Revelry Review: Forks over Knives

Last night Jesse and I attended an advance screening of the new documentary, "Forks Over Knives", here in DC. A Q&A session followed the screening with Dr. Neal Barnard of PCRM, Dr. Michael Greger, Gene Bauer from Farm Sanctuary and Bruce Friedrich from PETA.

The film follows the career trajectories of Dr. T. Colin Campbell and Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn, who are advocates of using a plant-based diet to halt and even reverse the so-called "diseases of affluence": heart disease, hypertension and diabetes. It also follows the experiences of several people (including the director!) who suffered from these problems and were following a plant-based diet in an effort to change their lives. It was like seeing The China Study brought into visual form. I wanted to show it to every member of my family that suffers from these health problems.

Unfortunately, due to time constraints, the Q&A portion was cut a bit short (let's be honest--I could listen to that group talk all day!). However, it did raise interesting questions, such as should we be using the term "plant-based diet" or "vegan" and what are the implications of each. I find this discussion fascinating. On the one hand, saying "I eat a plant-based diet" seems a lot more palatable to some people, but using "vegan" more often might help to take some of the negative stereotypes out of the word. This led Jesse and I to a discussion about eating mostly plants for the animals versus for health (or both or a host of other reasons) and how those groups of people are really at a disconnect some of the time. I think this movie, about the health benefits, seems fit for a different audience than say, "Earthlings", even if they get at the same essential end result.

Someone also asked about educating their current doctor or if they should change doctors if they received push back on this issue. Dr. Barnard's suggestion, which surpised me a bit, was to continue with your regular doctor, as long as they have good diagnostic capabilities, but follow a plant-based diet and hopefully the changes that brings will show your doctor how useful it can be.

The film is expected to be released into theaters in the fall and available for purchase on DVD later this year or early in 2011. I am hoping it reaches a very wide audience because the impact could be huge.

Vegan Kickstart: Days 6 and 7

I had such a great weekend! During my time in grad school and working full-time I often wondered (and whined) about what people do with free time. I haven't really had very much of it in three years. Now that I only have one class until graduation (May 14th!), I can finally afford to do things just for fun!

On Saturday I took myself on a mini-artist's date. I went to Borders, wrote in my journal and perused some books. I ended up getting Tal Ronnen's The Conscious Cook (man those recipes look hard but great!). I know I said I would only buy Colleen Patrick-Goudreau's Color Me Vegan and Terry Hope Romero's Viva Vegan! this year and stop amassing such a ridiculous collection of cookbooks, but I had a rare combination of a coupon, $5 worth of Borders Bucks and a partial gift card so I got this $30 cookbook for a mere $8! I may just read through it and look at the beautiful pictures until I am feeling adventurous. After that I had lunch at Java Green (yum!), took a long walk and went to yin/yang yoga at Tranquil Space (hurts so good!).

On Saturday night I had dinner with my friend Noel at Toscana Grill, which is located just outside the Courthouse metro station in Arlington. They have a very vegan friendly and organic menu (soy cheese and meats, vegan pastas, etc.) that has the vegan items clearly marked but they also have a lot of options for the meat eating crowd. I started with the minestrone soup and had gnocchi with marinara and mushrooms for dinner. The food was delicious and the staff was so friendly. They asked if we wanted to see their dessert menu. I nearly died when I asked what was vegan on it and they said, "Everything!". Not only was it all vegan but it was all from Vegan Treats bakery! If you ever have a chance to sample their desserts, you must try the peanut butter bomb cake. It is THE BEST dessert I have ever, ever had. They even took our picture for their blog! That is the dessert that legends are made of right there on the table! Pardon the cheesy grins--we also had a considerable amount of wine:

After dinner we went to see "The Blind Side", which I had been wanting to see before the Oscars. To my surprise, I thought it was really funny and cute (......could've also been the wine!).

Today I got a late start but I ended up trying out two new recipes. The first was banana chocolate chip muffins from Colleen Patrick-Goudreu's The Joy of Vegan Baking, which I've had for quite some time. They are so good and so easy to make! They have a lot of bananas in them, so I feel less guilty than I probably should about eating them!

The second recipe was the Spicy Chickpea Tomato Soup from the Vegan Yum Yum cookbook. It was the first recipe I've tried from it and if the rest are like this, I'm cooking the entire thing! Basically you first cook a mix of garlic, onion, chickpeas, tomatoes and a ton of spices in a pan and it looks like this (I almost just made some rice and ate it over that because it looked and smelled so yummy!):

Then you mix it in a blender with a few other ingredients (this was also the first recipe I've tried that called for nutritional yeast!) and voila! You have soup! I can't begin to explain to you how good this is. It's like a spicy vegan tomato bisque, which I haven't been able to enjoy since having my gall bladder out a few years ago due to the cream, but with better nutritional value. The chickpeas also add some bulk to this soup so it is filling. This is the final product:

I will definitely be making this one over and over again! Soooooooooo good. Now it's time for the Oscars!

Have a great start to the week, everyone!

The Oscars!

I am SO excited for this weekend--it's the Oscars! I think of this as my Superbowl. I try to see as many of the movies as I can beforehand. Here are my predictions, though I should warn you that I am usually wrong. You can see the full list of the nominees here. Feel free to leave me yours!

Best Movie: Avatar (though I'd like it to be The Hurt Locker, which I didn't care for too much but was still really well done)

Best Actor: Jeff Bridges

Best Actress: Sandra Bullock

Best Supporting Actor: Christoph Waltz

Best Supporting Actress: Mo'Nique

Best Director: Kathryn Bigelow, The Hurt Locker

Best Foreign Film: El Secreto de Sus Ojos-Argentina (The Milk of Sorrow was great too!)

Best Animated Film: Up

Best Documentary: Food, Inc (though I wouldn't mind if The Cove won either!)

Revelry Review: Earthlings

Last week one of my co-workers let me borrow the film "Earthlings". I knew it was about the treatment of animals but that was about it. It wasn't until afterward that my co-worker said, "What do you call someone who has seen Earthlings?" When I said I didn't know, she replied, "A vegan."

So true.

I've seen plenty of footage of how farm animals are treated and killed. I've seen and read about the treatment of circus animals. However, I've never seen anything quite like this. I had to watch it in 20 minute increments because it was that difficult to get through. I cried several times. And after viewing it, I made a decision. No more fish, regardless of my B-12 problems. It's full-fledged vegetarianism for me now.

The tagline of this movie is "Make the connection", which refers to the connection that we and all animals are all earthlings. However, I started to think about the connection between dairy farms and the animal industry in general, between leather and animals killed for meat, etc. It was disturbing to say the least. Thinking of my new Marc Jacobs bag as just pretty and not a former cow is much easier to digest.

I'm not sure where I am headed on this eating preferences journey of mine but it may very well be to full veganism, complete with no leather and honey and dairy. Recently I've been doing a lot of reading on the subject. It will be easier to explore when grad school is over and I am home more often to cook. As Colleen Patrick-Goudreau says in many of her Vegetarian Food for Thought podcasts, even if you can't do it all right now, you do what you can. Only time will tell.

Revelry Review.

Over the weekend, I was very sick and feeling sorry for myself, so I took myself to the movies.  I figured getting out of the house might do me some good.  I decided to see "Food, Inc", a new documentary about food policy.

I thought that this movie was incredibly well done.  It tells the story of how our food went from being farmed to becoming like a factory.  It shows what happens to the animals before they get to our supermarkets.  It also discusses how a few large companies basically own and control the entire country's food production, as well as how that has impacted the way that farmers do their work.  There is also a portion about how much of our food products contain large amounts of corn.  

I've read Eric Schlosser's and Michael Pollan's books and I still felt like I learned a few things.  Hearing from the families and farmers that are directly affected by decisions made in Washington and in board rooms made it hit home.  The personal stories were deeply touching.

The one bad part is that the people who need to see this movie the most are probably the ones that are least likely to see it.

The Time Traveler's Wife: The Movie

One of my all-time favorite books!  I hope the movie lives up to even a fraction of the goodness of the book.

Revelry Review.

Yesterday I saw the new documentary, "Enlighten Up!".  

The basic premise is that the director picks an ordinary guy--Nick-- who doesn't practice yoga and has him commit to trying different kinds of yoga for an extended period of time.  She sets out to prove that yoga has some level of a transformative impact on its practitioners and to capture that on film.  Many important and interesting yogis appear here--Pattahbi Jois, BKS Iyengar, Dharma Mittra, Cyndi Lee, Ana Brett and Ravi Singh, Sharon Gannon and David Life, etc.  Nick takes classes in New York, Hawaii and India. 

Without giving anything away, I will say that I thought this was an interesting way of examining the multitude of ways that yoga is practiced today, what yoga is and is not, and, more importantly, why it is practiced.  

This was the kind of movie where I wished a discussion session for the audience was built in afterward.  I wanted to hear the other yogis in the audience talk about their experiences too.  

I wish the whole world would do yoga, but I know from my own experience and from others close to me that yoga tends to appear to us when we need it the most.  For example, I thought I was trying out yoga to lose weight but I can see now that I was drawn to the mat, and stayed there, for reasons much bigger than that.  In fact, if I only wanted to lose weight, I probably would've been better off spending those 1.25 hours on a treadmill.  I often say, and it's true, that I pay for not-exactly-cheap yoga classes because without them, I'd need to pay a much more expensive therapist.   Yoga has taught me to listen to my body, to slow down, to value and believe in myself, to get out of my head, to stay present, to choose happiness and to follow my heart.  I simply cannot put a price on all of that.  I am convinced that yoga saves me from myself time and time again.

So, for my fellow yogis and yoginis out there, why do you practice yoga?

{Photo credit: IMDB}

Words to Grow By.

"For what it's worth: it's never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be. There's no time limit, stop whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. And I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you're proud of. If you find that you're not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again."~The Curious Case of Benjamin Button