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.

TRANSCRIPTION:

Hello, I’m Caryn Hartglass and you’re listening to It’s All About Food. Thank you so much for joining me today and for the last three years that I‘ve been doing this show. I’ve realized recently that I started doing this show—It’s All About Food—back on March 25, 2009; that makes this week my third year anniversary. There have been 145 shows of It’s All About Food since we started. I have spoken with 155 unique guests—there were a few that I’ve brought back several times; but out of the 168 interviews, 155 of them were unique guests. Wow, it has been an incredible journey and experience. I thought I would take the opportunity today to go over some of the people that I’ve spoken within the last three years: what I’ve learned from some of them, and what some of the highlights were. I certainly would love to hear from you sometime about what you’ve enjoyed about this show and maybe some of the interviews that you’ve heard that made a difference in your life. You can contact me at Info@realmeals.org.

The first thing I want to talk about is the intro to this show. I have been playing the intro at the beginning of the show ever since we’ve got started and I have to thank my brother, Barry Hartglass, for that. You can find him at BarryHartglass.com: he is a composer, musician, and a really nice vegan guy and it’s nice to listen to that tune every week. I guess I have been listening to it over a hundred and forty times (Humming). Anyway, so many great things have gone on during this show. I’ve met a lot of “wonderful people” and I put that in quotation marks because some of these people I feel I know really well now I have never seen them in person; but that is the beauty of the internet. I have always been a fan of radio. I think there was a time maybe radio would disappear as we became more high-tech and video and all kinds of things were growing. Now with the Internet, Radio is really exploding,  and what I love about it is  you have the opportunity either to really lie back and focus only on one thing, which is listening, or you can multi-task and do a number of other things and also listen.  I am not a big television watcher or video watcher, but I love listening, and I’m really glad to be a part of this whole progressive radio network experience. Okay, I am looking at this long list of different people that I spoke with and tagged a number of people that I think are worth mentioning: I don’t know if I can spend a minute on each of them (that is only 60), and when there is a 145 I would run out of time. I tried to highlight select ones. So let’s see how far we get.

So one of the first people I spoke with on It’s All About Food was Pamela Rice. Actually she was my first guest. She is the author of 101 Reasons Why I’m A Vegetarian.  She is one of these early activists that concisely put together a lot of different reasons—101 of them—and this came out in the days when we didn’t have access to the internet. One of the amazing things about the health movement is that is it really exploding now that we have the internet and that so many people are accessing it and looking for information; but, before we had internet there were people out there putting pieces of information together and that created a base. It created a ground of information that people could build upon and now we are starting to see all of this exponential growth which is really exciting. So Pamela Rice said in the beginning that she was influenced by John Robbins, author of Diet for a New America, and I will have to go back and listen to that interview to make sure; but one of the great things she has done is taken that concept of the veggie pride parade that was done early in the decade in London, and she does it in New York City. We have one coming in May and my nonprofit, Responsible Eating and Living, will be there. It’s a great event in New York City; you can hear speakers and find out what is new and exciting in the plant world. So I am really grateful to her.

Another great activist is Richard Schwartz and he puts out a lot of information about the reasons to be vegetarian from a Jewish perceptive. It is really interesting when you get religion into the mix. Personally I am not a religious person. I was raised in a Jewish environment but I just choose to be vegan. That is my politics that is my religion. But Richard Schwartz has put together some books and a website—I think it is Jewishveg.org—with lots of very compelling information from literature, like the Bible, that people of the Jewish faith would respect and find interesting enough to pay attention to. But there is lots of interesting stuff in the religious realm that points to eating a plant based diet; it is all about thou shall not kill.  What does that mean? Does that just mean white men? All people? Does that mean animals? I really like to think about those things that people repeat over and over in their prayers and in their thoughts. He’s got a lot of great information from that perspective.  Will Tuttle, Are you familiar with Will Tuttle? A very gentle, peaceful, compassionate, how many other nice words can I come up with for him? He is the author of the World Peace Diet. I’ve spoken with him twice on this show It’s All About Food. He and his wife travel around the country speaking and promoting all the concepts in the World Peace Diet. Basically, he like many others believe the way we treat each other and the way we treat other cities, other towns, other countries—the way we deal with everything in this world—is related to what we eat. When we open ourselves up to considering plants as food and animals not as food, we open the possibilities to creating a more compassionate world and a world of peace. His book is definitely one of the tops on my list; a lovely, lovely, book. I tend to be someone who does too many things—maybe a Jane of all trades—and I’m involved in one thing here and one thing there, trying to do different things. That’s the way it’s always been and not planning on changing it at this moment. Will Tuttle is focused on telling his story about the World Peace Diet. He and his wife travel around, they live simply, and he speaks wherever he can. He is also a musician—he sings and plays the piano—but his focus is on spreading this message. He lives very simply and it’s very admirable to see someone so intent on this message and on getting the message out this way.

Carol Adams is another wonderful activist and author. She has written a number of different books. Sexual Politics of Meat is probably the most popular. She is an eco-feminism which ties together all different kinds of interesting concepts in the world that have to do with how we eat and how we treat each other. One of the things that I remembered about in her book is seeing the advertising that currently goes on in the world where we go back and forth between promoting animals and women in a very similar way. I never look at advertising anymore ever the same since I read her books. You often see pieces of meat looking like a voluptuous women in different ways and also women looking like animals. It just goes back and forth reinforcing the exploitation of both. And her book is really brilliant. Carol Adams, her book, Sexual Politics of Meat.

Then we talked to Mark Rifkin, who is another wonderful person, and he became a registered dietitian. He is super knowledgeable about food and I have had him on a few times and I should probably have him back since I haven’t talked to him in a while.  Then of course, Brendan Brazier. He was on in June, 2009, and he has really done a lot in that time. He is the author of the Thrive Diet. He has had a number of books and revisions on the Thrive Diet and he’s also, I believe, the creator of the Vega product which is a plant based meal powder you can put in smoothies; it’s useful for a lot of different applications. I am sure a lot of athletes use it, especially when they look at Brendan Brazier and see what an amazing athlete he has been and the accomplishments that he has done. I personally used it when I was going through cancer treatment back in 2006 and 2007 as a way to make sure I got all the nutrients. It was light and easy on my stomach while going through chemotherapy and I was really happy to have that product. Brendan Brazier: a really beautiful example. Of course, I want people to embrace the plant based diet. I would love to see this peaceful planet where we don’t exploit animals and factory farms. I would love to see no one dying of heart disease and diabetes and significantly reduce the risk of cancer so we can really focus on cures for the ones we don’t know the reason why they are caused. So many diseases we do know why they’re caused and yet, we continue to dump all kinds of funding into finding cures for these things that can be prevented. When there are people out there like Brendan Brazier, who is a model example of someone that looks really great, glows, physically fit, and is a lovely human being. Those are my favorite representatives of people spreading the message about a plant based diet. Gosh there are so many people.

Stephane Groleau and Meghan Kelly up in Canada. They are organic farmers and what is special about them is what they are doing with organic farming. They are into what is called veganics, and you may or may not have thought about it, but farming requires the care and nurturing of soil. There are a lot of methods to go about nurturing soil, some good ways and some not so good ways.  The industrial agriculture unfortunately really sucks the life literally out of the soil that food is grown in, to the point where some of that soil may not be able to grow food. What we end up doing is covering all of those fields with a lot of petrochemical based fertilizers. It is a drain on the resources of petrochemicals and it is also not the ideal for the soil and the plants; the food that’s grown in that soil is impacted negatively; and the nutritional value is not good, etc. And we know with organic farming there are more natural nurturing ways to take care of the soil that we need so desperately to grow our food: that includes letting a field rest for a season; growing different plants in a particular field, so that some plants will take out certain nutrients and put in other nutrients back and vice versa. So there are complementary different plants can be grown in the same area keeping the soil fertile and then there are natural fertilizers. Some organic farmers will use fertilizers from animals, bones, char bone, and animal manure of course. There are a number of people, and it’s growing, where they do farming without manure; it’s called veganics: they don’t use animal products on the soil.  What I learned from this particular program is that there are people that developed this in Europe, and they developed this because they were not around animals; they did not have access to animal manure. They learned to feed the soil without it. Now there are people coming at it from a another angle because they don’t want to use animal products for a variety of reasons, certainly animals that come from factory farms and are fed with industrial and conventional foods: foods that are filled with antibiotics, pesticides, and herbicides. Their manure is going to be, like their flesh, concentrated with the toxic chemicals that you don’t want to put in your body. So if you are using manure that contains a lot of these contaminates it’s going to get into the food then you can eat it.  There are people are doing things veganically using a variety of different compost materials from plant sources to nourish the soil. That is what that show is about, back in July, 2009, and it was a really interesting program.

Then there was Jo Stepaniak; that was really delightful. She’s one of those people who put out a number of different cookbooks. I haven’t seen a new one from her recently but I think one of them has really been the base for a lot of people. Actually, I think there were two of them: one was about sauces; and I’m trying to think if I am confusing two of her books or if they are the same…just some basic technique. She had a whole recipe book full of how to make dips and sauces. I think it was helping move the bar in terms of how we all thought about flavoring plant food using vinegars and silken tofu in a variety of difference flavors to make flavorful sauces and toppings. A plate of steamed vegetables is great and I love it. I love it especially if the vegetables are organic and fresh, but sometimes it’s nice to have a dip or a sauce and there are so many different ones. I think Jo Stepaniak was really essential with her book getting us on the path of easy to make and delicious sauces and dips.

Victoria Moran has a new book coming out, Main Street Vegan; another lovely, lovely, person just trying to make this world a better place. She has written numerous books, Love-Powered Diet, and often talks about what’s in us internally. Many people struggle with weight and she along with numerous other people talk about how it’s not just food: it’s connecting the dots; it’s realizing what we need to fill the hole, the void  that is inside of us, and she’s written extensively about it, and we talked about it on my August, 19th 2009, show.  That’s something many people struggle with over and over.

Another one was Ruby Roth who wrote a book for children and I was really curious to talk to her. The book is called Why We Don’t Eat Animals. It’s a little children’s book, and the way she described it, it is targeted for young children as old as 6 and maybe older. It’s a picture book, beautifully illustrated, and it talks about factory farming, which is a taboo subject even with parents with young children. It’s taboo even with parents who are vegetarian and vegan who don’t want to talk to their children about animal slaughter. It’s a very unpleasant subject and many will say, “Okay, if you don’t want to tell you children the truth you don’t want to tell your children where their food comes from because it is horrible. Then, why do you continue to eat meat and dairy products?” It is a very dark story with what we do in factory farms. Kids love stories about animals, and we have these continued myths of stories about Dick and Jane and Spot going on the farm and seeing the cows and chickens roaming freely and romping happily; that is fiction, for the most part, because most animals grown on factory farms, crammed, never seen the light of day, treated horribly, separated from their babies at births. It is miserable, and we don’t want to tell our children that story because we know inside it is a horrible thing. Many people have been convinced or have been convincing themselves for a long time it is okay, so we don’t want to share that story with our children. So Ruby Roth came up with a book that shares the story with children in a way that is appropriate, age appropriate, for them, in order to introduce and explain to children why some children don’t eat meat. I enjoyed that book and talking to her.

Okay moving right along. So many great people. I spoke with Joseph Connelly, December of 2009, and he’s done some amazing things. He is the editor and the founder of VegNews Magazine. I’m sure that part of it is the right place at the right time. We needed a Vegan magazine to provide positive stories as well as a vehicle for advertising vegan products. All of this kind of came together at the same time and there has been an explosion of vegan food products. I know things used to come a lot from California and there’s certainly a lot of products are not just coming from California, but Chicago and Brooklyn are also two places where entrepreneurs are specifically making vegan products that’s really exploding. They need a vehicle, they need a place to advertise their products to a targeted community of people that are interested and VegNews Magazine filled that need very well. There are other places that are doing it also, but this is a well focus targeted community. I have to happily say that my organization, Responsible Eating and Living, was featured in VegNews in their 2011 Nov/Dec “Best Of” issue. One of the fun things they do is have competitions for the “best of” for a variety vegan products/cookbooks/cookies/personal items/podcasts/nonprofits. They have all kinds of competitions and it is a fun issue and we were featured in their “10 Nonprofits You Need To Know.” So I have to thank Joe for that. My brother was also featured in there a couple of times. They have a very popular wedding issue where they show couples having complete vegan weddings, they show the pictures and the menu; it is a lovely thing. So my brother had a vegan wedding, and he was in one of their issues, 7 or 8 years ago. What I really love about this show is that I get to talk to so many people doing really great things and it’s so easy to get bogged down and think about all the things bad in the world. It’s so easy, just turn on CNN and listen and yet at the same time, there are more wonderful things that are happening. I think if we heard more about the wonderful things and focused more on the wonderful things I think more people would get their heads out of the sand and start doing more good. Certainly, I know for myself, talking to some of these people even on some days that I’ve been tired, not really feeling like I wanted to do anything, I’ve always been energized and inspired to hear the great work of so many others. So many of these people do it as a volunteer, they do it without any thought without any financial compensation, because they can’t see doing anything else. They feel a need to share information, a story to be a part of the conversation about how to make this world a better place. So inspiring.

Let’s see, I’m moving down my list of 168 different interviews. (laugh) I spoke with Alexander Jamison and you may remember her in the movie, Super Size Me, she was the one that brought her partner back to health after he ate McDonalds every day, 3 days a week for 30 days. She’s a delightful person and has put together a few books on healthy eating; she’s very sensible. I like to recommend her books for people that are looking for a book on how to move to a plant based diet. These books are very friendly, easy, and filled with common sense. She does coaching in NY for those people who need more one on one type of information.  I had her on two shows, maybe I should have her back; another great activist.

Then I spoke to Martin Rowe, you may not know about him because he is often behind the scenes. He is a publisher and created Lantern Books. Lantern Books for so many has been a great opportunity for those looking to get their books published. They publish Non-Fiction and many vegetarian and vegan activists have published through Lantern and have been able to get their books on paper and in press, which have enabled them to have a better platform for their message. So many great books come out of Lantern books and I’ve interviewed a lot of different authors from Lantern. Everyone has a part to play…do you know what your part is?

It has been such an amazing experience. For me, there have been things that I’ve wanted to do throughout my life and hosting a radio show wasn’t something I ever thought about. I became an activist over time by first becoming vegetarian at 15 because I did not want to eat animals. A lot of us discover whether we want to or not and we have to defend ourselves. People always ask, “Why do we do what we do?” Especially, when we sit down at the table for something to eat, because if we’re not eating what everyone else is, the questions fly, and the stares start. I think it’s improving in some locations where there is a bigger movement towards healthier, more compassionate eating. Unfortunately, there are pockets where people are not as aware of what’s going on which blows me away, still, there are people that are clueless about healthy eating and what is going on with factory farms. I just started learning as a teenager because one, people were telling me what I was doing wasn’t healthy; and two, people were very antagonistic towards me. I realize now that it was in some ways defensive because a lot of us have these compassionate feelings and don’t really want to kill. When we learn that we don’t need to kill other living beings, animals in order to live healthy and thrive. Gosh, it lifts a whole spiritual load off of your shoulders.

Let’s take a quick break and we will be right back.

BREAK

Hi, I’m back. I’m Caryn Hartglass, and you’re listening to It’s All About Food. I have just been taking a little mate break: have you ever had Yerba mate? I just finished the last tea bag from a box that I brought back from Buenos Aires when I was there, not this summer, but last. I guess 2010. I brought a big box back with me of some Yerba mate, which I drank a lot of in Buenos Aires. You can get it here of course; it’s popular especially in health food stores. I usually sprinkle a little stevia in it; I do that because of the things that I learned when I spoke with Jim May back in September 2010. He’s the founder of Sweet Leaf Stevia and I learned so much from that show. Number one: I learned that it’s “stevia” and not “steeevia.” That could be because the word comes from one of these South American, Central American, locations where they say “steeevia.” But when we brought it over to this country we called it “stevia.” Well, Jim May let me know that it was called “stevia” and so that’s what I call it, stevia. He tells a very compelling, very sad story—with a somewhat happy ending—about the decades that he worked trying to get stevia approved in this country as a food and sweetener; plus, all the politics behind taking so long to get this in our hands as a sugar free and reasonably healthy alternative to sugar. Now, you can get it. There are also some major corporations that have gotten into the scene of using stevia as a sweetener. I prefer using Sweet Leaf Stevia because Jim told me on the show about how they manufacture it. They basically do some very simple processing to get their stevia and they get it from sources in Uruguay. I think that they have a lot of confidence in how they’re grown, whereas the corporations that sell products with stevia in it are not completely stevia and they contain a lot of manufactured synthetic ingredients; not the same product. So, I enjoy using Sweet Leaf Stevia. I don’t use it a lot, I don’t use it when I’m cooking sweets, and I have no problem using the vegan version of sugar: evaporated cane juice or agave, or maple syrup. I just don’t need a lot of sweetener in my daily life; it’s for treats. I do like to use the stevia with the Yerba mate just because they seem to go well together, so I’m enjoying that right now. Something that Jim May told me about on that show: he discussed caffeine, theine, and mateine, and I have since kind of learned that what he was telling me wasn’t entirely correct because there have been discussions that mateine from mate and theine from tea and caffeine from coffee are different and have different effects; where theine and mateine may not have the same negative effects as caffeine. I have since read that they are all just different names for the same thing. But, I think what’s different is that it’s not the caffeine and coffee that’s so problematic, it’s all the other organic chemicals and carcinogens that you find in coffee, whereas theine and mateine have a lot of health promoting elements, like antioxidants and things that are good for us. I like to drink tea: black, green, and mate; those are my preferred hot beverages. Anyway, Jim May. That was a great, great interview back in 2010.

Of course, I spoke to John Robbins back in June of 2010, back when his newest book, The New Good Life, came out and so many of the people that I’ve spoken to on this show It’s All About Food were influenced by John Robbins and his groundbreaking bestseller, Diet for a New America, which came out in 1987. Gosh, it’s so hard to believe that it was so long ago. He came out with a number of other great books, Food Revolution, and I believe there’s supposed to be a revised book coming soon. He was one of the leaders that connected the dots between our food choices and the impact on health, the environment, and animals. So many people have been inspired and have gone so much further once they had that ground to hold them up. My nonprofit, Responsible Eating and Living, or website, responsibleeatingandliving.com—all one word. We’re going to be exhibiting, in the Washington Dulles, Washington D.C. area right near the Washington-Dulles airport: the Take Back Your Health Conference April 15 and 16, so if you’re in that area, we would love to see you, and John Robbins will be speaking there. It’s going to be very, very exciting. It’s an interesting conference. It’s not an entirely vegan conference. There are speakers that talk on nutrition I guess from a holistic and alternative point of view and so the vegan point of view is presented as well as some other points of view—I personally don’t agree with—but this is America and everybody has to have their say. So we’ll be there at the Take Back Your Health Conference with John Robbins. So many cookbook authors I’ve had, gosh, so many of them on this show and the thing that I do when I interview someone that has a book—either a nonfiction book or a how to book or a cookbook—I read them. I read them from cover to cover before I interview the Authors. This has really been an educational exercise for me because I can’t talk about something unless I know what I’m talking about. Reading a cookbook is something that I never did before I started this show. I pretty much thumbed my way through and found something that looked interesting or if I was looking for something in particular I might go into the index of the book and look for a recipe. I really enjoyed reading cookbooks and I have a whole different respect and feeling for the author when I’ve read their story. One of the cookbooks that I’ve enjoyed reading and ultimately using was with Sharon Valencik as a vegan. Her deserved cookbook called Sweet Utopia, and one of my favorite things in that book was the sesame cookie. Incredible. I’m a big fan of sesame butter, sesame tahini; the sesame cookie is such a winner. I have to confess that I took her recipe and I made it gluten free so I have a gluten free vegan sesame cookie recipe—of course it’s on the responsibleeatingandliving.com website, and it’s one of my very, very favorites.

It’s fun to get a treat out of all of this. Lots of other really wonderful cookbooks. Another cookbook that I really loved and I’m looking for the title of it…Mark Reinfeld, where is that book? Well, I love Asian food and when you go out and eat Asian food in a restaurant—I do from time to time—there are two things that someone like me who’s trying to eat as clean as possible. I get challenged with too much oil and too much salt or soy sauce, so I like to cook at home. I find that Asian cooking requires, it’s a little more challenging. I have the desire for Asian food in my blood but not the desire or knowledge of how to make it, so that’s where cookbooks come in handy for me…and what was the name of the cookbook? There was one by Chat Mingkwan and he has several books: one is called Asian Fusion, and the other one that I’m thinking of—scrolling along—oh well, I don’t see it. There are a number of authors whose books just blew me away and I wanted to talk about some of them because if you haven’t read their books, I highly highly highly highly recommend it.

David Kirby is the author of Animal Factory and this was a really great book. I got to meet him—I didn’t know this—but he’s from the NYC area. What’s interesting about this book is that this man is not a vegan. He chooses to eat—I think what he would call humanely—promoting the grass fed free range animal concept. But, the book is really excellent whether you’re just interested in factory farming, vegetarian, or not, he talks about what’s going on from a human perspective. Many times I’ve heard when I talk to people about being vegetarian or vegan: one of the responses is you care so much about animals but you don’t care about people. That’s so far from the truth because once you realize what’s going on in the world with factory farming and the production of animals for food, you realize that it’s certainly not good for the animals and it’s not good for humans, either. So working towards getting people on a plant based diet is better for animals but it’s also better for people and for the planet. Most of the people I know that are in this movement care about both people who are animals and all the other animals. This book, Animal Factory by David Kirby, is about different small communities where factory farms came in and the work that the communities did to try and prevent these businesses coming in; the lies that they were told by their local government and promoters of these businesses about how factory farms would improve their community; the things that the community would get from it; and, the jobs that it would create—all of these ended up being lies. There are a number of different really heartbreaking stories about people and their communities, and their farms. You read about the stench that comes out of these factory farms; you read about the contamination of the water from piles of lagoons, which contain manure and how they’re not maintained properly and how they get into the local water supply, either during snowstorms or rainstorms or because they’re just so full. People are going out of business as a result. The fish in local streams are being affected by dying and getting sick. It’s just a heart wrenching story and the focus was on the people and their communities, not even what was going on with the animals that were in these factories that were being manufactured for food. I think it was a very important book and it was great to meet David Kirby.

I spoke with Marion Nestle who has a new book out on calories. She’s known for her work with food politics and she is not a vegan as well, but she does talk about promoting healthy food. Her voice is very important in this movement. Another fun one was the interview with Joe Cross—he’s a filmmaker, and he created the film Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead: have you seen it? You can see it on Netflix if you’re a member. I think it’s one of the “watch now,” free, live streaming options. It was an interesting film where this Australian came up to the United States and decided he wanted to lose weight. He did it by juicing for sixty days and he talks about the people that he met. This one very obese man that he connected with—that he said he would help—this man was interesting and then the film continues with the story about the new man who goes through a similar kind of practice of juicing. It’s an interesting message about the importance of whole, plant based food and how it can help us maintain our weight—I’m a big proponent of juicing. I know I believed it really saved my life when I went through my cancer experience. I think there could be some mixed messages with this film and I think it’s important to clarify that juicing should not be used for weight loss per se. It should be used to increase the amount of nutrition that you’re getting, to boost your immune system; but it should be in addition to a healthy plant based diet, it shouldn’t be instead. It shouldn’t be as a quick fix so it will allow you to consume unhealthy food—I’m not sure that that message was clear in the film—but, I’m just going to say it here because it was important to me. A lot of great films are coming out and this is all part of everybody doing what they’re moved to do: to make this world a better place. Of course, Forks Over Knives is another one that’s gotten a lot of popularity, and I had T. Colin Campbell and Caldwell B. Esselstyn, the filmmaker, on one show back in April, 2011. T. Colin Campbell is the writer of The China Study and what I loved about this film with Dr. Esselstyn and Dr. Campbell is that both of these men have had great careers, and here they are. I believe they’re in their seventies now, both slim, silver haired and stunning; they just don’t stop. They keep promoting this message and I don’t know about Dr. Esselstyn, I know he’s got a pretty impressive career as a surgeon. Dr. T. Colin Campbell has been on a number of panels and worked at Cornell University for quite a long time. But he’s definitely had ups and downs with knowing such important information and not getting the response from your colleagues, or the government, or the people that you think should be sharing this information. Decade after decade after decade and not getting your due, and finally these guys are getting their dues—I’d love to see the book from this film, Forks Over Knives  by Gene Stone, who I’ve also had on It’s All About Food, that’s been on the NY Times bestseller list for a very long time. The other book that’s been on the NY Times bestseller list of course is Eat to Live by Dr. Joel Fuhrman. I talk about him a lot and I’ve had him on this show not too long ago. These are really great people who are doing really wonderful things.

I want to talk about something that I thought was really amusing. One of the things that I’ve been saying on this show, and many other times, is that we’re definitely seeing an exponential change in people’s attitudes towards healthy diets and the knowledge that people have with cookbooks and other books and products—it’s really great. Now on the NY Times they’re actually having a contest and it really shows you how the world is changing. It came out just a few days ago, March 20. It’s in The Ethicist column if you’re familiar with the NY Times. They’re having a calling all carnivores tell us why it’s ethical to eat meat, a contest and they’ve got some really interesting judges including: Jonathan Safran Foer, the author of Eating Animals; Peter Singer who wrote Animal Liberation and really decades ago got the log started in terms of how we treat animals; Michael Pollman, Mark Bittman: these are guys that are promoting healthy organic foods but they’re still eating animal products, so this interesting dialogue going on in a competition which you would have never seen before. We vegetarians have had to defend ourselves for so long and now there’s a kind of turning the table with a competition that’s saying, “Okay, meat eaters,”—well, they’re saying, “calling all carnivores” but they’re really omnivores—humans are not carnivores. They want to know why it’s ethical to eat meat and whatever the response is—I’m not sure how important the response is. I’m just glad the dialogue is out there and the world is definitely changing for good. So many different people, so many wonderful interviews. You can go to responsibleeatingandliving.com, go to the Real Radio tab, It’s All About Food, Real Interview, and you can listen to any of these which are archived last three years worth of programming.

Another couple of greats, people I really have great respect for, I spoke to Mia MacDonald, who has a nonprofit called Brighter Green. She’s going around the world talking to people and trying to make change in third world countries when it comes to environment and food. We’re just going to keep doing more and more and more because there are a lot of people doing great work and we’ve got to keep talking about it—I feel very privileged to have the opportunity to do this. I’ve got a book shelf that is overflowing with too many books; there are just too many to read from this. Well you’ve been listening to me, I’m Caryn Hartglass. This show is called It’s All About Food, where I get to talk about my favorite subject…food! Thanks for listening today, it’s kind of been a celebration of three years of healthy plant based food. Let me know what your favorite shows have been, I would love to hear from you: Thanks so much for listening and have a delicious week!

Transcribed by Donielle Zufelt 5/24/2014, Meichin, 3/16/2014, edited by Joe Wilson 6/24/2014

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