It’s All About Food

Bill Hatcher, The Red Planet, Gendered Landscapes and Violent Inequalities

Nisha Vora, Big Vegan Flavor

PART 1: Nisha Vora is a cookbook author, content creator, and former lawyer known for her innovative approach to vegan cooking. After graduating from Harvard Law School in 2012 and working as a lawyer, she exchanged her casebooks for cookbooks to follow her dream in the food world by creating Rainbow Plant Life, the vegan cooking website. With over 2 million followers across her blog and social channels, Nisha’s dedication to creating accessible, delicious, and meticulously tested plant-based recipes has earned her a loyal following and widespread recognition.

Following the success of her first cookbook, The Vegan Instant Pot Cookbook (2019), Nisha is preparing for the launch of her second cookbook, Big Vegan Flavor, which will be released September 3rd, 2024. This “vegan flavor bible” is the ultimate guide to mastering vegan cooking, sharing the principles of exceptional plant-based cuisine as well as 150 incredible recipes.

Born and raised in California and currently residing in San Diego, Nisha continues to inspire others with her innovative, flavor-forward approach to vegan cuisine.

Author Site: www.rainbowplantlife.com

Erika Hazel The Bizerkeley Food Festival

Ron Weiss, MD, Ethos Primary Care and Ethos Farm

A vegan-friendly plant-based doctor in New Jersey and New York, Dr. Weiss prescribes the Ethos Diet – an all-organic, ecologically-sustainable, and Whole Food Plant-Based (WFPB)  diet – as the cornerstone of his work with patients.  Not only has a growing body of research indicated that a whole food plant-based diet helps patients dramatically heal from chronic illness, but over the years, Dr. Weiss has found the Ethos Diet to have an exceptional success rate in reversing most chronic diseases. 

LINKS:

ETHOS FARM TO HEALTH

Gregory Berns, M.D., Ph.D. is the Distinguished Professor of Neuroeconomics in the Psychology Department at Emory University, where he directs the Center for Neuropolicy and Facility for Education and Research in Neuroscience. He pioneered the use of brain imaging technologies to understand human motivation and decision-making. Now, he uses MRI techniques to study the brains and minds of both humans and a wide range of other animals.

Dr. Berns is the author of What It’s Like to Be a Dog, the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller, How Dogs Love Us, Iconoclast, Satisfaction, and The Self Delusion. Dr. Berns and his wife live on a farm outside of Atlanta with several dogs, chickens, and some very special cows.

Julie Guthman, The Problem with Solutions

Lowering Cholesterol, Reducing Plaque

Christine Wong, The Vibrant Hong Kong Table

• PREORDER The Vibrant Hong Kong Table!

REMEMBERING TWO LEADERS WHO LEFT US THIS YEAR

Dr. John McDougall, MD

He has authored numerous law review, encyclopedia, and popular articles. His work for the legal rights of nonhuman animals was highlighted on Dateline NBC and was the subject of the documentary, A Legal Person. The documentary Unlocking the Cage follows Wise in parts of his struggle for chimpanzees.

Links mentioned in the podcast:

Food from Somewhere, Building food security and resilience through territorial markets

Dr. Sailesh Rao has over three decades of professional experience and is the Founder and Executive Director of Climate Healers, a non-profit dedicated towards healing the Earth’s climate.

A systems specialist with a Ph. D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, Dr. Rao worked on the internet communications infrastructure for twenty years after graduation. During this period, he blazed the trail for high speed signal processing chips and technologies for High Definition Television, real-time video communications and the transformation of early analog internet connections to more robust digital connections, while accelerating their speeds ten-fold. Today, over a billion internet connections deploy the communications protocol that he designed.

He received five Exceptional Contribution Awards from AT&T Bell Laboratories between 1985 and 1991, a Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff award in 1990, the Intel Principal Engineer Award in 2003, and the IIT Madras Distinguished Alumnus Award in 2013 for his technical contributions. He is the author of 22 peer-reviewed technical papers, 50 standards contributions, 10 US patents and 3 Canadian patents. He was the co-founder of Silicon Design Experts in 1991 which was acquired by Level One Communications in 1996 and which was later acquired by Intel Corporation in 1999 for $2.2 billion.

In 2006, he switched careers and became deeply immersed, full time, in solving the environmental crises affecting humanity. Dr. Rao is the author of four books, Carbon Dharma: The Occupation of Butterflies, Carbon Yoga: The Vegan Metamorphosis, Animal Agriculture is Immoral and The Pinky Promise, and an Executive Producer of several documentaries, The Human Experiment (2013), Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret (2014), What The Health (2017), A Prayer for Compassion (2019), They’re Trying to Kill Us (2021), The End of Medicine (2022), The Land of Ahimsa (2022), Animals – A Parallel History (est. 2024), Milked (2022), Christspiracy (2024) and I Could Never Go Vegan (2024). His work is featured in the award winning film, Countdown to Year Zero produced by Jane Velez-Mitchell and Unchained TV.

Dr. Rao is a Human, Earth and Animal Liberation (HEAL) activist, husband, dad and since 2010, a star-struck grandfather. He has promised his granddaughter, Kimaya Rainy Rao, that the world will be largely Vegan before she turns 16 in 2026, so that people will stop eating her relatives, the animals. He has faith that humanity will transform to keep his pinky promise to Kimaya, not just for ethical reasons, but also out of sheer ecological necessity. Along with Kimaya, Dr. Rao was the co-recipient of the inaugural Homo Ahimsa award from the Interfaith Vegan Coalition in 2021. He has formally taken the Ubuntu pledge to become Homo Ahimsa.

Dr. Rao was honored with the Karmaveer Puraskaar Global Indian award by the Indian Confederation of NGOs (ICONGO) in 2008, the Shining World Award for Earth Protection from the Supreme Master Ching Hai International Association in 2020 and the Winsome Constance Kindness Medal by the Winsome Constance Kindness Trust in 2022. He was designated a Climate Hero by The Guardian Newspaper in 2023, which recognized him as “a foremost voice on green transition and on the true scale of societal change required to save the planet.” He serves on the Universal Meals Advisory Council of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine and he served on the Board of Directors of the T. Colin Campbell Center for Nutrition Studies in 2023.