It’s All About Food

It’s All About Food - Susan and Dave Kenney, Dry January

In 2011, Susan and Dave Kenney are the founders of Emergo Academy. They saw a need and opened a private residential recovery and wellness program. This innovative program centered around a brain-first approach to lasting recovery. Leading a team of nearly thirty professionals they worked with and impacted more than two thousand families. They are putting out a new book in February 2024, Actualized Recovery – It’s Not About the 12 Steps – Recovery is a Brain Thing.
Emergo Academy’s mission is to continue to provide the gold standard in Recovery and Crisis Coach Certification and education programs worldwide. The academy is committed to transforming the lives of one million people by inspiring and supporting a thousand coaches, each impacting a thousand clients. This ambitious goal is set to be achieved by 2026.

It’s All About Food - Ruby Roth, Boss Inside, A Reclamation of the Feminine

Featured on Today, CNN, FOX, and other major media outlets, Ruby Roth is the leading author-illustrator of a series of vegan books for kids. Her media clips have garnered millions of views and her books have been translated into multiple languages and are distributed around the world.
Ruby Roth’s work today is defined by the female form and depicts the inner lives of women through emotionally visceral representations of the bodies they inhabit.
For the past several years, amidst a radical transition from a decade of familial life as a best-selling children’s book author-illustrator to self-determined independence as a single female artist, Roth has explored the deep end of the feminine spectrum and its archetypes.
Roth’s work often features solitary women navigating inner and outer wildernesses. In vast emptiness, surrounded by hints of nature, her wild women and “girl gods” find their way through physical and spiritual dimensions of darkness and light, bondage and freedom, apocalypse and utopia, life and death, transmuting nourishing or toxic forces into usable means.
Roth has been a keen observer of the body since childhood, having been diagnosed with scoliosis, which required 13 years of aggressive and painful treatment. Rooted in academic anatomy and pop surrealism, her artwork——often created in live-model sessions——exaggerates and distorts female forms to reflect them as vessels of powerful, feminine processing.
Roth is based in Los Angeles, CA. More at RubyRoth.co and RubyRoth.art.

It’s All About Food - Hartglass & De Mattei, Happy Festivus, Let the Airing of Grievances Begin

Hartglass & De Mattei, Happy Festivus, Let the Airing of Grievances BeginIn this end-of-the-year episode, Hartglass & De Mattie air their grievances in the Festivus spirit of the season. They review the films Chicken Run (2000) and the new sequel Chicken Run, Dawn of the Nugget and discuss the upcoming release of Christspiracy. Grievances include cashmere, whole milk, and food waste. They end on a sweet note, with cookies!

It’s All About Food - Angel Moreno, Caravan of Dreams

Caravan of Dreams was founded by Angel Moreno in 1991 as the place where the Spanish expat could combine his passions for food, health, music, arts, and community. Since then it has served the East Village in particular — and New York City in general — with all organic, all vegan, kosher verified, and extensive live food options, plus a fully stocked bar, nightly entertainment, and occasional educational seminars and events.
Built plank-by-plank and brick-by-brick by Angel, Caravan of Dreams became the vanguard of a new mode of living, and has since become one of the established stalwarts of the East Village scene and a symbol of the Zeigeist.
Caravan of Dreams is for people that appreciate the quality of things and — like Angel — have a deep respect for the elements. This can be found in the restaurants commitment to the freshest organic food ingredients, structured water, energy-saving lighting, and more. The purity of Angel’s vision and dedication fostered an on-going and evolving community of participants who embrace better living.
The restaurant is now the home for that community, a place where Angel and others reach out to countless people to develop new ideas for a greater world based on the Caravan of Dreams tenet: good food and health, music and dance, friends, family and lovers. These are the indigents to the wellspring of happiness Angel has always envisioned and actively shares.

It’s All About Food- Rey Ortega, The Mad Cookie Man!

Rey Ortega is a pioneer in the plant-based sector with over 30 years of experience. In 1994, he founded the Alternative Baking Company, one of the first vegan cookie brands on the market, which generated $1 million in sales in 1995. In 1997, he founded Sun Flour Baking Company. to create new flavors, tastes, textures, and nutrition products with a longer shelf life and higher profit margins. Sun Flour Baking produces raw and baked gluten-free cookies free of animal products. It also provides co packing, product development, consulting, testing, nutrition facts, graphic design, and wrapping in small batches. Clients include Continental Airlines, Sodexo Marriott Food Service, and Whole Foods. The company supports Farm Sanctuary, the American Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), and In Defense of Animals (IDA).
Rey owned Garden to Grill, a vegan restaurant, for five years. With extensive knowledge across the entire product life cycle, he is an experienced formulator within the industry, has designed three facilities, and has sold millions of vegan cookies, keeping eggs and dairy out of the mouths of many. Besides owning ‌five plant-based brands, he has also published two children’s books and is an expert at cannabis infusion for topical and edible products.
More about Rey and how to start a vegan business here.  It’s Giving Tuesday! You can make a tax-deductible contribution to Responsible Eating And Living by clicking on this link.

It’s All About Food- Robert Grillo, Playing the Outside Game to Grow our Movement

Robert Grillo, Playing the Outside Game to Grow our Movement
As an activist for all species (including the human ones), Robert Grillo has played the role of thought leader as well as front line activist, leading campaigns, large-scale protests and other creative actions since 2012. He has learned as much from academia as he has from the streets, from first-hand experience in grassroots activism. Most figures involved in social change are either academics on the theory side or activists on the practice side. Rarely do you find those who engage equally in both the theory and application, providing a unique perspective that bridges that gap between the two important sides of every movement.
Grillo is also the founder and director of Free from Harm, a non profit dedicated to advancing a plant-based food system and challenging the dominance of animal agriculture since 2009. He founded Slaughter Free Network in 2018 with the intent of building a powerful grassroots base and carrying out dramatic and innovative actions to capture the attention of media, public and food industry powerholders.

It’s All About Food- John Beske and Marla Rose, Vegan Street’s 25th Birthday!

John Beske and Marla Rose, Vegan Street’s 25th Birthday!
JOHN BESKE is a long-time veteran of graphic design, advertising and marketing with stints at a series of large and small advertising agencies including Leo Burnett and Della Femina McNamee. During this time, he produced print, television, promotional and retail advertising and design for dozens of companies including such famous brands as General Mills, Sony, Popsicle, Miller Brewing and, yes, even McDonald’s. Eventually, he became disillusioned the advertising industry and left the agency scene to become an art director for brands he believed were doing good in the world. Shortly after, he co-founded a visionary marketing agency called Sustain that devoted all of its work to building the messaging of non-profits in the environmental and social justice sectors including campaigns for Sierra Club, Earthjustice and the Rainforest Action Network. During this same time, he teamed up with Marla to create the pioneering website Vegan Street in 1998, and open a Chicago chapter of EarthSave International in 1999.  In 2005, he left Sustain to form John Beske Communications, which has been building the brands of vegan and ecologically responsible companies and organizations for more than a decade. John Beske Communications has now been folded into Vegan Street Media.
MARLA ROSE is an award-nominated journalist, columnist, public speaker, recipe developer and author as well as event planner. Since leaving her job in humane education in 1998, Marla has dedicated her life to building vegan culture and community and today she writes most of the content for Vegan Street. In 1999, Marla was the founding chairperson of EarthSave Chicago, which hosted dozens of monthly potlucks, each featuring speakers, and produced five major day-long vegan conferences called The Conference for Conscious Living, which ultimately evolved into  Chicago VeganMania, which was a popular free festival for ten years. In 2009, she and her partner John Beske were awarded Activists of the Year by Mercy for Animals and won Green America‘s People and Planet Award in 2015. For the past several years, she has been writing feature stories for magazines and has spoken at the Green Festival, Animal Rights Conference, Vegetarian Summerfest and many other conferences and festivals. She is a frequent writer for  VegNews  magazine, a writer of feature stories and author of several books.

It’s All About Food- Ed and Natasha Tatton, Bred, Sourdough Loaves, Small Breads, and Other Plant-Based Baking

Ed and Natasha Tatton, Bred, Sourdough Loaves, Small Breads, and Other Plant-Based Baking ED TATTON is a professional chef who has been to culinary college and worked in high-end kitchens in the UK, Australia, New Zealand as well as Canada, but now specializes in making organic naturally leavened sourdough. As co-owner of BReD–Organic Sourdough with his wife Natasha, Ed leads a small bakery team, making and baking bread, pizza dough, and other small baked goods. These days, Ed’s food is compassionately 100% plant-based, a movement he is passionately excited to be part of and help grow for the benefit of people, the planet, and animals. He lives in Whistler, BC. More on Ed on Instagram and Facebook: @eds_bred NATASHA TATTON is an English teacher turned bakery manager, animal rights advocate and co-founder of BReD–Organic Sourdough, a 100% plant-based café/bakery in Whistler, BC. Natasha has taught English all over the world but now leads a small front-of-house team of cashiers and baristas. She taught English and ventured into various food and beverage roles, nurturing her desire to establish a vegan eatery to provide more compassionate food choices for people.
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It’s All About Food- Zen Honeycutt, Fast Food and School Lunches: Toxin Dense, Nutrient Poor

Zen Honeycutt, Fast Food and School Lunches: Toxin Dense, Nutrient PoorZen Honeycutt is the Founding Executive Director of the non-profit, Moms Across America, a National Coalition of Unstoppable Moms with the motto “Empowered Moms, Healthy Kids.” Moms Across America’s leaders created over 1,000 community events in all 50 states to raise awareness about GMOs, toxins in the food supply, and other environmental issues that pose risk to the health of our families. The organization’s mission is to educate and empower mothers and others with actions and solutions to create healthy communities. Zen Honeycutt and Moms Across America initiated the first glyphosate testing in America and successfully petitioned Costco to remove Roundup from their shelves. She is the author of UNSTOPPABLE, Transforming Sickness and Struggle into Triumph, Empowerment, and Celebration of Community, the director of a short film called Communities Rising and the co-founder of the recently launched program called The Neighborhood Food Network whose mission is to create a parallel food system, one street at a time.

It’s All About Food- Shawna Weaver, PhD, Climate Grief

Shawna Weaver, PhD, Climate Grief, From Coping to Resilience and Action
Shawna Weaver is a career-long educator and mental health advocate. She spent her early career as a mental health therapist and school counselor. The climate crisis compelled her to return to graduate school to earn a PhD in Sustainability Education and explore the intersection of nature and human wellness. She has presented on environmental justice topics to audiences all over North America, Australia, and Europe. She is currently focused on education program development, household sustainability, and wellness advocacy. When she isn’t working or traveling, she is home in northern Minnesota, exploring trails with her three legged canine companion.