use a lot of greens, different varieties of greens in a stew just to thicken it. Yeah, it’s great.

Caryn Hartglass: Right. Okay, we have just a couple of minutes left. So you mentioned you’re eating more raw food. I think I read somewhere that you’re becoming certified as a raw food …

Donna Beaudoin: I just finished a certification in raw food. The purpose was mainly, because I do eat probably about 50 or more percent raw food a week, and just to show vegetarians and vegans to try to incorporate raw foods such as raw greens into their meals, either on a daily basis or every other day in some part of their meal, just for added nutritional benefits. Because like I said, I’m not a physician, but I tell you, in three years, in just eating vegan and some raw meals I really have kept colds and flus at bay. I haven’t caught anything. So it really does help us to stay healthy.

Caryn Hartglass: Okay. Well, thank you so much, Donna. Thanks for writing Sister Vegetarian’s 31 Days of Drama-Free Living.

Donna Beaudoin: Thank you, Caryn. Thanks for having me.

Caryn Hartglass: My pleasure. And keep doing it. You’re helping so many people.

Donna Beaudoin: thank you so much. And thank you everyone for supporting me, reading my blog …

Caryn Hartglass: What is that blog? Sister vegetarian….

Donna Beaudoin: It’s sistervegetarian.com or you can go on the blog directly sistervegetarian.blogspot.com.

Caryn Hartglass: Great! Thanks you so much.

Donna Beaudoin: Thank you, Caryn. You have a great and beautiful day.

Caryn Hartglass: I’m Caryn Hartglass. You’re listening to It’s All About Food. We’re going to take a quick break and be back with sticky fingers sweet Doron Peterson. We’ll be right back.

Transcribed by Diana O’Reilly, 2/17/2013

PART II:

Hi, I’m Caryn Hartglass and you’re listening to It’s All About Food. OK, now we come to the really yummy part of the show. We’re going to be talking to Doron Petersan who is the owner of Sticky Fingers Bakery and has a great, delicious new book out called Sticky Fingers Sweets: 100 Super Secret Vegan Recipes. Welcome to It’s All About Food. Read more »

Chemicals – the good and bad.

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2/26/2012: The show theme was chemicals, good chemicals and the bad.
Marty Krutolow, the pilot, a.k.a. the Flying Vegan, joined me and we compared “lab meat” to Quorn. I also talked about Monsanto losing a chemical poisoning case in France; herbicides and pesticides; and some delicious new recipes on REAL. This was the final ASK A VEGAN show on the Progressive Radio Network. ASK A VEGAN can now be heard live here on the REAL Worldwide Radio very Sunday from 7-8pm Eastern Time.

LISTEN to hear the entire 2/26/2012 program.

Interviews with Barbara Gates and Milton Mills, MD

2/22/2012:

Part I: Barbara Gates
Lean & Green Kids

Barbara Cole-Gates is the Director of Lean & Green Kids. She is the mother of two smart and spirited teens, Jack and Lucy. She earned her BFA from San Diego State University in drama/acting, and now and again works as a professional actress in Southern California (barbaracoleacts.com). She has been working to teach kids about healthier foods since her son entered kindergarten – Jack is a Jr. in high school now!

2/22/2012:

Part II: Dr. Milton Mills
Rethinking Food

Dr. Milton Mills is the Associate Director of Preventive Medicine with the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) and co-author of PCRM’s report on Racial and Ethnic Bias in the U.S. Dietary Guidelines. Dr. Mills serves as the Race & Nutrition Specialist and Board Advisor for A Well Fed World. Whether internist Dr. Mills is practicing at Fairfax Hospital in Virginia or at free clinics in Washington, D.C., his prescription for patients is likely to include some dietary advice: go vegetarian. “Medical research shows conclusively that a plant-based diet reduces chronic disease risk, so that’s something I absolutely encourage my patients to move toward,” says Dr. Mills, a graduate of Stanford University School of Medicine. Dr. Mills doesn’t limit his message to his patients. He takes it to audiences around the country as well, speaking at hospitals, churches, and community centers.

TRANSCRIPTIONS

Transcription Part I:

Caryn Hartglass: Hello, I’m Caryn Hartglass, and you’re listening to It’s All About Food. Thank you for joining me today, and I am really looking forward to today’s show because I have a couple of people on that I really enjoy talking to, so I hope you will enjoy listening. I think it’s going to be fun for me. Read more »

2/15/2012 Interview with Molly Phemister

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2/15/2012:

Molly Phemister
Eatcology

Molly Phemister is the founder of eatcology.com, a blog focused on the nexus of ecology, design, and community food systems. She holds a Master of Landscape Architecture from the University of Virginia, as well as a Master of Education and a BA in Art. She is a published author, most notably “Designing a Landscape for Sustainability” in ActionBioscience, the online journal of the American Institute of Biological Sciences, and “The Biggest Picture: Global Food and Hunger Issues” for Planning magazine, the flagship publication of the American Planning Association. Other articles include “The Beets Out Back: Bringing the Local Food Movement Home” for Joyful Dissent, and smaller pieces for Ecoagriculture Partners and The Cultural Landscape Foundation.

TRANSCRIPTION:

Caryn Hartglass: Hello, I’m Caryn Hartglass and welcome. It’s time for It’s All About Food. Repeat after me. It’s all about food. For the next hour we are going to talk about food and connect the dots a bit because it is all about food. There are just so many thing that go in our lives everyday, and when we think about our food and where it comes from, and what it does to us when we eat, and what happens to it while we’re growing it and shipping it all around the world, it touches just about everything. We’re going to be talking to someone who writes quite a bit about it. I’m going to bring on Molly Phemister, the founder of eatcology.com, a blog focused on the nexus of ecology, design, and community food systems. She holds a Master of Landscape Architecture from the University of Virginia, as well as a Master of Education and a BA in Art. She is a published author, most notably “Designing a Landscape for Sustainability” in ActionBioscience, the online journal of the American Institute of Biological Sciences, and “The Biggest Picture: Global Food and Hunger Issues” for Planning magazine, the flagship publication of the American Planning Association. Welcome to It’s All About Food, Molly.

Molly Phemister: Hi, I’m so glad to be here.

Caryn Hartglass: Me too. I recently discovered your blog, and I love it, and I just wanted to talk to you because I love the concepts you are bringing up and the important issues you’re bringing up that we need to be talking about.

Molly Phemister: I need to hear that. I’ve talked about that cross-connectivity. We’ve gone through this age of intense specialization. People whose medical focus or law practice or whatever it is, they’ve focused down, narrowed in on some tiny piece, which is a wonderful way to really hone in on something and explore that topic and learn more about the connectivity of how it all puts together. I believe we are entering an age of generalists, of people being needed to connect the dots to put the various things together.

Caryn Hartglass: That’s such an important theme for me. I’m glad we are going to be talking more about it. I don’t know very much about you, but one of the things that I like is that you bring art to whatever it is you’re doing or you have an appreciation for it, and I think that’s also part of connecting the dots.

Molly Phemister: I think it is. I went to college as a pretty promising young person, who writes pretty well, can do these various things, and I was a major in art. Luckily my mother is a musician and taught piano for years while I was growing up. She believed in her own musical capacity enough to major in music going through college. So she let me major in art, but I continuously got from various people, “What are you going to do with that? What is that gonna teach you?” They can’t tell you how valuable an art education is, especially when it comes to something like painting an intense scale or sculpture. There’s so much problem solving that goes on. There’s so much thinking about issues from a variety of angles. The initial art classes that most people take just scratch the surface.

Caryn Hartglass: Art is really important. Unfortunately, we have so much artistic void these days because we are so focused on making profit and money and don’t realize how important it is. We’ll get to ecology and all that, but I just wanted to create a few basic brushstrokes here.

I was just listening to the show just before us, and they were talking about farms briefly and how people are upset sometimes because they think that wind farms are ugly. There’s a way we can create beauty in everything we do. Nothing has to be ugly, and if it has a benefit, we can put beauty into everything we do. That should be an important part of it. I talk about food all the time and when food is presented on a plate, it can be the simplest food or even the most extravagant, but why not make it lovely, it just makes the entire experience much more gratifying.

Molly Phemister: Yes, it appeals to all the senses.

Caryn Hartglass: The last think I wanted to say, and then I’m going to let you talk for a bit, is that I studied art. I studied color, and what always fascinated me was when you took one color and put it in a background of another color and changed the background, that same color would look completely different. We cannot ignore the whole picture because it is all connected. Not just from an artistic point of view, but from a health and sustainability perspective. It’s all connected. Specialization is great, but we have to keep in mind everything else around it because we can do something specific and not realize the repercussions and there could be a horrible domino effect.

Molly Phemister: Yeah, and you often do it completely accidentally. I like the color theory metaphor that you brought up. It’s orange surrounded by blue versus orange surrounded by red and how they look like two totally different oranges even though they are the exact same shade. And I take that back to the wind farm idea. In addition to the form of the wind turbines, which at the moment we are use to these airplane propeller tops, and that’s not necessary. There are other forms that will catch the wind and generate power. What’s also not a given is the scale. Everybody who’s working on wind farms, well I shouldn’t say everybody because somebody out there is bound to be doing what I’m about to suggest. Right now, most of what I’m seeing is being done on a very large scale, but we can shift that scale. We can take that same idea, surround it with a different context, and come up with a very different answer.

When power grids began to be interconnected, they took them out of the cities, they put the power generation in a separate spot, they called it centralization. Well, it was centralized for the power generators, not for the cities, it was out of the city centers. As we are re-localizing food, why not also re-localize power generation.

I remember I was living in Washington D.C. for a while and if you come up out of the metro stations, anytime you come up the escalators it’s a constant wind tunnel. Why not have a micro row of wind turbines right there. The pressure differential between being at the surface and being underground by the trains naturally automatically creates electricity. So why not catch it? Why not light that station with that?

I’m seeing that happen with food too. People are trying to solve issues. It’s the scale jumping that’s causing a little bit of problems because people want to work on urban stuff, and they want to get bigger. They’re like, “Oh, we gotta feed more people.” So I would see architecture students working on skyscrapers that were intended to be large, multi-floor hydroponics gardens. They would ask me what I thought, and I would take a look at their picture and inevitably, I could find somebody and say, “You know, farmers don’t wear lab coats.” They would inevitably somebody standing there in a little white coat and I would say, “No, no, no. Farmers don’t wear lab coats. This is not how these people dress.” But it’s not what that job requires. But the students were looking for it in their attempt for solutions to those issues. Going back to some of these 1960’s ideas of building new structures to grow food. Meanwhile, look out of that structure, look across the city. We had a plethora of rooftops. There’s no shortage of rooftops. Why not figure out how to combine the local food movement and the green roof movement to extend food production in urban areas?

Caryn Hartglass: We have this bigger is better concept that touches everything, and we are learning slowly, now, that bigger is not always better. We definitely need to bring things to a small scale, and what I love about it is that it brings the importance of change is somebody individual. How we are all part of the solution. How we can all participate and make a difference, and that’s all beautiful.

You have a post on your site, eatcology.com, about things going on in other countries like in Cuba and Venezuela. I thought we could talk a little bit about that because it is somewhat related, going back to the small scale and how that benefits in so many ways.

Molly Phemister: What happened with Cuba was amazing, and really I hope doesn’t quite happen this way to anybody else. They can get to the same place without taking the same path. But when the Soviet Union dissolved, Cuba didn’t have any oil coming in. Literally, there was no gas to drive a tractor with. There was no ability to move fertilizers and chemicals out to the fields. There was no ability to take what grew in the fields 150 miles from the city to the city. Everything ground to a total halt. It was horrible. The average calorie consumption (between 2500 and 3000 calories a day) was down to between 1400 and 2000 calories. This was way inside the zone where the U.N. starts to pay attention to figure out if they need to start shipping food in. This is really tripping on famine territory. And they went through it, and somehow we were all just ignorant to the fact because we are so blind to what’s happening down there. But they very quickly figured out how to do organopónicos, is what they call them. They are these in-city farms. They can be very small farms. It used to be that a farmer didn’t feed 600 people; a farmer fed a dozen. There were many more farmers because there were many more farms. But each farm was smaller, and in an urban area something like that makes more sense. And into it they developed various systems of the farm and the market being right there, and you would go up and ask for whatever it was you wanted, and somebody would trod out into the field and pick your order for the day and bring it back to you. Just incredibly fresh. If somebody didn’t want that squash today it could sit on the vine for another week and be okay. But if I pick it, suddenly the clock’s ticking. How long is this gonna last?

Well they took the knowledge from Cuba and the folks from Tanzania too, whom the U.N. had worked with, and the U.N. had developed this system that is incredibly dignified and respectful when they talk about [south-south relations] where various countries, who are not the first world countries, who are not the totally industrialized developed nations, talk to each other about how to solve the problem. They figure out how to transfer their knowledge from one person to another, from one community to another. So they brought books from Cuba and books from Tanzania into Venezuela and used [ ], Venezuela as a test site to see if the idea was transferable and if it was scalable to cover a whole city. Could it be done a little more intentionally? And it did work. It definitely worked, and they took, I’m going to forget off the top of my head how many hectares but a lot in the city and made organic farms right there in the city. They were run, a lot of them, by cooperatives so that the income was shared amongst the greatest people doing the farming, which brought jobs to neighborhoods that didn’t previously have jobs. It brought healthy foods to neighborhoods that didn’t necessarily have access to healthy food. In addition to those larger plots dug into the ground there, they developed a system of tables, kind of these micro-farms. No more than a one meter square. They were happening on rooftops, in backyards, on balconies, by a south-facing window. So the people could grow food in a much more proximal way. Something that they had control over, something that they had attachment too. Now that in particular, the micro-gardens, need nutrient additives to keep it going, it’s a little closer to a hydroponics situation. And right now, to the best of my knowledge they are still working on a large “we will send you the nutrients you need” situation. These are compost based gardens taking the food waste that would have gone to the landfills and sending it to places to be composted and turning it into stuff. We need to localize that a little bit more. Give the local farmers a little bit more capacity to develop their own. But I think it’s along the lines of the worm compost heap so it should be very doable.

Caryn Hartglass: Well I’m just hoping that when we get through this current economic crisis that we come out better human beings, and we change the focus a little bit. Right now, businesses and things pop up with a profit motive, and I don’t think that is ever going to change, but I think we can change where we add more parameters to what we consider success in a business. There needs to be this social parameter in addition to profit, and then we won’t concentrate entirely on squeezing whatever we can out of a business. So by making it larger, the profits are bigger, but it may devastate the environment, it may not be as practical. If we can get back and put more incentive on making these smaller farms profitable, not just financially but socially, that’s what we really need to have. And we are seeing it here and there, and I hope that it’s not something urgent that makes us really go to it. I hope that it’s just a natural, comfortable transition, but it’s very inspiring to see it working in different pockets.

Molly Phemister: It is inspiring, absolutely. There’s a couple of factors that need to happen with that. It’s not that a one acre farm or a ten acre farm or something very small like that is the ideal, it’s that various products, various methodologies, have appropriate scales to them. So it makes sense that in and around cities, in and around urbanized areas there would be more farms that would be smaller farms that would be focused on producing things that don’t ship well, and that things like grains would continue to be grown a little further out. What I’m trying to say is that there are different scales that are appropriate. A 500acre lettuce farm is not appropriate, but seven cows on five acres is also not appropriate. There’s a jump there that needs to be thought about for folks.

I have a map from an upcoming post talking about places that are local to nowhere. If we define local food as a 100 mile radius from an area, that works pretty well. There’s an awful lot that can be done within 100 miles. But if you make 100 mile circles around all of the large cities, all of the cities with any size in the countries, there are places that do not have a major city, or even a minor city, within 100 miles. There are places in this country that are local to nowhere, and it’s important that we think in terms of both a local food movement and a regional food movement. That we understand that there are some things that make sense to come from a little further away, and I propose a 500 mile radius for a regional food movement. That scale gets pretty far. A local food movement for Washington D.C. would duck into southern Pennsylvania just a little bit and swing around the eastern shore a lot. But when you get into a regional food movement you are able to pull from New York. I think it ducks down into the Carolinas, maybe even clip a little piece of Georgia. This greatly extends stuff. To give you a west coast example, everybody’s thinking that we are still getting it from the same place because it’s still California, but D.C. to Atlanta is about the same as San Francisco to L.A. So on the east coast you change four states and on the west coast it’s still California so it doesn’t count. Sorry guys, we’ve busted you. To make it a little bit larger allows you to pull from further away so that a 100 mile radius around the Bay Area, you’ve barely gotten down to anything resembling affordable housing, let alone places to grow much in the way of the foods that work best at larger scales. But by running a 500 miles radius, then you begin to broaden that and there become places that are more appropriate, and crops that are more appropriate, and scales that are more appropriate from across that larger zone.

Caryn Hartglass: Well the idea is just not to be rigid, and to be open to all kinds of possibilities, and that there’s not one solution. We are always fixed on one pill for one disease and one solution for one problem. There’s a range of solutions for food.

Molly Phemister: Absolutely.

Caryn Hartglass: I love technology, and I think we’ve really come along in the last few years. When you think about it, it’s just awe inspiring. But, it comes with good things, and it comes with not so good things. What I don’t like is when we are trying to cram technology down the throats of developing countries when it’s not appropriate. And you talked about that the farmers don’t wear lab coats, and we do things here, in terms of producing food, and we have genetically modified food, and our favorite companies Monsanto and Dow.

Molly Phemister: Yeah, those are mine.

Caryn Hartglass: She says sarcastically, of course. We are coming up with a notion that we are going to feed the world with these high tech foods. The first thing that needs to happen is that the lab coats need to come off because (I don’t believe in these high tech foods to begin with) even if they were superior in one environment, they don’t work in other environments.

Molly Phemister: They don’t. A lot of what their actual goal is at the scale of companies and profits is dependency. Their goal is to create dependency. This is why they have the suicide seeds that won’t regenerate. They even grow the crop but that the crop itself will be infertile.

Caryn Hartglass: That is the scariest thing to me. That whole concept is so scary.

Molly Phemister: Oh yeah. It’s so contradictory to natural logic. A lot of the problems that technology is attempting to solve either aren’t problems or they are trying to get one thing to solve somebody else’s problem without looking at the larger picture. A couple of examples come to mind. One was the push to develop rice that had vitamin A in it because there were areas that didn’t have vitamin A easily accessible. And I always wondered, “What did they used to eat?” Because before you turned all of this to rice monocultures, wasn’t there something they were eating before? Wasn’t there vitamin A available in that food system that you simply have squelched?

Caryn Hartglass: Exactly. What have humans been doing for hundreds of thousands of years in that region?

Molly Phemister: Yeah, there is a solution already there. The other one that comes to mind is the example from the [Mekong Delta] over in Asia, and several countries got together and began to figure out how to work on damming various portions of the delta and controlling the flood and water cycles a little bit more. The goal was to clear more land to create more rice paddies because rice has this wonderful ability to feed a population for about nine months of the year. There is a stretch there when you run out of rice. So the goal was, “Oh, we gotta make more rice because then we can bridge that three month gap.” Well, the IUCM, which is a major international ecology player went into the [Mekong Delta], did some studies of what was happening in these areas that were being slated to be dammed and turned into rice paddies, and they realized that, actually, there was more food present before they were putting rice paddies into these areas then after because the people were collecting wild plants. They were getting not just the wild plants but the wild protein. The wild protein source was the ducks and the frogs and whatever else was around. They weren’t asking for their rice to be their protein, they were asking for there to still be wild lands where this can happen. And the country took that into account. They really changed and backpedalled on what they were trying to do and began to realize the value. It is one of the things that is marvelous about Asia, is that there is so much wild food collecting. It is a totally common concept there, whereas in America it is absolutely foreign. It is part of why you see these warnings in San Francisco, in Golden Gate Park that say, “No, no these mushrooms are poisonous.” It’s because these Asian immigrants come over, and they are expecting to do wild foraging because that is what they have always done. Then they go combing through the park, and there’s a mushroom in San Francisco that looks very much like an Asian one. The one is Asia is very tasty, and the one is San Francisco will kill you. So that transferring of environment, that subtlety is very important. It comes from this cultural history, the cultural heritage of gathering, foraging for food. It’s one of the totally viable options for becoming a well-fed person in these areas.

Caryn Hartglass: Whereas today, in America, if the food hasn’t been covered in toxic chemicals and then shipped all around here and there and back again through twenty different steps where all of the nutrition is taken out, and then a few are sprinkled back in, and then cook it up into some shape, and package it in plastic, and put it in a box, and then ship it around a little more. That’s food.

Molly Phemister: Yeah, I don’t think a lot of folks know how much gets pulled out just at the stage where you say, “I need all the tomatoes put into packaging crates and not bruise easily, and ripen on the way to market but not be ripe too fast.” That the breeding that goes down, and the narrowing in selection to get those fully ripe tomatoes, we’ve already lost huge chunks. Even if we took those same tomatoes and grew them organically, we’d still have lost a huge swath of what makes tomatoes tomatoes if we’re working with the ones that were made to be round, to ripen on the way to market, not bruise, not rot.

Caryn Hartglass: The whole tomato story, I don’t know if you are familiar with Barry Estabrook’s book Tomatoland, it’s just a whole nightmare what’s going on with non-organic tomatoes coming out of Florida. It’s just crazy, and makes me think that every vegetable has another story of what we do to it that’s crazy all in the name of profit. Then the result food, which isn’t the way nature intended it to be, isn’t quite as good for us, unfortunately.

Molly Phemister: Part of it is that we want to eat the same things all the time and everywhere. I think it is going to be an important element of the local food movement that people begin to diversify their diets. You have got to give our farmers more options than just cabbages, tomatoes, and peppers. They need more things to be able to grow. They need a variety of harvest times. We can’t just keep eating the same things. It is incumbent on people to learn a new food, try something new, pick something else up, begin to experiment so that you are adding burdock, you’re adding rutabaga, you’re adding tatsoi. So various new things are coming into your diet, which gives farmers in your area new flexibility and more capacity to find what works for them in their microclimate on their farm.

Caryn Hartglass: Well isn’t variety the spice of life?

Molly Phemister: Oh, so much of this stuff is so good.

Caryn Hartglass: And eating with the seasons is really important and can really be fun. Where we are kind of spoiled at this point, and it ruins the joy in some things. If we can have everything all the time, what’s special?

Molly Phemister: Yeah, and you lose the ability to taste the difference. I didn’t like tomatoes growing up. I think it was because I could taste the store-bought quality, but once I got into local tomatoes and growing my own, it was a whole different ball game. They had the same name and that is about all that they had in common.

Caryn Hartglass: So many people are not interested in fruits and vegetables because they don’t think they taste good and their tongues are so used to sugar, salt, and fat. Part of that is that we have gotten to this convenient, commercialized business of food, where tomatoes need to be perfectly round and look exactly the same so they fit on a burger perfectly at the expense of flavor. And people don’t know what fruits and vegetables are supposed to taste like. So it is important to go organic, local, seasonal, fresh, variety, fabulous.

Molly Phemister: I think one of the things that is behind what you are touching on right there is the concept of the local food infrastructure. We have gotten to the point where we have a pretty good farmer to consumer connection developing. That wheel is turning, that train is moving. It’s picking up its momentum, it’s doing what it needs to do. The next step is going to be to develop the infrastructure. The grain mills come to mind, a little bit of food processing, local canneries. Part of that is going to be local kitchens because not everybody has the capacity to figure this stuff out. A lot of people are working two jobs. For a lot of people it’s totally new. The learning curve is very steep, and if you’ve grown up on canned green beans and frozen corn then how do you learn the next step? How do you move it forward? We are going to need community kitchens where people are bringing stuff from the farmers market to the kitchen, there are cooking classes happening, there are canning workshops. You take your jelly home. You go there and the farmers have dropped off a pound of strawberries per person, and everybody learns how to make strawberry jelly and then you take it home. It’s a whole re-education. Bill McKibben had a book a long while ago, at this point, about the age of [“you see information”]. About how so many of us know so much, but collectively what we know is often the same thing. We have to branch that out a little bit.

Caryn Hartglass: Yeah, that’s really good. I want to talk about that. I want to talk about a bunch of different things like site analysis, preparing an area to grow food. And I want to take a quick break.

—Break—

Caryn Hartglass: Hello, I’m Caryn Hartglass and you’re listening to It’s All About Food. My favorite subject, food, and I’m talking with Molly Phemister, the founder of eatcology.com, the blog focused on the nexus of ecology, design, and community food systems. Molly we were talking just a few minutes ago about how all of us seem to know the same things in this world of all of this information. And yet, there are so many things that have gotten lost like how to make food, how to grow food. Can we talk a bit about, you have a blog post about site analysis, which I thought was rather interesting, and I guess that’s part of your skill in landscape design. I remember a couple of years ago, when Michelle Obama was talking about the White House garden. We’re not hearing about that very much anymore because they discovered that in the Clinton administration time period that garden had been fertilized with sludge, and there seems to be a significant amount of lead in the soil, unfortunately. What should people be doing when they start to create a garden or an area for farming?

Molly Phemister: Knowing the history of the site is pretty important. Something as basic as the White House grounds ought to have really good records. Lead doesn’t preclude growing anything. Lead precludes growing and eating certain things. Lettuce, for example, bad choice. There are tests for everything, but nobody that I know can afford tests for everything. So if you know your sites history a little bit then you can begin to narrow it down a little bit. It’s a good bet in an urban setting that until you have a test that says there’s no lead in the soil that you probably have lead in your soil. We had enough years with leaded gasoline driving around in the cities, the exhaust fumes put it into the ground, plus all of the paint chips and things like that coming off of the old buildings. If you are in a newer subdivision, you’ll have other issues, but you won’t have those ones. If you’re downstream from an old shoe factory, if you’re, believe it or not, at an old rose cutting place, one of the most polluted sites. If you’re near a gas station, if you’re living next to a place where they used to grow roses to cut, you better test your soil for some of the intensive chemicals that were used in floriculture. So knowing the history helps a lot. There are a variety of options. There are ways to build beds up. You can either trust that the soil below is going to be able to amend itself or you can just put a fresh bottom on and start anew with some of that so you are not getting crossover between the pollutants and what’s on top. There are crops that are better at it. Things with shallow roots will pick up the pollutants in the top layer of the soil much better than something like corn that ends up having very deep roots. Things that grow close to the ground, that pollutant doesn’t have to travel very far to get into the leaves. So not only does your lettuce have shallow the roots but it has got its leaves right there that the lead only had to go two inches and it’s in the leaf. Then you are going to eat the leaf. A lot of plants will collect stuff in their leaves, but won’t necessarily collect stuff in their fruits. So although the leaves of a tomato plant may be gathering the toxin from the soil, the tomato itself is very likely to not have had that stuff cross the barrier, to cross into the fruit itself. There are some nuances to that, but that’s the gist of it. There are things you can do. There are always options. You are never completely out of luck.

Caryn Hartglass: Then there’s not just the soil that’s a concern but water and sun and wind.

Molly Phemister: Yes, microclimates. Knowing not just generally I live in Arizona or generally I live in Minnesota, but then knowing the microclimates of the whole thing. A south-facing wall, a south-facing brick wall is very different than an exposed north-facing section. Your getting very different climates, very different light. It’s holding heat differently. The south-facing brick wall, meanwhile, may even have a dead zone right in front of it because it is holding heat too well. It is burning off whatever’s in front. It doesn’t have the capacity to grow there. So those kinds of things can be really fun. Knowing who will put up with what, beginning to understand what kind of site you’ve got. A lot of the most common mistakes that I see folks will forget entirely to look at where their downspouts are. Their gutters coming off their roof will be dumping water down onto a part of their yard, and they will forget entirely that it is dumping water into their yard. They’ll plant something there that doesn’t want that much water. Rosemary next to a downspout is not a good idea. On the other hand, if they plant mint by their downspout, but then they’ve attached one of those black hoses and actually have sent the water further under the ground into the culvert. Then their yard is getting none of the benefit of the rain that fell on the roof. So the mint by the downspout, even though it is right next to the water going past, the water is in metal and plastic and will never get to the mint, which will be thrilled to have it there. So you’ve got to look at where your water is. Take advantage of what’s naturally given to you. If you’ve got a depression in the yard, find some water friendly plants, find some things that can handle having their roots soaked, having their oxygen depleted for a few minutes, for a couple days while the water soaks into the ground. The other really common mistake is that it is so much more pleasant to work on your garden in the summer when the sun is high. Even if you are going out in the morning before the heat of the day sets in, you’re still setting stuff up in the summer, you’re looking at the sun patterns of the summer. So they put in their fall garden and then come October they are totally disappointed because nothing’s growing. The garden is completely in the shade now because the sun has tipped back down and then the angle totally makes a difference. So that’s the second common mistake. A fall garden is going to have to be open to the south. It is going to need the sun to come in at a much steeper angle, and the same with a spring garden. It won’t fit where the summer gardens grow.

Caryn Hartglass: Right. So where do you live?

Molly Phemister: I am currently living in Lincoln, Nebraska.

Caryn Hartglass: And do you have a garden there?

Molly Phemister: I have a porch with a really great balcony. That’s what I can afford at the moment.

Caryn Hartglass: I’ve got a terrace and I grow whatever I can on it.

Molly Phemister: Exactly, exactly. I have friends in town, who are very much into permaculture. They let me dabble in their yards as well. But a lot of what I’ve been doing the past several years has been helping people out, coaching. I don’t know if folks are even familiar with this, but there is a movement, a new profession evolving as garden coaches, who are people who can come to your yard, spend an hour with you, tell you what you’ve got, what you inherited from the last homeowner, and then help you make some plans. They give you some suggestions for what could be and what should be done first, help you prioritize what the next project will be, but with a larger picture in mind so that each of your little projects builds into a coherent whole.

Caryn Hartglass: I haven’t heard of that, but I like the concept. There’s certainly a lot of coaching going on with life coaching, and I think people need a lot of nutrition coaching for food changes. Why not garden coaches? That seems like something that a little bit of time upfront could really make a difference for the whole season.

Molly Phemister: Yeah, it really can. Some folks want continual lessons through the season to figure stuff out, and other folks just want to check in to figure out why their fall garden didn’t grow, just little details. Everybody’s got their own place.

Caryn Hartglass: I want to talk about the word “weed” for a minute because we choose to, by the words we use, to downgrade things that actually are quite beneficial. Some of the things that we call weeds are actually nutritious foods.

Molly Phemister: Oh, quite a few.

Caryn Hartglass: And some of them now are kind of getting a comeback and we are seeing them pop up in farmers markets at big prices. What are some of those unfriendly pests that are actually good and tasty foods?

Molly Phemister: There’s quite a few out there. I would say purslane is a really common one that I see around. It’s a really small, ground cover. It has a tendency for fat little leaves like you would see on a succulent plant. It will bloom in the summer. It’s the best in the spring. That’s before it’s gotten bitter. The spring’s a lovely time to trick with purslane because it is a ground cover it is frequently planted or appears (plants itself) along sidewalks. And you need to find a spot where it’s coming over the ledge of a wall. What you’re looking for is higher than the height of a dog because you don’t want to eat what’s been the neighborhood restroom. So you’re looking for something coming over somebody’s retaining wall or something like that that wouldn’t have been affected by those natural forces. Another one that’s really common that’s really good in the spring is lamb’s-quarters. Lamb’s-quarters are part of the goosefoot family. Their leaves look kind of like geese feet. It’s actually a relative of quinoa, and if you let it go to seed you can really see that in the [seed heads]. In the urban areas, lamb’s-quarters unchecked can sometimes go, if they’re really happy, six to ten feet. Most folks don’t ever meet lamb’s-quarters that size. Most folks are only meeting about two or three feet tall. They’ll have sort of a bluish green quality, but then there will be sort of a white dust on the leaves. This is a very common weed. I’ve seen it all over the country. It is very tasty.

Caryn Hartglass: I get it all the time in my terrace beds. It just blows me away how it grows and how well it grows. But you can eat the seeds as well?

Molly Phemister: I don’t think you can eat the seeds.

Caryn Hartglass: You said it was a relative of quinoa.

Molly Phemister: I eat the leaves. I chop it up and pop it into salads and things. There’s a number of other ones. I’m not a fan of Russian olive, autumn olive. It’s Elaeagnus angustifolia, or something like that. It is a very common shrub that you’ll see around. It will have an orange-red berry in the fall. It grows in a lot of places that are difficult to get things to grow, a lot of roadside areas and highway medians because it is one of the nitrogen fixer that is not in the legume family. Mostly the legumes handle nitrogen fixing in the soil. The Eleagnus is a weed plant, it is a relative of one that I like much better, the goumi berry, and I’ve heard a couple of pronunciations on that. Those are kind of all over the place. You can definitely eat the berries of the ones that are all over. If you were going to plant it intentionally in your yard, I would go ahead and get the one that’s actually the goumi berry instead of digging up something from the side of the road because it is more likely to stay contained within your yard.

Caryn Hartglass: Are there sites where we can see what these things look like that you would recommend?

Molly Phemister: I tried to put pictures up of them when I talk about them. I did a little bit of weed discussion.

Caryn Hartglass: Okay, so somewhere at eatcology.com.

Molly Phemister: Yes, the article title itself is Glinda the Good Weed.

Caryn Hartglass: Are you a good weed or a bad weed? I’m not a weed at all.

Molly Phemister: Exactly, Glinda the Good Weed. I grew up a fan of Dorothy Gale. It’s actually eatcology.com/Glinda-the-good-weed. I’ve got images there of purslane and lamb’s-quarters. I also have some other ones on there. I have dandelion and onion grass. Onion grass again is tasty, and it has the dog issue. I use onion grass as a pH indicator. If I see onion grass growing near a lilac shrub I need to adjust that pH higher because onion grass will only grow in acidic soils, and lilacs will only bloom in non-acidic soil. So if I want my pretty lilac blossoms, and there’s onion grass near by…

Caryn Hartglass: And you do. That’s my favorite fragrance, lilac. That just drives me nutty they’re so good.

Molly Phemister: Oh yeah, and the butterflies too. They’re wonderful. Because I use them more as an indicator than as an edible. There is a variance on clover, the sour clover. It will bloom in with the other clovers, but where the other ones have white and purple heads, this will have much, much smaller, little yellow flowers. It tends to be a bit stemmier, and the stems themselves are what’s so tasty. It’s a sour lemony taste like you would get from sorrel. That’s very good in salads. Little violets themselves are tasty. The flowers are perfectly edible. I remember walking down the street once, there was a band of day lilies growing beside us. I was walking with a woman, who, I kind of was aware, had a crush on me. It wasn’t reciprocated in this particular case, but I wasn’t really paying attention to what I was doing so when I picked a day lily flower, and was aware of some motion on her side. I think she was thinking, “Oh my gosh, she’s picking me a flower.” And I picked it, and I pulled the pollen out of the center, and I ate the flower because it’s like a very juicy lettuce. She was absolutely flabbergasted. She was like, “Woah, woah, woah, what just happened?” But day lilies are marvelous. They are very tasty. I tend to like the tall orange ones. I like the yellow ones also, but they tend to be shorter and again get into the dog issue. The red ones are a little powderier to me, but I’ll pull out the center stems where the pollen is, and the rest of it is just like a juicy lettuce, wonderful.

Caryn Hartglass: Well I think there is something in our DNA, and that’s what’s enabled us to survive, but the idea of being able to roam and nosh and eat is important as scavengers. I love it when there are berries growing, and I can just stay there for an hour and pick berries. It is just such a lovely thing. We are so far away from that, and I would love to see that come back.

Molly Phemister: I think it I making a comeback. Phoenix, Arizona has some scavenger maps available. I’m not really sure how much of those ones are findable. Portland, Oregon has scavenger maps.

Caryn Hartglass: Molly, the music means we are at the end of the hour. Thanks for talking with me. I really enjoyed it. This was Molly Phemister and eatcology.com. Please visit it. There’s lots of great information. Thanks so much for joining me on It’s All About Food

Molly Phemister: Caryn, bye.

Caryn Hartglass: Okay. I’m Caryn Hartglass. You’ve been listening to It’s All About Food. Thanks for joining me. Have a delicious week.

Transcribed by Steve Lee-Kramer, 3/9/2013

More on Monsanto, White House Sludge, Eating (and Loving) Veggies with Michelle Obama,

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2/12/2012: Caryn talked about the new American organic farmers lawsuit against Monsanto; Sludge at the White House; Michelle Obama & “Eat Your Veggies”; GM Corn; Pepsico Layoffs and falling in love with steamed vegetables.

LISTEN to hear the entire program.

Interviews with Priscilla Feral and Nick Brannigan

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2/8/2012:

Part I: Priscilla Feral
Friends Of Animals

Priscilla Feral is the Friends of Animal President, who works out of FoA’s International Headquarters in Darien, Connecticut.

2/8/2012:

Part II: Nick Branningan
Genetically Modified Food

Nick Brannigan is the author of I’m Eating WHAT?!?: The Health Risks of Genetically Modified Food and 10 Real World Solutions to Avoid Them the free eBook available for free at www.imeatingwhat.com

TRANSCRIPTION PART I:

Hello I’m Caryn Hartglass and it’s time for It’s All About Food. It is February 8^th, 2012 and as you know on this show we talk about things related to health, environment and animals. Read more »

Defeating Multiple Sclerosis, Breast Cancer & the Susan G. Komen Foundation and Taxing Sugar

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2/5/2012: In this episode, I talk about Multiple Sclerosis and some of the nutrients that may stop or slow the progression and even reverse symptoms. I gave my thoughts the Susan G. Komen Foundation debacle in the news this week, digging deeper, pointing out that this organization and others like it are not focusing on what’s really necessary to prevent and cure cancer. I discussed the idea of taxing sugar like tobacco and alcohol.

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2/1/2012 Interview with Dawn Moncrief

2/1/2012:

Dawn Moncrief
A Well-Fed World

A Well-Fed World Founding Director / Board Director – Dawn Moncrief has been a social justice advocate (for people and animals) since the mid-90′s. She has two master’s degrees from The George Washington University: one in International Relations, the other in Women’s Studies, both focusing on economic development. Her work highlights the ways in which high levels of meat consumption in the U.S. and globally exacerbate global hunger, especially for women and children. She also draws attention to the negative consequences of increasing livestock production and intensification on climate change and oil scarcity.

TRANSCRIPT:

Hello I’m Caryn Hartglass and you’re listening to It’s All About Food. Good afternoon, thank you for joining me today on this very lovely February 1^st. Read more »

Trust in our food, A New Diabetes Drug, Traffic Light Labeling, Monsanto, GMO protests and Coconut Oil

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1/29/2012: Frequently asked how we can be confident whether our food is organic, I discussed whether or not we can trust the quality of food or other consumable products we purchase. I replied to a listener’s concern about a recent article questioning the compassionate/ethical values of a vegetarian diet and talked about convenience of the new one a week drug for Diabetes; a new study on the power of package labeling; monsanto and protests against genetically modified food; and the benefits of using organic coconut oil for hair and skin.

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1/25/2012 Interviews with Hannah Kaminsky and Alan Roettinger

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1/25/2012:

Part I: Hannah Kaminsky
Sweet Vegan

Hannah Kaminsky began playing in the kitchen at a very young age, encouraged by her drive to create accessible and delicious animal-free eats. By her senior year of high school, she was already busy working on her first cookbook, a vegan dessert book titled My Sweet Vegan. Now Hannah is the author two vegan dessert books, an award-winning blog, and a handful of eBooks. Here, Vegan Mainstream dishes with Hannah about blogging, baking and her newest project, a vegan ice-cream book titled Vegan A La Mode.

1/25/2012:

Part II: Alan Roettinger
Cooking Skills for the Home

Alan Roettinger has been a private chef for over 28 years, serving a broad spectrum of high-profile clients, from entertainers to presidents. A world traveler, he absorbed elements from many cuisines to synthesize a unique, creative, personal style. Alan’s first cookbook, Omega-3 Cuisine, showcases his ability to bring health and flavor together, offering a wide range of dishes that are simultaneously exotic and accessible to the home cook. In Speed Vegan, Alan has kept flavor and health, but expanded these parameters to include quick, easy, and strictly plant-based.

TRANSCRIPTION
PART I:

Hello! I’m Caryn Hartglass and you’re listening to It’s All About Food. Happy, happy, happy January 25th, 2012. Time marches on and here in New York City it is a beautiful, clear, very unlike-winter day. It’s like autumn—keeps going on and it’s really delicious. Can’t help but take advantage of it and be outside. But I’m inside right now and I’m talking about my favorite subject: food. And it’s going to be a very, very sweet, yummy show. I hope you’ve eaten because if you haven’t, you might start salivating sometime soon and that can be dangerous. Read more »

Imported Orange Juice, Paula Deen, Yogurt, Soy-free, nut-free, wheat-free Vegan Diet, Girl Scouts Forever Green.

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1/22/2012: Caryn weighs in on hot topics in the news: 1) Imported orange juice found with banned fungicide and what are the best sources of Vitamin C; 2) Paula Dean and diabetes. She discusses listeners’ questions on yogurt and on how to eat vegan without soy, wheat, or nuts and touches on what’s missing in the Girl Scouts Forever Green Campaign.

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MLK, Violent Animal Rights Protests, Cooking in Small Spaces, Dealing With Univited Guests (bugs, rodents)

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1/15/2012 This show compared Martin Luther King non-violence philosophy with an animal rights group burning cattle trucks; dealing with uninvited guests (bugs, rodents), cooking in small spaces, and highlights in the news: sugary beverage tax to combat diabetes study; Americans eating less meet; the Hostess company filing bankruptcy.

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1/11/2012 Interviews with Betsy Carson, Toni Fiore, Miyoko Schinner, Terry Hope Romero, Johanna McCloy

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1/11/2011:

PART I: Betsy Carson, Toni Fiore, Miyoko Schinner, Terry Hope Romero
Vegan Mashup

The filmmaker
Betsy Carson has a passion for sharing the benefits of a plant-based diet, and is fueled by a lack of vegan programming options. Since 2005 she has produced 52 episodes of the popular public television program Totally Vegetarian. And a top 10 recipe podcast VegEZ, now seen by more than 4 and a half million people and counting. She also created and produced Vegan Hotspot, a celebrity dining series podcast that can be viewed online at VeganHotspot.com. Both podcast were nominated for a Taste TV Award. With a desire to once again reach the wider television audience she’s ready for her next big adventure: Vegan Mash-Up.

The Chefs
Terry Hope Romero, author and co-author of bestselling vegan cookbooks Veganomicon: The Ultimate Vegan Cookbook, Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar, and Viva Vegan! Authentic Vegan Latina American Recipes has also presented informative and lively cooking demos and talks to hungry crowds at food festivals and conferences the world over, from Paris to New York City, from Boston to Toronto and beyond. Terry also contributes to VegNews (a leading vegan lifestyle magazine) with her regular column: “Hot Urban Eats.” She also holds a certificate in Plant Based Nutrition from Cornell University.

Toni Fiore was the host of the Delicious TV’s Totally Vegetarian, as well as the VegEZ podcast with apps and e-cookbooks .Toni is also the author of Totally Vegetarian: Easy, Fast, Comforting Cooking for Every Kind of Vegetarian, she is currently mulling over ideas for her next cookbook.

Miyoko Schinner has published three cookbooks, owned a restaurant, developed and sold products nationwide and on United Airlines, and has taught cooking in front of both live audiences and on television. She started her own cooking show – Miyoko’s Kitchen – with the goal of mainstreaming vegan cuisine and making plant-based cooking fun and accessible to all.

1/11/2011:

Part II: Johanna McCloy
Soy Happy

Johanna (pronounced “yo-hah-nah”) is dedicated to bridging cultural gaps and empowering individuals to realize that their voices and their actions matter. With compassion and action, they can cross divides and help to generate the positive changes they seek to see in the world. Soy Happy was created with this in mind.

A multi-cultural background
Johanna spent seventeen years living in Spain, India, Japan, and Venezuela. She speaks nearly fluent Spanish and some Japanese. She attended Duke University and received her degree in Comparative Area Studies and Anthropology.

Experience in the entertainment industry
Johanna studied acting with the legendary Sanford Meisner in Los Angeles. She is often noted for her Guest Starring role as Ensign Calloway in Star Trek The Next Generation and for other acting credits in radio, theatre, television and film. She also has professional experience as a story analyst, documentary researcher and tribute video producer. (She continues to free-lance in these capacities.)

Published writer
Johanna’s personal essays have been published in India Currents Magazine, Moxie Magazine, Journeywoman and a book entitled Voices from the Garden (Lantern Books.) She has written countless articles regarding consumer advocacy and Soy Happy for a variety of publications, including the book by Erik Marcus entitled, Meat Market. Johanna is also co-creator and co-editor of Dare To Be Fabulous (DTBF) , celebrating womens’ stories of daring, joy and empowerment.

In 2000, Johanna attended a Major League Baseball (MLB) game and found no viable vegetarian menu options in the entire stadium. She realized that many fans were either bringing their own food or eating before or after the game, due to the lack of options, so she decided to do something about it. She compiled statistics on the rise in demand for vegetarian options, and presented her menu proposal to the concession manager one week later. She then began outreaching to every MLB park, as well as baseball fans, consumer groups and supportive organizations. The Soy Happy website was created as an informational resource.

Fans started to speak up, celebrities offered endorsements, media paid attention, and concession managers responded. When Soy Happy started, none of the MLB parks offered veggie dogs. As of 2011, 22 MLB parks offer veggie dogs, due in large part to Soy Happy‘s efforts.

Using our baseball experience as a model, Soy Happy continues to empower consumers on the importance of their feedback and to promote a wide variety of vegetarian/vegan options for foodservice establishments.

Soy Happy provides a unique hybrid of services. In addition to being a consumer advocate, Soy Happy offers promotional and outreach services for foodservice providers.

TRANSCRIPTION PART II:

Caryn Hartglass: We’re back! I’m Caryn Hartglass and you’re listening to It’s All About Food. Say it with me: it’s all about food because it is and we need to rethink the way we think about food. We need to re-think the way we feel about food. Read more »

Organic Agriculture, Fracking, Earthquakes, Contaminated Water and Weight Loss

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1/8/2012 Caryn commented on criticism regarding organic agriculture and discussed fracking’s connection with earthquakes and contaminating water. She talked about the very popular New Year’s resolution of weight loss and gave her thoughts on lap band surgery and the recent US News Best Overall Diets report.

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1/4/2012 Interview with Shira Lane

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1/4/2011:

Shira Lane
The Milk Documentary

Shira Lane: born in Israel, raised in Australia and returned to Israel to serve the Israeli Army. In 2001 Lane graduated from Entertainment and Performing Arts School, Beit-Zvi. In 2002 her television career launched with Israeli TV Drama series ‘Tipol Nimratz’. When the TV show run ended, Lane sought to return to her family in Australia, but due to severe dog quarantine laws, she diverted to Los Angeles, not to be separated from her dog.

Lane’s inquiries into milk started while she was in production on feature film ‘Magdalena’, with Dean River Productions and Inspirational Films. Lane’s allergy to milk and dairy products amplified upon arrival into the U.S. Lack of information from other documentaries, nutritionists and even doctors, motivated Lane to do her own research. The findings from medical journals and other resources are revealed throughout the film.

“I would have wanted my parents to watch this film, when I was growing up, and I hope the information in the film helps others the way it has immensely helped me.”

TRANSCRIPTION:

Hello. I’m Caryn Hartglass and you’re listening to It’s All About Food. Happy, happy, happy new year. (Pop sound) That was the virtual opening of a bottle of champagne. I want to celebrate with you with a little glass. Here’s to a great year: health, happiness, and let’s move our species along a little bit. Here’s to some great evolution, some great things happening with humanity. I’m very positive about 2012. And while we’re making all of those promises to ourselves, all of those great resolutions about the things we’re going to do, the pounds we’re going to lose, the diet we’re going to improve, can we work on milk? When I talk to people about getting healthy, when I talk to people about some of the things that they might adjust in their diet—and they always know that they’re talking to me, the vegan—but the thing that I always make clear is that if I were going to eliminate anything in my diet when it came to all the meats out there and all the milk products, milk products would be the top thing on the list. And you may be going, “What? Milk? What’s wrong with milk?” Well, we’re going to spend an hour today talking about just that. I have a guest with me. Shira Lane is a filmmaker and created a film called Get the Facts About Milk: The Milk Documentary. She was born in Israel, raised in Australia, returned to Israel to serve in the Israeli army, and in 2001 she graduated from Entertainment and Performing Arts School, Beit-Zvi. In 2002 her television career launched with Israeli drama series, Tipol Nimratz, and we’ll find out what that means later. When the TV show run ended she thought to return to her family in Australia but due to severe dog quarantine laws, she diverted to Los Angeles not to be separated from her dog. We might want to know about that too. There are a lot of things I’m going to be talking about in this hour but I want to welcome right away Shira Lane.

Caryn Hartglass: Welcome to It’s All About Food.
Shira Lane: Thank you. Thank you so much.
Caryn Hartglass: Hi. How are you today?
Shira Lane: I’m doing fabulous. Thank you for the wonderful introduction.
Caryn Hartglass: Well, I would read more…I recommend people go to milkdocumentary.com.
Shira Lane: Yeah, milkdocumentary.com. We tried to make it simple. You don’t have to go to movie.com. We tried to get everything possible so people can find us.
Caryn Hartglass: That’s good. And then people can read more about you.
Shira Lane: I’m not important. I think the film is more important than me.
Caryn Hartglass: Oh please. I think you’re important.
Shira Lane: That is very sweet of you. I completely agree with you that people are still in that belief that milk is really, really good for you and that we need to be drinking more of it. What is really funny is that Harvard just recently came out with this whole thing that milk is not healthy.
Caryn Hartglass: Harvard’s interesting. They put out some really good information. And it’s coming from Harvard. People should be impressed.
Shira Lane: I know. I was thinking maybe they got a hold of my documentary and that’s what promoted them to begin to do some research about it.
Caryn Hartglass: This information that’s in your documentary has been out for a long time. So, here’s the thing. I was looking just before the show started but I don’t have the numbers at my fingertips. But the budget for the dairy industry, their marketing budget, it’s some gigantic number.
Shira Lane: They have…I don’t remember it exactly either. If I’m not mistaken, I know that in 2007 I got my hands on some records and they spent approximately 180 million dollars on marketing. I’m sure that with the years they’ve increased that number. They’re really, reallt good at marketing. People tend to forget that this is a company that is for profit. Their job is to see you something you do not need. That is what advertising is. (phone rings) Sorry about that. I do apologize for that. A lot of people don’t understand. They think that it’s in schools so we should be drinking this. They are the smartest marketers that there is. If there is an award for the best marketing company ever, it goes to the people who market milk because they have been successful in getting into schools, getting in the infrastructure in government so that it’s really hard to get rid of. It’s just in the last 100 years that people think that milk is really healthy.
Caryn Hartglass: I don’t like to sound negative and I don’t like slamming things. I always like to give a very positive image on things and this show is going to end this way but I’m going to bring up some things and I’m going to sound like I’m complaining. We are heavily marketed in this culture and we want to be able to trust our government but more and more we know we can’t. We want to be able to trust our doctors and more and more we know we can’t. We want to know that what we see on television is true and more and more we know that’s not true. There are a lot of people that still…it still gets to them even when intellectually they may know that it’s not true, there’s all this subtle stuff that gets into our subconscious. People think that they need to drink milk.
Shira Lane: People think that they need to drink milk because of the marketing companies. Here’s how it started. In the beginning they were telling us we need to drink milk for vitality. It’s going to give you energy but that turned out to be not true so they dropped that campaign. Then they decided on “Milk Makes Strong Bones.” There had this big ricket problem and really what happened is people weren’t exposed to the sunlight and they didn’t have Vitamin D. They thought that they should drink milk because there is calcium in milk. That turns out not to be true because when you drink milk your blood becomes acidic and any calcium you do drink really doesn’t do anything. Actually what it does do is cause osteoporosis and hip fractures because it’s pulling calcium out of your bones so they had to drop that campaign as well.
Caryn Hartglass: But that information still lingers and people still think that is true. We still see it: in magazines that promote that milk is good for bones.
Shira Lane: And the reason that we have that is because a lot of people in doctor professions do not get updated on nutrition. First of all, doctors do not receive any nutritional lectures or anything. Maybe they get a lecture or two but they really don’t emphasize nutrition. They emphasize what medication to give to what problem. So you should never go to your doctor for a nutritional question. And they’re only telling you what they’re seeing on television.
Caryn Hartglass: But they’re also telling you what they’re getting from the drug companies because the drug companies, this is important, they spend more on sales than they do on research and they print a lot of literature that they give to the doctors. Sometimes they wine and dine the doctors and sometimes they just get this promotional stuff in. And doctors don’t have a lot of time, especially with our crazy insurance system. They’re cramming as many patients as possible they can see. I don’t want to knock them but they don’t have a lot of time to get the information so they read these pamphlets and they get the wrong information.
Shira Lane: That is true. I’m not downing doctors. Doctors have a rough time. It is hard. I think it’s the educational part of becoming a doctor that they really need to increase the nutritional part. I mean, when you take your dog to the vet and its got diarrhea, the first thing the vet says is, “Have you changed its diet? Have you done anything different?” But when we go to the doctor with diarrhea, they don’t ask anything about what we’ve eaten or what we’re doing and the first thing they’ll say is, “Here’s this pill that will fix you and you’re good to go.” That’s really one of the reasons that I made this film because I came across so much information. There’s so much information if you just google the word, “milk.” You will see that there is a lot of information out there that milk is actually the worst thing that you can put in your body. It’s the last thing you want to do. If you’re thinking that you want to go healthier but you want to decide between milk or dairy, I say give up the milk.
Caryn Hartglass: Absolutely. I agree with you. Milk’s got to go.
Shira Lane: The reason that is, and I’ll simplify it, we’re not cows. We’re not cows so we’re not designed to drink the milk of cows and we’re not babies anymore. When we grow older we lose the enzyme called lactase that breaks down the lactose. And lactose—you hear a lot of people are lactose intolerant—and that is because the don’t have lactase which breaks down the lactose. Lactose is actually milk sugar. It’s the sugar that’s in milk. What happens is it sits in our large intestine and it gets all icky and then we’re running to the toilet, we’re gassy, we’re uncomfortable. This brings back another thing that’s in the documentary which is the school lunch program. The school lunch program…here’s back into how the dairy industry is really good at marketing. What they do is they say, “Let’s get into schools. Let’s teach these kids that milk is really good and they need milk to grow tall, they need milk to be skinny.” I mean, if they could say that milk could give you blond hair and blue eyes, they would tell you. They’ve gone even as so far to tell people that it will make you skinny and help you to lose weight. They had to drop that campaign in 2007 again because they were told that they had nothing to prove that this is true. So back to the school lunch program. What they’re doing is they put it into schools and the school lunch program is very important for communities that are very, very low-income. Usually those communities are communities of color. Usually the school lunch is the only place where they have like a real good meal. So a lot of schools really, really want to be part of this school lunch program. They want to have that food to give to the children. The problem is that the school lunch program is actually subsidized food. It’s food that the government doesn’t know what to do with so they’re like, “Let’s give it to schools. Let’s give it to hospitals. Let’s give it to prisons. They’ll be happy.”
Caryn Hartglass: Isn’t that amazing that we give the lowest quality foods to our children?
Shira Lane: To our children and people in hospitals. Yes. And then here’s another thing. We’re giving this milk…and we’re forcing it. Within the school lunch program it says that you cannot restrict the sale or marketing efforts of milk within the schools. So milk can advertise in the school. They can put posters up in the cafeteria. But broccoli? You can’t advertise about broccoli. That’s crazy. But here’s the thing. These people of color who are in the school lunch program and who are forced to drink milk, most of these kids are lactose intolerant. Now when you’re forced to drink milk in the middle of the day in school, you’re going to feel really bad and have these really bad bowel movements and you are forced to sit there at school. You’re not going to be able to concentrate. You’re not going to be able to excel in school. In a way, our foods are ruining the education of these children.
Caryn Hartglass: Yeah, like in the film you mention, or someone mentions that being lactose intolerant is actually natural and those who are able to digest lactose are like mutants.
Shira Lane: This is true. I know it sounds weird. But when any mammal…when we’re born, we’re born with the lactase enzyme that breaks down the lactose. We use that to digest the milk so we can digest our mother’s milk. When we’re finished weaning, our body naturally ceases to create the lactase because we don’t need to drink the milk anymore. Some people have after generations after generations after generations, like people in Northern Europe, continued to develop the enzyme to break down milk and they do not suffer from lactose intolerance. But 75%…between 70 and 75% actually to be more accurate of people are lactose intolerant. Of the world’s population, 70 to 75%. So if you’re lactose intolerant, it is normal. You are normal. You are not meant to be drinking milk. Milk is a food that is designed to make things grow.
Caryn Hartglass: Something that surprised me about the politics about milk…I’m just surprised that so many different organizations are not fighting about milk more. For example, you were just talking about the percentage of the population that cannot digest milk and so it’s really discriminatory to have these children who are lactose intolerant made to drink milk. Now certainly they can just not drink it but the school is not reimbursed per child if they don’t serve the child milk. And the parent has to jump through hoops to get a substitute for milk. So it’s really discriminatory. So why aren’t we seeing more organizations saying, “Change this policy because it’s racist.”
Shira Lane: You know, that is absolutely true. I would love, love to see more organizations fighting for it.
Caryn Hartglass: It’s because of this subliminal thing going on with marketing and media where we really believe that milk is important.
Shira Lane: That is true. And it hurts me and that is why it was so important for me to drop everything that I was doing and make this film. Because when I came across this information…here’s my story. I, my whole life, had been allergic to milk. I’m not lactose intolerant, I’m allergic to casein, one of the proteins in milk. But living in Israel it was really easy for me to do the separation because of the kosher do I really didn’t have to think about it. But when I came to America, I was getting sick constantly and I just needed to figure it out. So I started to do my own research. And then at some point I was like, “Wait a minute. I’m sure there’s a documentary out there about this. Why am I doing all this research? I’m sure somebody else has already done the work and in two hours I’ll be up to speed.” Well to my astonishment, there was nothing. There was nothing. I just dug deeper and deeper and deeper into this milk information that it doesn’t do a body good, it isn’t the best thing in the world, it causes cancer. There are so many things. And the hormones and the antibiotics in the milk. I just went on and on and eventually I became the crazy person at the supermarket telling people, “Don’t buy milk. That’s horrible.” And then eventually I was like, “I’m in the movie industry. Why don’t I just make the documentary? So I just stopped everything I was doing. I was an actress at the time. I was acting in a movie, Magdalena, when I decided to call my manager and say, “Sorry. No more auditions. No more anything. I am doing this documentary.” So I put everything I had into this because I just want…I don’t want children to suffer anymore. I mean, children who have got asthma, which is what I had. When I drank milk I had asthma, bronchitis. I was in the hospital two weeks with a collapsed lung. 50% of children are allergic to milk.
Caryn Hartglass: When I hear about children getting tubes put in their ears at such a young age because of all of the problems that they’re having and it’s all because of milk.
Shira Lane: And they won’t tell you that. The hospitals won’t tell you that. You go to the hospitals and you get taken care of and they give you dairy products as you’re coming out. There has to be…
Caryn Hartglass: There are so many things I want to respond to that you just said. I’m scribbling notes as you’re talking but let’s see what we get to. #1. I appreciate you saying it was relatively easy for you not to eat dairy while you were in Israel. I became a vegan in 1988 and I was struggling with how to do it and what happened was I went to work for an Israeli company and I spent three months in Israel and I decided to do it there just for that reason because it was easier and because people knew what was in the food and they certainly knew if there was dairy in the food and that made it really easy for me. Plus there are so many great vegetables and great things to eat that it was such a pleasure.
Shira Lane: I’m so glad and that’s true. In Israel it really is a lot easier. Although Israel is a very dairy-based place. They love their dairy there.
Caryn Hartglass: So how does this affect…what do people that are lactose tolerant do in Israel? How do the families handle people not consuming milk over there in the land of milk and honey?
Shira Lane: A lot of people are lactose intolerant and I think what happens is they tolerate it and they just don’t know that they are lactose intolerant. I think that some people that are really severe, they will know. They eventually find out what makes them feel crappy. But for most people they just feel like, “Maybe I ate something weird.” They don’t put too much thought into it because the problem is that milk is really in everything. It’s in our breads here in America. It’s in meats if you eat meat. It’s in gum. It’s really in absolutely everything that you can possibly imagine. It’s even in dark chocolate that isn’t supposed to have milk.
Caryn Hartglass: Well some of them do. You have to read the ingredients.
Shira Lane: Well most of them. It’s really difficult to find and that’s what really caused me to make this because it’s just in everything and it’s really hard to avoid.
Caryn Hartglass: What’s really crazy is I just took a food handling course here in NY, which you have to take if you’re going to be handling food or working in a restaurant. And I have some projects that I want to do in the future so I took this course which anyone can do online. And I really recommend doing it because you learn so much about the food industry that’s scary.
Shira Lane: Really? Like what?
Caryn Hartglass: Just all the rules that restaurants are supposed to follow to prevent the growing of all of these microorganisms that cause food-borne illness. When you read about all of the possibilities and what needs to be done to prevent or lower the risk, it’s just amazing that people are still walking around alive because I know a lot of restaurants don’t do these things or try and make shortcuts. So it was just eye-opening. One of the things they talk about are the foods that people are allergic to. One of the top things on there is milk and what restaurants are supposed to do at least at NY is if someone asks if there is milk in food or if there is an allergen in food, the servers are supposed to know. As a vegan, I’ve asked many different places and restaurants, “Is there milk in the food? Is there butter in the food?” And I get this blank stare from people sometimes unless I’m in a vegan or vegetarian restaurant. That’s scary because for me it’s a choice but for people who have allergies and issues to milk and can’t eat it and the servers don’t know, and they’re supposed to, it’s scary. Are you with me?
Shira Lane: That is so true. For some reason we got cut off. It is a problem that there is no education among the servers. And it makes it really difficult to eat out and trust. And what’s worse is it makes you a really bad person to dine with because you go there and you’re asking questions and they don’t know the answer and you say, “I don’t eat dairy.” And they go, “Oh my gosh.” Really?
Caryn Hartglass: They’re supposed to be respectful of you and give you what you need. There was a scene in your film about cooking with butter and making eggs with butter and the server was saying that everything had butter in it. It was crazy because there are things that the cooks don’t know how to do without butter or the servers don’t know if things have butter and things that I’ve heard very often when I ask for things that don’t have dairy and when I really grill them, they’ll say, “There’s just a little bit of butter. There’s not a lot.” And what I’ve had to say, and I don’t know if you’ve had this experience, is I’ve had to say if I knew I wasn’t getting their attention, “I will die if I eat dairy.”
Shira Lane: That usually will get their attention because then they’re thinking of lawsuits.
Caryn Hartglass: That’s right. It’s all about money.
Shira Lane: Yes, unfortunately. I just wish that people had a better understanding of what is in our food. I mean, the reason I made this film was not only about milk but for people to start asking questions, for people to look into our food. Don’t accept as true whatever people are saying because that’s just not going to benefit you. You really need to look into food and see where our food is coming from because once you understand that, you will understand the importance of why it is that you should be healthy and why it is that you should eat in a certain way.
Caryn Hartglass: You kind of touched on it a little bit but part of the problem is when you go out to a restaurant, you want to have a good time—you’re with friends or you’re on a date or with family. And when you start to have a conversation with the server about all of the ingredients in the food it kind of changes the tone of the atmosphere and it’s kind of a drag. There she goes again talking about what’s in her food—what she can have and what she can’t have. And you really just want to be able to go and relax and order things. I look forward to a day when we can do that everywhere.
Shira Lane: I think restaurants…I’m here in Los Angeles and restaurants here have begun to be a little more friendly. I’m seeing more vegetarian meals but also non-dairy vegetarian meals. I think this is a growing trend where I think a lot of restaurants are forced to have a lot more healthier options. Usually what we’ll have is salad. Well, I just got some grain salad with olive oil.
Caryn Hartglass: There are definitely more options in many places but there are still lots of pockets, especially in Middle America, where it’s like time is standing still.
Shira Lane: That’s true. But I think in places, like LA and NY and in the main places, restaurants, to get younger, trendier people, it has to be a lot healthier. It’s not just the hamburgers and anything fatty. People are beginning…I think the revolution is beginning to get to our food and where our food is coming from. I think a lot of younger people in their late 20s, early 30s are really looking into their food. It’s more of a cool place, to go to a place that serves healthy food.
Caryn Hartglass: We’ve got a lot more people, a lot more celebrities, a lot more hip people that are vegan or are looking into the vegan scene or non-dairy. It’s definitely a positive trend. Shira, we have to take a short break and I want to talk a lot more about your film. Stay with us and we’ll be back in a couple of minutes.

Caryn Hartglass: Hello, I’m Caryn Hartglass and you’re listening to It’s All About Food. We are talking about the documentary, Got the Facts on Milk? And I have the director and filmmaker, Shira Lane, with me here on It’s All About Food. Got the facts on milk? Most people don’t.
Shira Lane: Unfortunately that is true.
Caryn Hartglass: I like to look at people’s expressions when I say “dog’s milk.” How about a nice cold glass of dog’s milk?
Shira Lane: The thing about that is that people find cow’s milk fine. But I tell them cow’s milk is really, when you look at the structure of the milk and you look at the structure of human milk, really we should be drinking human milk and not cow’s milk because at the end of the day we’re humans and not cows.
Caryn Hartglass: I don’t know about that with some people.
Shira Lane: But people get grossed out by that. They go, “Oh my god. Really?” It’s OK to go to a cow. And there are two things to that. One: When you’re giving cow’s milk, especially to young children, the way that our milk, mother’s milk, human milk is built is to increase brain development. We develop a lot longer than a cow. When you consume cow’s milk, a cow is supposed to go from a baby to maturity within two years but a human is supposed to go from 0 to 18, 19, 20 years. That’s when we hit maturity. So when we’re looking at these different milks you see that each milk is designed differently. Each milk is designed for each species. It’s very species-specific. But another thing is if you want to drink and are like “Oh I’m grossed out. I’m going to go for an animal milk,” you should go for rat milk.
Caryn Hartglass: Rat milk?
Shira Lane: Rat milk. Rat milk. Rat milk is the closest thing you can get to human milk.
Caryn Hartglass: I didn’t know that. I thought rat milk had more protein in it than human milk.
Shira Lane: Oh it does but it’s the closest one…if you’re looking at different milks, it’s the closest one to human milk.
Caryn Hartglass: Nice. It would be hard to get a glass, though. They’re so small.
Shira Lane: I know. And then it’d be pretty expensive.
Caryn Hartglass: The point is: are you grossed out by the concept of drinking certain other animals’ milks and not others?
Shira Lane: I think people really don’t stop to think about it and that goes…that’s our issue that we just accept what the advertisements and commercials say. We accept what the media say and we don’t stop to think. We don’t stop to question, “Wait a minute. This is a company trying to sell me something.”
Caryn Hartglass: Well I’m absolutely convinced that many people could be marketed to drink dog’s milk. I mean it could take some time but the media can do anything. It’s done a lot already. Unfortunately. I’m just reading about how the law was passed about how we’re going to be able to slaughter horses for meat in this country that is something that has not been allowed for a long time. And so people think…some people think who are meat eaters that they can’t eat horse meat because it’s from a beautiful horse and we don’t think of horses in this country as meat. That there are so many things that we have been socialized to accept. It’s OK to eat cow in this country but not dog. But it’s OK to eat dog in some Asian countries but I don’t get any of it. I’m a plant-eater. I don’t differentiate. But milk is the worst food from any animal.
Shira Lane: I agree. That is true. Eating meat…I can go on about that. Before I made this documentary, I have to be honest, before I made this documentary I was not vegan. I just was allergic to milk, that was it. When I started doing this film and came across all this information about milk, then along the way it was inevitable for me not to see what was going on with the meat industry and all the other animal industries. When I came back to the editing room and I was sitting there and I was going through all of the information again, you know what, I was like I can’t do meat anymore. And that day when I started editing this film, I became vegan.
Caryn Hartglass: Wow. Well I give you a slap on the back and kudos to you because there are many people who have written books and put out films talking about what is going on in the food industry and they still have not connected the dots. Absolutely. Let’s throw out a few names. Let’s talk about Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan. These people are always talking about factory farms and all of the dangers that are going on in their food and that they still believe that eating meat and dairy is OK. And there’s a long list of that. But OK, that’s fine, we’re humans. Let’s just … go through a list of things that milk is related to when it comes to health problems. You listed a few, but let’s list as many as we can because there are so many.
Shira Lane: Oh my goodness. There are so many. It would take me hours and hours.
Caryn Hartglass: OK, well at the top of the list milk is connected to at the very most breast, ovarian, and prostate cancer.
Shira Lane: Correct. And that goes back to…oh, do you want to just list?
Caryn Hartglass: Let’s just hit them. I just want to go bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, milk is bad because it increases the risk and is highly correlated with different ailments.
Shira Lane: That is true. It is connected with reproductive cancers because of the IGF-1 and the hormones in milk. That’s natural. Even if you have organic milk, you’re still getting the hormones because all milks have hormones in them.
Caryn Hartglass: That’s a very good point. It’s still a high risk even with organic milk.
Shira Lane: Just because it’s organic…that’s better than regular I guess because you’re not getting the antibiotics that are in milk and all the other anti-inflammatory drugs that you have in milk. But what you are still getting are the hormones and these hormones are designed for a cow and also they’re designed for a baby to grow. So when you’re an adult and you don’t need to grow anymore and these hormones are in your body and looking for things to grow and you have carcinogens in your body—and everybody does, we don’t live in a bubble—these hormones go, “Oh these are something cool to grow, I’ll just grow that.” In countries where we have the highest consumption of dairy are the countries that have the highest rates of cancer. In our film, that’s what we did. We just looked at the data that said here are the countries that have highest deaths from cancer and here are the countries that have the highest dairy consumption. It was really one for one. And the countries that had no consumption of dairy or very little had no cancer reports whatsoever.
Caryn Hartglass: You could say the same for many other things, like osteoporosis.
Shira Lane: That’s true. Milk does cause hip fractures and osteoporosis. It really deteriorates the bones. It does not help to build strong bones. This is according to all of the studies in the film and everything is linked in the film so if you want to get the real studies, it’s all there in the film. But what the doctors and researchers are saying is that when you consume dairy, it causes your blood to become very acidic and when your blood becomes acidic it needs to buffer itself. So it needs calcium and it will take it from a place where your body stores it, which is the bones. And then what it will do, it will return the blood to the proper pH and then you will be urinating your bones to the toilet. What this also causes is kidney stones because then the calcium will sit there and you’ve got kidney bones. So you’re urinating your bones to the toilet and you’re also causing kidney stones.
Caryn Hartglass: Amongst many other things. Now you mentioned that there are hormones in the milk and that it’s one of the reasons that we don’t want to drink milk. These hormones are really meant to grow a little baby calf to a big animal in a short amount of time and no other reason. But that’s not the only bad thing in milk. The milk protein, or a number of the other milk proteins, many of them are too large or too difficult for us to digest and then they roam around in the body undigested and cause all kinds of autoimmune diseases like multiple sclerosis, which we don’t hear enough about.
Shira Lane: That is true. Unfortunately we didn’t have enough time to get into that in the film but that is so true. Cow’s milk is just not designed for humans. Cow’s milk is designed for a baby cow, meaning a calf. And I want people to understand. People usually don’t also think about what’s happening to the environment when we consume these products. Let’s just take it out from us and let’s look at the environment. When we are producing milk, we also have to make sure that the cow is pregnant every year. People don’t think that. We think cows just give us milk. No. Just like any other mammal, like a mother human, she has to have a baby so she has milk. So they impregnate the cow every year and they take the calf away.
Caryn Hartglass: And what happens to that calf?
Shira Lane: It depends if it’s male or female. If it’s male it will go to slaughter and become veal. If it’s female, it will probably go to become a replacement cow. Cows usually live until about 20 years but when you’ve got a milking cow they only live until about 4 or 5 because they become spent. They are impregnated every year. They get milked all the time and they just don’t last that long.
Caryn Hartglass: So many vegetarians who think that there isn’t any murder involved in eating dairy and eggs, there’s a lot of that that’s involved with dairy. The veal calves and then the cows aging and being treated so poorly that they die so young and go into hamburger.
Shira Lane: If you are vegetarian because you can’t think of killing animals then you should stop drinking milk because drinking milk actually promotes the veal industry.
Caryn Hartglass: There’s one other little ingredient that nobody really talks about and I don’t know if it’s that big of a deal but everybody cries about their cheese and says, “I can’t give up my cheese. I love my cheese.” And a lot of cheese, hard cheese, has rennet in it, which is not a vegetarian ingredient. It comes from cow’s stomach linings. Eww. Nobody talks about that.
Shira Lane: That’s a really good point. I did not know that.
Caryn Hartglass: Oh yeah. That’s an old story that nobody talks about anymore. A lot of the soft cheeses don’t use rennet but a lot of the hard cheeses are not really vegetarian. I mean there are just so many reasons. You’re talking about the environment. There are just a gazillion health reasons not to consume milk but there is a gazillion not for the environment.
Shira Lane: Yeah. When we talk about the environment…first of all, when you have a large group of cows and on a lot of farms there are now 4,000 or 5,000 to 10,000 cows…
Caryn Hartglass: They call those family farms too.
Shira Lane: They have cesspools. They have a problem controlling all of the urine and poop that goes on and that seeps down into our ground water and it contaminates the ground water. Apart from that we have a lot of E. Coli problems and this is caused by these huge factory-farming places that they are not disposing of their manure properly and it just leaks into our water systems and we have an E. Coli problem. Then you have the methane. Cows create methane. They burp it and they fart it and everything else. It comes out. And when you are constantly increasing the number of cows so that we can have consumption, you are creating more and more methane. What is methane? People talk about methane but don’t know what it is. We talk a lot about CO2. Let’s put it this way. Methane has 23 times the heat-grabbing capacity than CO2 . So 1 methane equals 23 CO2 and it stays in the atmosphere a lot longer. When we’re talking about the environment, according to the UN, the animal industry causes 18% of global warming footprint that we have. So if we’re really looking into the environment and you’re saying that you’re an environmentalist, you cannot be an environmentalist and consume dairy and meat.
Caryn Hartglass: This is the important point about animal agriculture and global warming. We’re talking about improving all kinds of technology for cars and factories and all of that absolutely has to happen. We have to get more sustainable energy sources to fuel everything that we do. I’m not saying that it’s wrong that we use fuel to do all of the things that we do, I just think we can do it all and have it all and do it sustainably. To upgrade all of our cars and factories…there’s a lot of great technology that’s out there already. To do all of that is going to take a lot of time and a lot of money. It’s going to take years. We’re spewing all of this CO2 and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and it’s going to take a long time to fix that. But what we can fix today is animal agriculture. I just want to correct one thing. The methane, yes, has 23 times the power of greenhouse gas atmospheric-warming potential but it stays in the atmosphere less. I think it’s about 8 years.
Shira Lane: Oh really?
Caryn Hartglass: Yeah. CO2 is in the atmosphere for about 100 years and methane is about 8. And that’s the good thing because when we reduce animal agriculture, the gases that are so powerful—methane and nitrous oxide—that are warming our atmosphere are not going to last in the atmosphere as long as CO2. So we’re going to do a great thing. We’re going to improve our health, we’re going to clean up the atmosphere fast, we’re going to give ourselves time to mitigate global warming and get all of these new technologies in place. It’s just win-win.
Shira Lane: That is wonderful news to know.
Caryn Hartglass: Well I think it’s on purpose. You interviewed Noam More in your film and he had put out a report. I was Executive Director of EarthSave International for about 8 years and we had a report that we published that he wrote and that’s where I got all of the information on global warming and animal agriculture. Noam More put that together. He’s quite a sharp guy.
Shira Lane: He is quite a sharp guy. He really is.
Caryn Hartglass: OK. Your film is great and people should really go see it because we need to paste over our old images of what it can do and get the fact on what it’s really doing. But can we talk about one person you had in your film, Isabel Maples?
Shira Lane: She was something else.
Caryn Hartglass: Was she a real person? She was such a moron. May I say that?
Shira Lane: Yes you may. For those of you who don’t know Isabel Maples, in the film we travel across the country and we interview a lot of researchers and doctors. No one from the dairy industry really wanted to talk to us because the dairy industry knew what we were doing the film about. Eventually I got a hold of Isabel Maples who is a dairy spokeswoman. We interviewed her in Washington, DC. When I interviewed her and I asked her all of these questions, she answered things that just blew me away. My cameraman—here’s a backstory—my cameraman had to walk out of the room during that interview.
Caryn Hartglass: Well I give you a lot of credit. You were very calm. You were respectful. You must watch this film, just this part alone, to hear this woman answer the questions and the stuff she says what causes to enter into early puberty, it’s just beyond nonsense. And she’s supposed to be an authority. And that’s what’s so scary. There are a lot of people out there in positions of authority that are educating the public and not only are they wrong, they are nonsensical.
Shira Lane: Right. They are pretty much teaching what they were taught. None of these people…and this is something to look at and this is what was really important in the film is I wanted to interview people that actually did the research themselves, that went in and wrote the reports themselves, that knew firsthand. For some reason I couldn’t get anybody that did research or that did studies that could prove milk, that could prove one good thing about milk. The only people that were saying good things about milk were people that were taught by the dairy industry which makes sense when you realize there is something here. From Colin Campbell to Neal Barnard…these are people that are hands-on with what’s going on and constantly doing all kinds of research and looking into things. They just could not stop talking about how we should stop now drinking milk.
Caryn Hartglass: Are you familiar with the Weston Price Foundation?
Shira Lane: The Weston Price Foundation? No.
Caryn Hartglass: OK. Well you might look into them and you might talk to some of those people. So they’re an organization that…they founded a lot of their information on Weston Price who was a dentist. I don’t have the whole story but he did a study a long time ago about whole grains and the effect on teeth. He was a dentist. And I think he went to Africa and discovered that people who were eating whole grains didn’t have the same cavity problems that we have and so he made this connection and said that it’s important to eat whole grains. Somehow these people came along and founded an organization on his early principles and then totally brought things out of perspective. So now they promote raw meat. They promote raw milk, unpasteurized. They’re promoting whole grains which is good. They put out some information that’s kind of credible and some stuff that’s just crazy. They say a lot of things about how raw milk is healthy. I’ve taken a few of their articles and tried to go to the first source of where they’ve come up with this information and it always leads me to junk. So that’s always a fun thing to do but people don’t have time to do that. When they’re reading a book and they see references in the back, they think this is a researched piece of information.
Shira Lane: That’s funny because I do the same thing. I do the same thing with the dairy industry whenever they have…they have this e-mail called the Dairy Download and they always come out with these new studies and then I go back to the links and I go back and go back until I find the original and usually the original research has nothing to do with what they were promoting.
Caryn Hartglass: I can’t say how important it is not to just spew out the sound bites that you hear. Go to the original source before you open your mouth. You might want to look them up because they are very powerful and they have a big following. They’re putting out a lot of, in my opinion, it’s not good information at all.
Shira Lane: I know a lot of people are really for the raw milk. People believe that if I get raw milk from a cow who’s healthy… Personally, I’m not a doctor. All I am is a documentarian. I collected all this information. I collected video of all these people and I put it together in a package for people to be able to observe all this information. And it’s a lot. But from what I’ve learned from the researchers and doctors that are there, raw milk or any milk, if you’re not a baby and if you’re not drinking your own mother’s milk, you shouldn’t be drinking milk. There is nothing good in drinking milk from another animal.
Caryn Hartglass: You may not be familiar with Dr. Benjamin Spock. I don’t know if you are. He was a well-known doctor in the United States about…I don’t know when he started. He wrote The Baby Book and The Baby Book is still out. It’s in a number of revisions and another doctor’s now writing it since he’s passed. But he was really respected and many, many mothers would go to their Baby Book by Dr. Benjamin Spock for many decades for information about how to raise their babies. When he was in his 80s and he was revising the book for the 7th Edition he stopped recommending cow’s milk for all people saying that it’s not healthy for babies and he became a vegan. He said in the foreword or in some part of the book that he had suffered from bronchitis for all of his life and when he stopped drinking milk it cleared up completely. When he put all of this information out, and he was a man who was so well-respected, all of these people started saying he was a nut.
Shira Lane: That he went crazy? That’s an easy way for the dairy industry to dismiss it. Like I said, it’s like going back to square one, the dairy industry is the most powerful marketing organization I’ve ever seen. They deserve an award for marketing. Really they do. Every award and any award they deserve because they have been able to establish a staple. They’ve been able to establish a staple and convince everybody of something that is healthy. I want people to think about this and think about the ’60s. When they were saying that cigarettes were healthy.
Caryn Hartglass: Good point.
Shira Lane: We had doctors saying that they smoked cigarettes and doctors advised to smoke cigarettes. Years later we find out that, oops, we were wrong. I think that the time has come again with milk. They’ve been advertising so long and people really haven’t stood up and questioned it. There have been a lot of people questioning it but I think that the media hasn’t gotten into it yet. The problem is that the dairy industry has so much money and so much power to put their message out as wrong as it is and as misleading as it is. The people that really know the research that can read the research and that understand it, they don’t have the money to put out that message. So that’s why I really wanted to create this film because I wanted to make sure that I give a platform to those people so they can speak and we can promote their message.
Caryn Hartglass: We need your film. We need many more that are talking about what’s wrong with dairy if we’re going to make a dent in combating in that force out there that is so huge. We just have a few minutes left. Can we talk about all of the great foods that are out there so that we don’t have to consume milk?
Shira Lane: Oh my goodness. So just for example, when I cook I like to use cashews. I make cashew cream.
Caryn Hartglass: I love cashes. Magical cashews.
Shira Lane: I know. They’re so good. I have a Bullet so we blend everything up. I take a handful of raw cashews, a little bit of water, and bang, you’ve got this thick, great cream for pastas, soups, whatever you want to use. I use almond milk instead of regular milk and I use almond milk in everything that requires milk. Every time it says to use milk in a recipe, I use almond milk and it works just fine. I really have no need for it. I have found other substitutes for cheeses. Unfortunately not all of the fake cheeses are healthy. There are substitutes, especially if you’re just getting off dairy. Usually it’s a good transition to find substitutes and there are…there’s a company that I really like called Daiya Cheese. It’s fabulous because my life partner is not vegan and he actually loves this cheese. He says that it is quite good. He’s my tester. It’s really funny because my partner is not vegan but he’s really slowly eating a lot healthier. He’s coming to…we’ve been together 3 years and said to me today, “When I don’t eat at home I don’t feel as healthy.” He’s coming around. There are a lot of healthy things that you can substitute instead of dairy. I really advise on nuts. I use nuts in everything. When you’re looking for calcium, first of all green, leafy vegetables have tons of calcium and so does sesame seeds.
Caryn Hartglass: Great Middle Eastern food. Sesame seeds and tahini.
Shira Lane: You can make some hummus because hummus has some tahini in it. Hummus, which is a great protein, and tahini are just great, fabulous.
Caryn Hartglass: I just want to mention that I have a nonprofit called Responsible Eating and Living. Our website is responsibleeatingandliving.com and I have a number of recipes for nut-based cheeses that you can make at home. They’re really easy to make and they’re delicious. I personally prefer the nut-based cheeses than the ones that are available in the supermarket but you have to make them at home.
Shira Lane: Those sound great.
Caryn Hartglass: I love cashew cheese and almond cheese. They melt and they’re just incredible. We’re not missing anything by not having cow’s milk. There are lots of great dessert books out there and we can just do it all. Really. But we’re at the end of the hour. We’re done.
Shira Lane: If you want to get the documentary, it’s at milkdocumentary.com.
Caryn Hartglass: Watch the film. Get it for your schools, for your churches and synagogues, and your community centers. Everyone needs to see it. You do not need a milk mustache, you need a green mustache. Eat your greens.
Shira Lane: Yes. Thank you so much for having me.
Caryn Hartglass: Thank you Shira Lane. Just keep doing what you’re doing.
Shira Lane: Happy New Year.
Caryn Hartglass: Happy New Year. Thank you for listening to It’s All About Food. I am Caryn Hartglass and please, again, visit responsibleeatingandliving.com. Have a delicious, delicious week and stay warm.

Transcribed by Jennie Steinhagen, 4/12/2013

12/28/2011 Interviews with Laura Theodore and Latham Thomas

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12/28/2011:

Part I: Laura Theodore
The Jazzy Vegetarian

Laura Theodore is a radio host, television personality, and award-winning jazz singer and songwriter. She currently hosts the Jazzy Vegetarian cooking show on public television and Jazzy Vegetarian Radio, a talk and music show focusing on easy-to-prepare, plant-based recipes, earth-friendly entertaining tips, celebrity interviews, and upbeat music.

12/28/2011:

Part II: Latham Thomas
Greening the Planet One Belly At A Time

Born and raised in California, Latham is a graduate of both Columbia University, where she earned a degree in Visual arts and Environmental science, as well as the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. She is a certified holistic health counselor, who mixes her passions of plant physiology, botany, holistic nutrition, fitness, yoga, and green cuisine into a lifestyle program that supports the various needs of her clients. Specializing in maternal and child wellness, Latham served as Program coordinator for the Healthy Moms-Healthy Babies project for the B-Healthy organization. She is the co-founder of Panela Productions, a company that educates parents and children about food, through cooking classes, and events. Latham has developed partnerships with Vogue Magazine, Destination Maternity, Jurlique, and Euphoria Spa to produce events for expectant and new moms.

TRANSCRIPTION PART II:
Caryn Hartglass: Hello, we’re back. I’m Caryn Hartglass and you’re listening to It’s All About Food. And I’m really excited to bring on the next guest, Latham Thomas.

She’s born and raised in California. A graduate of both Columbia University, where she earned a degree in Visual Arts and Environmental Science, as well as the Institute for Integrated Nutrition. She’s a certified holistic health counselor who mixes her passion of plant physiology, botany, holistic nutrition, fitness yoga, and green cuisine into a lifestyle program that supports the various needs of her clients. Read more »

12/21/2011 Interview with Michele Simon

LISTEN TO THE INTERVIEW WITH

MICHELE SIMON

12/21/2011:

Michele Simon
Eat Drink Politics

Michele Simon is a public health lawyer who has been researching and writing about the food industry and food politics since 1996. She specializes in legal strategies to counter corporate tactics that harm the public’s health. She is president of Eat Drink Politics, an industry watchdog consulting firm.

Michele Simon has taught Health Policy at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, and lectures frequently on corporate tactics and policy solutions. She has written extensively on the politics of food, and her first book, Appetite for Profit: How the Food Industry Undermines Our Health and How to Fight Back, was published by Nation Books in 2006.

She has a master’s degree in public health from Yale University and received her law degree from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law.

12/14/2011 Interviews with Nava Atlas and Bryanna Clark Grogan

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LISTEN TO:

THE ENTIRE PROGRAM

PART I WITH NAVA ATLAS

PART II WITH BRYANNA CLARK GROGAN

12/14/2011:

Part 1 – Nava Atlas
Vegan Holiday Kitchen

Have yourself a happy vegan holiday! This exciting, inviting cookbook by veteran author Nava Atlas brilliantly fills the biggest gap in the vegan repertoire with more than 200 delectable, completely doable recipes for every festive occasion. Atlas, one of the most respected names in vegetarian and vegan cooking, addresses everything from Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, and Christmas –to celebratory brunches, lunches, dinners, potlucks, and buffets. Such mouthwatering dishes as Coconut Butternut Squash Soup, Green Chili Corn Bread, Hearty Vegetable Pot Pie, delicate Ravioli with Sweet Potatoes and Sage, and Cashew Chocolate Mousse Pie will convince even the most skeptical eater that vegan cooking is well worth celebrating.

12/14/2011:

Part 2 – Bryanna Clark Grogan
World Vegan Fest

Longtime vegan author and cooking expert, Bryanna Clark Grogan, has written many books, including our title, World Vegan Feast: 200 Fabulous Recipes from Over 50 Countries. This book is destined to be a classic of vegan versions of authentic international recipes. The book is a treasury of excellent recipes and practical culinary and vegan information that can help any home cook excel. Bryanna knows the whys and wherefore’s of cooking science and what makes plant-based foods taste great.

Holiday tips, osteoporosis, avoiding bloating and feeding the world.

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12/11/2011: For the holidays: ideas for weight control, beverage ideas and how to not feel deprived not eating the unhealthy, non-vegan treats. I spoke about osteoporosis, avoiding bloating and gas, and how organic farming can feed the world. I described a bit of our latest video series called “IT’S ALL ABOUT GREENS” now showing at http://responsibleeatingandliving.com/?p=3503 which shows how to eat more healthy, dark green leafy vegetables. Have you seen it yet?

LISTEN to hear the entire program.

12/7/2011 Interviews with John Schlimm, Terry Hope Romero and Isa Chandra Moskowitz

LISTEN TO:

THE ENTIRE PROGRAM

PART I WITH JOHN SCHLIMM

PART II WITH TERRY HOPE ROMERO AND ISA CHANDRA MOSKOWITZ

12/7/2011:

Part 1 – John Schlimm
The Tipsy Vegan

Just in time for the holidays, John Schlimm, a member of one of the oldest brewing families in the U.S., brings together the flavor of the kitchen and the fun of the bar in The Tipsy Vegan: 75 Boozy Recipes to Turn Every Bite Into Happy Hour. Showcasing plant-based recipes that feature everything from beer to brandy, he presents irresistibly tasty dishes that are easy to prepare and reveal the wilder side of everyday fruits and vegetables.

12/7/2011:

Part 2 – Terry Romero and Isa Moskowitz
Vegan Pie in the Sky

Holidays? Check. Birthdays? Check. Tuesdays? Check! Our research says life is 100% better any day pie is involved. There’s nothing like a rich, gooey slice of apple pie straight from the oven, baked in a perfectly flaky crust and topped with cinnamon-sugar. And now it can be yours, along with dozens more mouthwatering varieties, vegan at last and better than ever. Vegan Pie in the Sky is the latest force in Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero’s baking revolution. You’ll find delicious and adorable pies, tarts, cobblers, cheesecakes and more—all made without dairy, eggs, or animal products. From fruity to chocolaty, nutty to creamy, Vegan Pie in the Sky has the classic flavors you crave. And the recipes are as easy as, well, you know.

The Price of Beauty – What’s in Your Hair Dye?

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12/4/2011: The first half of this show was dedicated to the range of harmful ingredients in hair dyes. In the second half, I covered horse slaughter for human consumption in the U.S., liquid smoke and baked tofu, mustard greens and food handling.

LISTEN to hear the entire program.

JOY!

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11/27/2011: Alan Roettinger joined me in this show. The hour was devoted to talking about joy: how humans are meant to experience joy and ways to experience bliss.

LISTEN to hear the entire program.

Interviews with Laurie Sadowski and Betsy DiJulio

LISTEN TO THE INTERVIEW
with Laurie Sadowski

11/30/2011:

Part 1 – Laurie Sadowski
Allergy-Free Cook Bakes Bread

Laurie Sadowski is a certified personal trainer and nutrition and wellness specialist, food writer, and musicologist. She spends her time spreading awareness about balanced living, cooking, and baking, and continuing her research in modern music and art.

LISTEN TO THE INTERVIEW
with Betsy DiJulio

11/30/2011:

Part 2 – Betsy DiJulio
The Blooming Platter Cookbook

The author of The Blooming Platter Cookbook: A Harvest of Seasonal Vegan Recipes, Betsy is an artist, journalist, teacher, and innovator in vegan cooking. Her concept of seasonality can be of audience interest for winter cooking, excellent for spring (and summer and fall, too)—topical four times a year as the recipes in her book take the guess work out of using the freshest seasonal produce in her creative and delicious recipes.

Interview with Richard Oppenlander

LISTEN TO THE INTERVIEW
with Richard Oppenlander

11/23/2011:

Dr. Richard Oppenlander
COMFORTABLY UNAWARE

Author of “Comfortably Unaware: Global Depletion and Food Choice Responsibility,” Dr. Oppenlander is a sustainability and wellness advocate, writer, and speaker committed to improving the health of our planet. Through literary work or in person, he brings an eclectic combination of experiences regarding this topic spanning the past 40 years.

Since the early 1970’s, Dr. Oppenlander has extensively studied the effect our food choices have on our health and the immense impact those choices have on our environment. He is president and founder of an organic vegan food production and education business and has given hundred of lectures, presentations, and open discussions on the topic of food choice.

Dr. Oppenlander has been a keynote speaker for the North American Vegetarian Society’s SummerFest as well as other events and has presented lectures and workshops at numerous universities and colleges. He has been a featured guest appearing on radio shows, in newspapers and magazines. With his book, “Comfortably Unaware” as well as with his speaking engagements, Dr. Oppenlander addresses the fact that our current choices of foods are causing Global Depletion- the loss of our land, water, air/atmosphere, food supply, biodiversity, energy resources, and our own health.

In compelling fashion, he reveals serious inefficiencies and unsustainable practices in our current food production systems and explores unique solutions. Along the way, Dr. Oppenlander challenges audiences with new insights regarding how this has happened – exposing our cultural, social, educational, governmental, and even media influences.

Interviews with Dr. Michael Greger

LISTEN TO THE LATEST INTERVIEW FROM NOVEMBER 16, 2011
with Dr. Michael Greger

LISTEN TO THE EARLIER JULY 22, 2009 INTERVIEW
with Dr. Michael Greger

11/16/2011:

Dr. Michael Greger
Vegan MD

Michael Greger, M.D., is a physician, author, and internationally recognized professional speaker on a number of important public health issues. Dr. Greger has lectured at the Conference on World Affairs, the National Institutes of Health, and the International Bird Flu Summit, among countless other symposia and institutions, testified before Congress, and was invited as an expert witness in defense of Oprah Winfrey at the infamous “meat defamation” trial. Currently Dr. Greger proudly serves as the Director of Public Health and Animal Agriculture at the Humane Society of the United States.

Dr. Greger’s recent scientific publications in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Biosecurity and Bioterrorism, Critical Reviews in Microbiology, Family & Community Health, and the International Journal of Food Safety, Nutrition, and Public Health explore the public health implications of industrialized animal agriculture.

Dr. Greger is also licensed as a general practitioner specializing in clinical nutrition and was a founding member of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine. He was featured on the Healthy Living Channel promoting his latest nutrition DVDs and honored to teach part of Dr. T. Colin Campbell’s esteemed nutrition course at Cornell University. Dr. Greger’s nutrition work can be found at NutritionFacts.org.

His latest two books are Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching and Carbophobia: The Scary Truth Behind America’s Low Carb Craze. Dr. Greger is a graduate of the Cornell University School of Agriculture and the Tufts University School of Medicine.

All speaking fees and proceeds Dr. Greger receives from the sale of his books and DVDs are all donated to charity. To invite him to speak fill out the Speaking Request form.

Oil crisis – you mean oil is not healthy?

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11/13/2011: The confusion about ‘healthy’ oils continues. I responded to listeners, giving my view on oil and fats, and gave some delicious recipe ideas for pie crusts made with seed butters. I discussed a listener’s concern with nail polish. With Thanksgiving coming up, I reminded people of the plight turkeys go through to become the ‘traditional’ main event during the Thanksgiving feast. I end the show talking about materials for sporting gear and instruments which may or may not come from animals.

LISTEN to hear the entire program.

11/9/2011 Interviews with Ken Babal and Colleen Patrick-Goudreau

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11/9/2011:

Part I: Ken Babal, CN
Mushrooms for Health and Longevity

Ken Babal is a licensed clinical nutritionist with over 25 years experience. He is a consultant to the natural food and supplement industry and a former instructor for Southern California School of Culinary Arts.

Ken Babal has written over 100 articles that have appeared in many popular publications including Let’s Live, Taste for Life and Doctors’ Prescription for Healthy Living. He is co-author with Shari Lieberman, Ph.D. of Maitake Mushroom and D-Fraction (Woodland 2004) and author of Good Digestion: Your Key to Vibrant Health (Alive 2000) and Seafood Sense: The Truth about Seafood Nutrition and Safety (Basic Health Publications 2005).

Ken appears in the Discovery Health Channel documentary Alternatives Uncovered and E! TV’s The High Price of Fame: Starved!. He has also been a guest on many local and national radio programs.

As a professional musician and drummer, Ken became interested in nutrition as a means of realizing one’s optimum potential. “You can’t have a bad day when you go on stage. Nutrition is something we have control over and it plays a huge role in how we feel and perform each day.”

11/9/2011:

Part II: Colleen Patrick-Goudreau
The 30 Day Vegan Challenge

TRANSCRIPTION PART II:

CARYN:
Hello, we’re back. I’m Caryn Hartglass and you’re listening to It’s All about Food. And we’re going to continue with my favorite subject: food.

And bring on the next guest, and that is Colleen Patrick-Goudreau, and we’re going to be talking about her newest book: The 30-Day Vegan Challenge. She’s an award-winning author of five books, including the best-selling Joy of Vegan Baking, The Vegan Table, Color Me Vegan, Vegan’s Daily Companion, and now the 30-Day Vegan Challenge. She has guided people to becoming and staying vegan for over 12 years through sold-out cooking classes, best-selling books, inspiring lectures, engaging videos, and her immensely popular audio podcasts: Vegetarian Food for Thought.

Using her unique blend of passion, humor, and common sense, she empowers and inspires people to live according to their own values of compassion and wellness. She also contributes to National Public Radio and the Christian Science Monitor and has appeared on the Food Network and PBS. Visit ColleenPatrickGoudreau.com for more.

Hello, and welcome to It’s All about Food, Colleen.

COLLEEN:
Hi Caryn, thank you for having me. It’s good to talk you again.

CARYN:
Yeah, it’s good to talk to you. And thank you for the book. I got it, and I read it, and I’m ready to talk about it.

COLLEEN:
Oh, great, thank you.

CARYN:
First, I didn’t realize what it was going to be. And I thought it was just going to be a cookbook, and there are many, many wonderful recipes in here, but there is a whole lot more. And you basically talk about everything people need to know.

COLLEEN:
Yeah, it’s wonderful. It’s actually really wonderful because this is a culmination of eleven years of my work. And you know, it was just published in August, and I wrote it a year ago, and it answers everything that I know people ask, and so when people come up to me now, I just saw a woman yesterday in a store, she said, “I know, but what about eating out?” and I said–

CARYN:
Read the book.

COLLEEN:
“What about traveling?” and it’s in the book. Nothing you ask is unique. Nothing you ask hasn’t been asked before. So that’s what’s really exciting about it. It really covers every question people ask about this lifestyle.

CARYN:
That’s funny that nothing people ask is really unique We’ve heard all these questions over and over, the funny thing is I kind of got a sore neck reading this book cause I just kept nodding. Yes, yes, yes, yes, oh yeah, uh-huh, right. [laughs]

COLLEEN:
Yup.

CARYN:
But that’s great, that it’s all here. And uh, it’s um, It’s really a good guide because, okay, you touch on some of the serious stuff–the nutrition, whatever–but it’s really just common sense things that help people through this change.

COLLEEN:
Yeah, I really tried to make this as easy as possible. I mean, the reason the book exists is because I realized that making changes is actually hard for people. That’s whether you’re becoming vegan or doing anything. The change is difficult for people. And so as much as that I can guide people and help them change habit, there are some things that I, you know, people need help with. Once you get past that, then it’s just a matter of creating new habits and kind of looking in a different direction, and that’s really what I do: I say, “Look, you’re going to be changing some of the foundation that’s been familiar to you for many, many years. But the good news is we’re gonna be replacing that with a new foundation so I’m gonna give you everything you need so that when you’re done, you’re standing on firm ground. You’re not flailing about, and I think that’s been a real problem with people, I think there’s a lot of people who are compelled to make these changes and become vegan for so many reasons, but they don’t know how to do it, and that’s really how I see my work, is that it helps people, it’s a guide for people, and that’s what this book is.

CARYN:
Now, it’s a 30-day vegan challenge, and the way you set it up is there’s a different chapter for every day. And, my– I would recommend to people if they were making a transition to the vegan diet I would read this whole book first, and then go back and read it a chapter a day. While they’re doing it.

COLLEEN:
It’s true. It’s interesting, isn’t it? It’s very much more than meant to be programmatic. My intention from the very beginning was not, “Look, day one you do this, day two you do this, day three you do this, and by the end of the 30-day you’re vegan.” This was, “Do it for 30 days, just commit to doing it for 30 days, and the book will give you everything you need and I suspect that they’re gonna read ahead cause you’re gonna want to know what to do the next day. You’re gonna want all the information to then– then do it for 30 days. And the keep looking back to it as a resource guide. But I think that’s what a lot of people are doing: reading it all at once.

CARYN:
Right. No, I think that’s the best way to do it, and then know, as you’re doing it. “Oh, I remember reading that, let me go and check up on that.”

COLLEEN:
Good, yeah, exactly. And there’s so many things that people can use: to take it to the store with them because, you know, I mean there’s a whole chapter on just, as you know, stocking your pantries and produces–lists and lists and lists of items that people would want to put on their shopping list, and, you know, recipes so they can go to the grocery store with the book and have a shopping list. I mean, so there’s a lot of resources to use again and again.

CARYN:
Now you’ve been doing this for eleven, twelve years. How long have you been vegan?

COLLEEN:
For twelve years.

CARYN:
Oh. Okay.

COLLEEN:
For twelve years. I started right away. [laughs]

CARYN:
So you haven’t been into this for that long, because I mean some of us have been doing this for decades, and right now it’s really exciting, because it seems like this is our time. People know what the word is: vegan. for the most part know how to pronounce it: vegan. [laughs] And– sometimes some people say “vay-guhn” but that’s okay. But we’re on television now, and if you read the New York Times, but every Sunday it’s so exciting because now I see three vegan books on the New York’s Times’ how-to best-selling list. We have Forks Over Knives, we have Eat to Live, and I just saw Dr. Caldwell’s Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease, and this is so exciting.

COLLEEN:
This is very exciting, absolutely.

CARYN:
So people need to know how to do it, because people are talking about it.

COLLEEN:
Right. Right, exactly. And that’s, again, that’s what happens is what I talk to a lot of people who read those books, or seen films, and they all have the same reaction: they want to do it, but they still ask the same questions–they all ask the same questions. So that’s what this is, that’s the why, and this is the how.

CARYN:
You talk about a lot of interesting things in here, and I don’t remember exactly where it was, but it had to do with where we’ve come as a civilization in terms of food. And you know there’s a lot of people that say, you know, humans weren’t meant to eat this way, you know, we’re meant to– and I certainly don’t agree with that, and I think we’re really evolving. We’re eating all different kinds of ways, and cultures have eaten all different kinds of ways, and I think we’re really just learning now about what’s best for humans in terms of disease and longevity and just feeling good.

COLLEEN:
I think it’s true. I think in terms of real optimal nutrition I think we’re really learning more now than we ever did before. But I think we’ve known for a long time what food really are the most helpful for us, and it got away from us as we became more affluent as our society became more affluent. We had access to things we never had access to before, which isn’t necessarily a good thing. Cause bringing all of these things into our diet has actually caused a lot of problems. So no, of course we’re learning more today, which is really good. That’s where I am. Let’s look forward, not look backward, and I think the excuses that people make, those statements about “But this is how we’ve always eaten,” “But this is how we evolved, “But this is what we did 10,000 years ago.”

I don’t care what we did 10,000 years ago. That doesn’t interest me. What interests me is how well we can do today, and how well we can do in the future. And, you know, I just find, Caryn, what I love about the response I get to that, is that it empowers people. I think we’ve kept the bar too low for too long. You hear, even, you know I’ve heard even vegan educators that are vegan activists say, “Well, people aren’t going to do it all so we might as well just expect them to do only this much.” I’m like, what are you talking about? People can do a lot more than you expect of them and I think we need to raise the bar. And when you do raise the bar people rise immediately and it’s a beautiful thing. They realize they can do things they perhaps never thought they could themselves.

CARYN:
I’m going to say amen to that, I really agree on raising the bar for so many things. So often when– the times I’m in a doctor’s office and I’m talking about nutrition, and ask them why aren’t you telling me this, and they say, “Well, you know, we do say it, but most people, you know, they don’t want to get there… and,” But if the doctor– if everyone raises the bar and says, “This is what you need to do,” people will meet that challenge.

COLLEEN:
They will meet the challenge, and I’ll tell you, they’re looking for it. They want it, they want the truth. People want to know what they can do to be the most– the healthiest they can be. They want to be the best people they can be. They want to be the most compassionate, and we’re really selling them short, and we’re not doing them any favors by just saying, “Oh, well, you’re not gonna– you’re not gonna do it so I’m just gonna give you the lowest amount of information, you know, the least amount of information, so that you can make the least number of changes so that you’re not uncomfortable”? I mean, that’s just so, that’s just underestimating them so much.

CARYN:
Well, yeah, part of it is when people are told how important good nutrition is, they don’t believe it. I know some people that just say [unclear] information, certainly for me, over and over, but they’re still kind of on the fence because they don’t see enough, they don’t hear enough, there’s so so much garbage out there.

COLLEEN:
It’s true, and if you notice– if you find the book on the– in the chapters on nutrition. You know, one of the things I really emphasize is that this is not that complicated and you don’t have to be, you know, a nutritionist, or a registered dietician or a doctor to understand this stuff. Or a chemist. It’s pretty basic stuff. And so the approach I take is don’t even listen to me. You don’t even have to believe me, but let’s look at common sense. The common sense is that calcium is a mineral found in the ground, and the reason cow’s milk has calcium in it is because the cow eats grass. You know, the omega 3 fatty acid that we find in fish is because the fish are eating the phytoplankton, they’re eating the algae, they’re eating the plant. So my whole point is that I get to be at the place of– the nutrients we need are plant-based, period.

You don’t have to believe me, but just start thinking about it. What we’re doing right now is going through the animal to get to the plants that the animals are eating themselves to get the nutrients we’re trying to get that originated in the plant. So when you touch it that way, people go, “I never thought about that before,” or “I never thought of that” and that’s the kind of thing that I hope to do, is just, you know, kind of shift paradigm for people so that they don’t have to think, like, “Yeah, but how many grams, and how many milligrams, and how many– you don’t have to measure away. You just have to understand the basic idea, that the nutrients are in the plants, and when we base our diet on plants we’re getting the most nutrients.

CARYN:
It’s not complicated. It’s easy and it’s delicious.

COLLEEN:
Yes.

CARYN:
Another thing I like in the book, I use this from time to time, or I’ll ask people, “You know, you drink cow’s milk?” How would you like a cold glass of dog’s milk?” And, uh, you have a great chapter on this, and, uh, you’ve added to it something that I didn’t think of, and that is that the animal that we’ve used for milk are the ones that don’t run away or don’t fight with us.

COLLEEN:
Yeah. And I make that point because I want people to understand how arbitrary the decision is. For us to consume– the ones who are consuming the milk of the animal– the milk that we’re consuming– the cow’s milk, you know, the goat’s milk, and in different parts of the world, they do consume buffalo’s milk, and, you know, yak’s milk and camel’s milk. And when you look at what all these animals share is that they’re herd animals and they’re easy to control and easy to keep together. So it’s the characteristic of the animal, not the characteristic of the milk, that makes– that have made us drink their milk for so long. If we could have controlled hyenas, if we could have controlled lions, we would have. It had nothing to do with the milk itself, it had everything to do with the animals that, you know, we could control.

CARYN:
Right. That’s pretty brilliant.

COLLEEN:
Thank you. [laughs] That’s– That’s– Again, the idea is that’s how arbitrary this is. And we don’t even drink our own human milk into adulthood. The animal whose milk we’re drinking, they’re not even drinking their own species’ milk in adulthood. It doesn’t make any sense. We’ve just all been, you know, we’ve all had the same marketing material from, you know, when we were so young that this was just embedded in our brains, but when you just phrase it a certain way it’s pretty amazing to watch people’s lapels go off when you say something like that and they go, “Oh my God, I’ve never thought about that before.”

CARYN:
One of the reasons why I thought it was important to read this book in its entirety before going off and doing the 30 days is what happens when you have to go out and talk to people about what you’re doing and the responses that you get, because a lot of people get intimidated, a lot of people get asked a lot of questions… you address a lot of them in this book.

COLLEEN:
So much pressure. Yeah, I mean, it’s– I talk about the social affects a lot because I think that’s very, very important, not only for us to be able to speak our truth and stand up for what we believe in and be able to feel confident and unapologetic about something that’s so powerful and so positive. But also because, you know, I do think we have a responsibility to be able to plant seeds when we’re talking to other people, and again, I think in the past, too long, vegetarians and vegans have felt intimidated doing this because they thought they were imposing their beliefs on someone when really it’s a done– in the right way it’s about sharing the truth, and that’s not something we have to apologize for and frankly it’s not something we can afford not to do. So I talk a lot about the social aspects and being able to answer those questions and feel really confident doing it.

CARYN:
Well, a lot of people having a real hard time with it. I know that there are some of us who don’t care what people think and can be really aggressive and just demand, and be upfront. But many people are not, and they need answers, they need scripted responses for the questions. And as you know, most of the questions, all of the questions we’ve heard before. So–

COLLEEN:
We’ve heard before, exactly. And I think what happens is, people who heard them, I think what happens is that we forget what we once were. I think we forget that we probably asked those questions to, and when we forget, that means when someone comes to us with these questions, “Oh my God I’ve had that same answer– same question– protein again, I’m so sick of it,” but you know, it’s the first time that person may be asking that question–

CARYN:
–thinking about it. Yeah.

COLLEEN:
Wait. And so you have to treat every person and every question as unique because it is. Because that’s the first time you’re actually having that conversation with that person. And the [unclear] is unique experience that we have to just kind of get out of our own way and really do a service to the truth by answering those questions even if we’ve been asked them a thousand times.

CARYN:
Where’s a unique place in our culture right now where we have a number of different problems in resecting our nutrition. One is, especially since World War II, when all these industrialized chemical manufacturing came into place we’re creating things and putting them in boxes and feeding them to people and calling them to food [laughs] and they’re not really food. Why are junk food, a lot of highly processed food, and we’re seeing this taking a toll on health. And the other part os that is as the population grows–we just reached seven billion recently, congratulations–if that we’re confining animals into this sopho– horrific spaces in order to grow more of them to see people there’s– two things are happening at the same time and they’re both not healthy.

COLLEEN:
Right.

CARYN:
And the– have a lot of bad impact on us, and you know, so when people– getting back to that subject where people talk about eating the way we’re supposed to eat or nature intended, I mean, we’re so far away from that.

COLLEEN:
For sure.

CARYN:
Not even talking about being vegetarian.

COLLEEN:
For sure. We are. Absolutely. And that’s what’s so lovely about being able to, you know, espouse this. We’re talking about whole food, we’re talking about, you know, whole grain, and vegetables and fruits, and nuts, and mushrooms, and beans, and herbs, and spices. These are not unfamiliar food, these are whole food. And it’s good food, it is nature’s food, and that’s, you know, we can get back to those kinds of basics, it’s really– its the best thing for everybody.

CARYN:
I know there’s a lot of people that listen to the show that are not vegan and are transitioning and having the classic struggles. So, one of the things is that people don’t even realize how many foods they eat that are vegan. It’s not the strange thing: vegan food. Oh, you’re serving vegan food. So what are some of the simple meals that people make that can easily be vegan?

COLLEEN:
Yeah, I talk about that too, I love that. Cause I, you know, if you’ve had an apple, you’ve had vegan food, we just don’t call it vegan. We don’t say, “Can I have a vegan apple?” or just have a vegan banana or– this is food, it’s just–

CARYN:
That’s actually given me a scary food that maybe genetically modified apples will soon have animal genes in them. Who knows what’s going on?

COLLEEN:

Let’s not go there. [laughs] Let’s just– by nature, apple is vegan, by nature, you know, banana is vegan. Yeah, I mean, that’s exactly what I do, Caryn, as well, is demystify it–it’s not a separate food group. You know, look in your cupboard, that’s one of the first things we do in the early part of the book. It’s just let’s look at the pantry and even before you go to the grocery store I suspect that you’re gonna have some things in your cupboard, in your refrigerator, in the freezer that are already vegan that you can prepare before you. Get to the grocery store and start buying some new things. I mean, there’ll be obvious things, like pasta, and like pasta sauce, some of which have chicken sauce, it’s true, but, you know, most are vegan.

As you’re getting to the most whole version of that tomato sauce, even if you buy it commercially, you’re getting to the most vegan as well, because it’s just, you know, tomatoes and citric acid as a preservative, and some garlic, and, you know, onion, et cetera. I mean, you’re getting pretty basic things. You’re not looking for the corn syrup and obviously the chicken stock. But you know for the most part, it’s vegan.

And then, you know, when you’re doing what I often encourage people to get greens as much as possible so I serve chard or kale, or even the pasta sauce that I’m making. Just for pasta. But it could be just basic things like, you know, some canned beans. Open them up and drain them, and then wrap them up in a tortilla, and put some guacamole on, and put some salsa on, some onion, and tomatoes, you know again, all the things that you’re already eating. It could be as simple as a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. I mean, it’s amazing that I, you know, I’m sure you hear this too: people say, “Oh, peanut butter? Is peanut butter vegan?”

CARYN:
Uh-huh.

COLLEEN:
Peanut butter is peanuts. It’s ground. I mean that’s what they’re supposed to be.

CARYN:
Okay, I have a thing about peanuts, because our standard, generic–well, not generic–but the big brand of peanut butter do not just have peanuts. Peanut butter should just be peanuts. Some people have a little salt, but it should be just peanuts. It shouldn’t be hydrogenated oil and sugar and twenty-five other things in your peanut butter.

COLLEEN:
Amen

CARYN:
I have a bug about that.

COLLEEN:
Oh, I do too. I do the same feel– I do the same thing because peanut is ground–peanut butter is ground peanuts, that’s all it is. And I remember, though, I remember transitioning. I grew up on Jiffy and Skippy and… Biffy, whatever it was

CARYN:
And Jiff. Choosy mothers choose Jiff.

COLLEEN:
Right, exactly, I mean I remember that. And I know friends, you know, who eat a pretty healthful vegan diet still– or are still used to that sugary, kind of creamy peanut butter, and I just can’t take it. But I’ll save it for– to make our point here. That’s really a good example of how your palate changes. So when you’re going from a processed food, animal-based product diet to a whole-food, plant-based diet, your palate really changes, and that’s what’s really exciting after 30 days. You’ll discover that even after 30 days. It doesn’t take very long. So the things you think you can never live without now, I promise you, you stop craving because you get all that fat and salt out of your palate, out of your diet, and you start actually craving things that you would never thought you would crave. I never thought I’d crave kale every day. I didn’t grow up eating kale. Right? I mean, that’s not what I imagined, and that’s what happened. And my diet continues to improve. It’s very exciting, it’s a journey, there’s still more to do. But you really have to give yourself time to experience the benefits of getting all the animal product of your diet.

CARYN:
Eggs. Let’s just talk about eggs for a minute. Now I like that you mention in here that eggs are in some recipes and they’re totally useless.

COLLEEN:
Yeah, yes. We mentioned World War II, and that’s a perfect example… you know, before then people were baking eggs– baking cakes without eggs. it was kind of part of the–

CARYN:
Normal.

COLLEEN:
Exactly. And especially during the war when animal products were a luxury item, and really they still are–if we didn’t subsidize them people wouldn’t be able to afford to consume as many animal products as they do–but so people were definitely baking eggs during the war and during the depression, and then after World War II when we had more money than we knew what to do with we just started putting animal product really in everything–commercial products–because we could. You know, because we could afford it, and it was a symbol of affluence. And so it kind of stuck, and so then people got into our cultural consciousness that you can’t live without eggs.

CARYN:
[laughs]

COLLEEN:
That’s again, I try to demystify it and say, “Let’s take a look at this. What do you really need to bake?” Well, you need fat, you need moisture, you need leavening. You don’t need animal products. They serve those roles but plant-based food also serves those roles. So obviously, you know, baking soda and baking powder does that of the leaveners– I mean, you get your richness, I mean, you know, you get your richness from oil–plant-based oil–but when you’re baking a cake, and if I’m baking a cake for special occasions I am gonna do a nice, you know, fluffy cake with oil and–

CARYN:
Uh-huh

COLLEEN:
It’s a rich desert–

CARYN:
It’s a treat.

COLLEEN:
It’s a treat. And then you’re getting the moisture from the oil–could be a plant-based milk, could be water–whatever you’re adding to that recipe. So you absolutely don’t need eggs, they’re totally purposeless in many cases and so even when people are experimenting, baking without eggs, just try removing them. They’re not the one providing the leavener, they’re providing fat.

CARYN:
Uh-huh. Amen. And then the other thing is of course is cheese. You have a great recipe in here for creamy macaroni-and-cheese, one of the old time favorite comfort food and kids love macaroni and cheese, and this is one that’s… well everyone would like.

COLLEEN:
It’s so good. And I have to credit Ann Gentry, it’s from her Real Food Daily Cookbook originally, I modify it a slight amount. But it’s just so delicious–it’s based on cashews, with cashews, and misos–you’ve got that really wonderful tangy flavor, and, you know, there’s a whole chapter of, you know, called “Life after–” “There Is Life after Cheese,” it’s called, and… And I talk about, you know, what it says for us physically. Cause there’s a certain mouth feel, there’s a certain tanginess, there’s a certain salt, there’s an amount of fat–that’s what cheese does for us, dairy-based cheese. It’s not the cow’s milk. That’s now what we’re so excited about, it’s the fat and the salt.

And so we can, again, achieve that, creamy mouth feel–or what you’re talking about with this comfort food, macaroni and cheese–we can achieve that with plants. But I also spend a fair amount of time, as you know, in that chapter talking about just the emotional response we have to food. Because a lot of it is attachment to memory that we had, just attached to having grown up that way, and when we left it was some of those things. I think our transition becomes a lot easier because we’re not so attached to what that thing symbolizes. We can celebrate the memory without having the dairy-based cheese. But it’s the memory that means more to us than the cheddar cheese, really.

CARYN:
Right. Well, change is… I think it’s what humanity is all about. We are continually changing, continually evolving, and I really have hope for, as a species, to really become something truly incredible. But we’re really in a big transition right now. And we. you know, we’re focusing our time and our money on so many things that are a waste in my mind. You know, I think if people were eating healthy food and eating a healthy diet we wouldn’t have the chronic diseases that we have today: heart disease, diabetes, many cancers, autoimmune diseases, etc. And all those research scholars that go, “To finding cures for these things that we know how to prevent could really be used for so much more.”

COLLEEN:
Yeah. Amen. [laughs]

CARYN:
So I know I hope for that.

COLLEEN:
I hope for that, too.

CARYN:
So. What are some of– Are there like Colleen Patrick-Goudreau’s favorite recipes–?

COLLEEN:
Sure.

CARYN:
–that people tell you, “Oh my God, this is my most favorite recipe”?

COLLEEN:
Yeah, there are. Some of them are in the book there. In fact, a lot of them are in the book. So one of them is the Garlic Green Soup. So again, I was talking about kale, and I’m sure your cooking skills are sophisticated enough to try that recipe. Well, I find exciting are those people who, you know, never had kelp before. And they make that recipe and they cannot believe it. They just cannot believe how tasty it is, how comforting, how healing it is. So the Garlic Green Soup is definitely an absolute favorite of many, many people. And there’s even a video demonstration of it on my website. I’m Colleen Patrick-Goudreau, and if people can’t spell that, it’s CompassionateCook.com. Cause I know it’s an annoying–

CARYN:
Annoying.

COLLEEN:
–hyphenated name. But also No Queso Quesadillas. Those are so fabulous people love those, they serve them to their kids, they make the as a snack, make them as a party appetizer or dinner. And that’s just quesadillas, which are made of tortillas: corn, or wheat; and hummus. And you can fill them with whatever you want. When you warm these tortillas on the stove the hummus becomes totally different

CARYN:
Warm, and gooey, and yummy.

COLLEEN:
Exactly. So those are the two that stand out.

CARYN:
Yeah, that’s great. Okay, well, guess what? We’ve come to the end and I’m starving. So I’m [laughs] I’m getting some yummy vegan food. Thanks, Colleen, thanks for writing this book: The 30-Day Vegan Challenge. And again, you’re– you’ve got a lot of websites, but the easiest one to remember is…

COLLEEN:
CompassionateCook.com.

CARYN:
CompassionateCook.com. Thank you.

COLLEEN:
Thank you, Caryn. Take care.

CARYN:
You too. Bye bye.

I’m Caryn Hartglass. You’ve been listening to It’s All about Food, and please check out ResponsibleEatingandLiving.com, and if you’re on Facebook please like us: Responsible Eating and Living. Okay, thank you very much for joining me and next week we have a very fond hour with Dr. Michael Gregor. So join us. And have a delicious week.

Transcribed by Monika Ayu, May 24, 2013;

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