On Life As A Picky Foodie

Be A Tourist in Your Own City 

Dear Friends;

When you think about it, these days, there is really no need to leave the house.  Everything from toilet paper to carrots can be delivered, and between texts, emails, cellphones and landlines, it’s almost easier to lose track of someone than it is to keep in touch.

So why even bother?

Because there’s a world out there waiting to be explored, tasted, smelled, experienced.

We fall into routines: where we shop, where we drink, where we buy our favourite staples.  Sometimes even the people we hang out with are part of the routine – we don’t think about whether we like them or not, we see them because it’s what we’ve always done.

All too often, we get stuck simply because it’s what we’re used to.  Excitingly, it doesn’t take much to change that: a bus ride / car journey / bike trip / walk can inspire our minds, excite our senses and make us feel like we’re on an adventure.

Being someone who has moved around a lot has its drawbacks: the lack of roots can create anxiety at times.  However, on the plus side, you get to see new places and meet people you might never have encountered otherwise.

One of my favourite things to do when the weather starts brightening up is to become a tourist in my own city.  The parks, art exhibits, street fairs, new restaurants and, of course, the outdoor markets, make me feel like I’m in a whole new place.

Especially big cities have this wonderful ability to transport us.  Each neighbourhood has its unique character, and the difference between one street and the next can be like entering another world.

So why not explore a new neighbourhood, check out that gallery you’ve walked by a million times but never entered, take a ride to the other side of town?  It might open your eyes to new possibilities, or it might make you all the more grateful for what you have – regardless of the outcome, in my opinion, it’s a win-win. 

With love,
Gabriela

Ciara Byrne is one half of the MacQuarrie-Byrne Films documentary filmmaking team, a company dedicated to making documentaries that address important issues and help improve the quality of our world.  In addition, Ciara is a tireless self-explorer always on the lookout for ways to improve her self, her health and her life.  Ciara is one of those people who not only talks the talk, she walks the walk.  When I met her, she was working as a television executive at a large, independent company.  She has since discarded corporate life and instead has traveled the world in search of her own bliss and empowerment – a journey she chronicles in her delightful blog.  From talking to her, you would never know what an incredibly accomplished woman she is.  Instead, in her personal as well as her professional spheres, Ciara is constantly looking for ways to challenge herself and the world around her to do better, live better, feel better.  I, for one, am in awe. 
Below, you can read about one of her latest exciting undertakings: veganism.
With love,
Gabriela

Some couples break up over dinner – but what about breaking up because of dinner???  Well I’m not saying that I am about to break up with my boyfriend of 11 years because of what we ate for dinner the other night but well let me explain.  I became a vegan.  You know a person who doesn’t eat meat, fish, eggs and dairy products and really any kind of animal-derived products.  Why you might ask would I punish myself so?  Well it was an odd confluence of events, a sort of a flowing along in a river that opened into an ocean and suddenly there was no going back.  That sounds awfully dramatic but I don’t know how otherwise to explain what happened to me this past spring.  Here’s how things unfolded.  I am working on a film that is requiring a lot of energy from me at the moment.  And yet when I put my foot on the gas pedal there was more chugging than speed.  And so I thought to myself well maybe I can change the gas I’m putting in the engine and upgrade to premium gas.  So I did some research and figured out that eating mainly vegetables for a while should increase my energy.  But as I’m someone who likes to eat the whole cake and not just a slice, bad metaphor, but you get what I’m saying - I decided to do a 5 day green juice fast starting the first day of Spring of this year.  And so that was to mark the beginning of the New Me – from then on I intended not to drink coffee or eat sugar or refined foods, and cut out as much meat as possible.  So that was the Cunning Plan.  What happened was a little different. 

Well I did the juice fast with a few friends.  The goal was to drink 4 liters of green juice a day – that was it, no food, no coffees or teas etc..  I cleared the calendar – no meeting friends or doing any kind of activities apart from yoga as I was sure I’d be weak and faint.  Well quite the opposite.  I was so full of energy I frightened myself.  On the third day for example I edited the film for 8 hours and spring cleaned the entire house!  By the fifth day my eyes were shiny and I was ready for more.  But more what?  I couldn’t just live on bottles of green juices for the rest of my life. 

At the same time I’d been reading lots of books on food such as John Robbins’, The Food Revolution and Diet for a New America, Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma.  I watched the documentaries, Fast Food Nation, Food Inc and King Corn.  From these books and films I learned not just how unhealthy much of our food is but also the desperate cruel manner in which cows, chickens and pigs are treated.  Egg-laying hens are crammed into cages so small they are unable to open their wings and their mangled feet actually grow around the wire mesh floors.  The ends of their beaks are seared off their faces using a hot knife so they won’t peck other chickens.  Cattle are subject to third-degree branding burns and having their testicles and horns ripped out.  Pigs also suffer from branding and castration in addition to the mutilation of their ears, tails and teeth.  I was outraged.  I’ve never been an animal rights activist.  I’ve never even been interested in having a pet.  But throwing live chickens into wood chippers?  Squashing pigs to death with large steel smashers?  Suddenly the penny dropped for me.  The Food Industrial Complex doesn’t care about our health, they don’t care about how we treat animals – they only care about making money. 

Meanwhile, I am in the midst of researching a film on how between 50 and 100,000 animals went extinct last year.  In fact we’re in the sixth extinction phase in earth’s history.  Recently we filmed with Birute Galdikas, the scientist who has lived in the jungle in Borneo for 40 years trying to save the orangutan from extinction.  There are now approximately 50,000 orangutans left on the planet   Dr. Galdikas explained how over the past 30 years the rainforest of Borneo went from covering 90% of the island to just 20%.  The land had been cleared to make palm oil – an ingredient found in many of our foods.  She says she believes orangutans will be extinct in the wild within 5 to 10 years.  But it’s not just the orangutan that’s endangered.  There are only 1300 tigers left on the planet, 300 mountain gorillas even chimpanzees will probably be extinct in the wild within 20 years according to Jane Goodall.  The main reason why we are about to lose our closest relatives and other beautiful animals – habitat destruction – and it’s usually for our food – soybeans, palm oil, raising cattle etc...

During the month of March as I was processing all these things a new picture of the world began to emerge in my mind.  For the first time in my life I understood that the decisions we make about what we eat every single day don’t just affect us, our health – although that was my initial reason for embarking on this journey.  Every bite we put in our mouth determines whether more rainforest will be torn down, whether the mountain gorillas will go extinct, whether we continue to treat livestock cruelly.  By the end of March my decisions about food had shifted from being about my health to being a philosophical decision on what kind of world I want to live in and future generations to inherit.  So I decided to become a vegan.  It hasn’t been easy.  The food part is fine.  It’s the anti-social nature of such a strict diet that is tricky.  And most of all my relationship has been affected.  The look on my boyfriend’s face when I told him I wanted to follow a vegan diet – it was as if all the fun had been taken out of life in one poof… But we’ve reached a kind of compromise for now – he eats one vegan meal a week and I eat a meal he makes minus the meat and dairy…  So far so good.

Here are some of the highlights of a recent IPCC study about the impact of a meat-based diet versus a plant-based diet.  The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in a well documented scientific study reports:

• Of all raw materials and fossil fuels currently used in the U.S., more than one-third goes to raising animals for food.
• An area of rain forest the size of seven football fields is destroyed every minute to make room for grazing cattle, but each vegetarian saves one acre of trees every year.
• More than 260 million acres of U.S. forest have been cleared to create cropland to grow grain to feed farmed animals.
• The world’s cattle alone consume a quantity of food equal to the caloric needs of 8.7 billion people—more than the entire human population on Earth.
• Raising animals for food is grossly inefficient, because while animals eat large quantities of grain, they only produce small amounts of meat, dairy products, or eggs in return. This is why more than 70 percent of the grain and cereals that we grow in this country are fed to farmed animals. It takes up to 16 pounds of grain to produce just one pound of meat, and even fish on fish farms must be fed 5 pounds of wild-caught fish to produce one pound of farmed fish flesh.
• Eating animals causes 40% more global warming than all planes, cars, trucks and other forms of transport combined.   Put in other terms, eating one pound meat emits the same amount of greenhouse gasses as driving an SUV 40 miles.

Dear Friends;

We try hard to please the people we love.

Sometimes we try too hard, so hard, in fact, that we fail to take them into account.

And then they get mad.

When all we did was try hard to please them.

Sound familiar?

Often it is in the best of intentions that communication is lost. We want to please our loved ones and we try very hard to do so. But sometimes we try and try and it seems impossible to get them to feel that pleasure we wanted so much to achieve.

Because oftentimes when we're trying that hard, when we're so focused on pleasing the other, we forget the most important step in this process: listening.

Listening to what the other is saying, to what they need, to how they are letting us know what will make them truly happy.

And that much-needed but lost art of listening is what is so lacking in so much of our interaction.

It makes me wonder who we are trying to please: the other, or ourselves?

Do we really stop and listen to that person we love so much? Do we actually know what they would most like from us, or are we assuming without truly taking their wishes into account?

Next time you try to do something for someone and the reaction you get isn't as grateful as what you expected, consider asking the other person what it was that they needed, whether they felt you had listened to them, and how you might respect them in a way that they feel heard.

With love,
Gabriela

Felicia Desrosiers is a multi-tasking mama of two.  In addition, she is co-founder and director of wellness of Butterbeans, a school lunch delivery service that aims to educate and provide children with the most nutritious food possible.  As if that wasn’t enough, Felicia also offers nutrition and holistic health counseling to individual clients all over the world.  Everything she does, she does with grace and a fiercely positive attitude; I am proud to be able to call Felicia my mentor and my friend.

For great information about everything from local Brooklyn events to nutritional advice, check out the Butterbeans blog

With love,
Gabriela

Bottled Water blues

Today I took the pledge – to get OFF the Bottle – the plastic water bottle that is, and I urge you to do the same. I am ready with my stainless steel water bottles and a few hard plastic ones that I’ve had for years. I pledge to use these reusable bottles daily, instead of buying plastic water bottles at a store. I’ve got a filter that I love attached to the water that runs freely from my tap. Even without the filter, the EPA regularly checks and regulates our tap water, but not bottled water. Much of the bottled water we buy is simply bottled tap water.

Tapped is a new documentary that was born out of the discovery of something called “the plastic stew,” a floating island of plastic in the Pacific ocean roughly twice the size of Texas. Do you know about this?

It is stunning really, what we have created. And of course, with plastic taking 700 years to decompose and much of our daily needs being met with plastic – the equation only gets more complicated with time.

To try to explain this to a child is daunting. It sounds entirely irresponsible of course. We can say that we didn’t know the damage we were causing as we went to, for example, bottle water for our convenience, in order to bring water to people far from the source…?

It is an easier story to tell, if we can also offer a solution, commitment and resolve to do something different. If each of us were to take responsibility just for our own cup, or bottle for drinking, it would shape an entirely different future for all of us.  www.back2tap.com offers the following statistics:

In 2007, Americans drank an average 218 bottles of water each for a total of 66 billion bottles (total spent $12 billion). Of that total, only 23% was recycled.

Roughly 50 billion plastic water bottles end up in U.S. landfills each year — 140 million every day!  That’s enough, laid end to end, to reach from NJ to China and back each day.

The problem with plastics:

Besides the growing garbage stew in the Pacific and the fact that plastic takes 700 years to decompose, ecosystems and wildlife are negatively impacted by plastic debris.

Disposable plastic water bottles are made out of oil, which is a finite natural resource.  Plastic bottles require energy to make and transport.  Currently, the amount of oil we use to produce water bottles each year (17 million barrels) could fuel over one million cars for an entire year.  One disposable bottle of water requires ½ cup of oil to make!

Your tap water:

Tap water is closely regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency under the Clean Water Act of 1977. Bottled water is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration and is not subject to all the same testing requirements.

Tap water can be 1000 times cheaper than bottled water ($.002 vs. $1-$2 per gallon).

Over 25% of bottled water is actually filtered tap water.

Which reusable bottle is best?

Stainless steel (food grade) is non-reactive, non-leaching, light weight, non-leaking and is 100% recyclable. 

For a comparison of reusable bottles, please visit www.back2tap.com.

NOTE: this article focuses on water supplies in the US.  For more information pertaining to the UK, check out http://www.water.org.uk