A Vegan World is Nearer Than We Can Imagine
Eighteen years ago, while in college at the University of Hawai‘i, I read a life changing book, Diet for a New America, by John Robbins. I learned that the toxic industrial petrochemical agriculture system used to produce huge surpluses of grain and soybeans to feed livestock in the U.S. is connected to topsoil loss and global warming, the pollution of streams and depletion of underground water sources. This same violent food system is responsible for the concentrationcamp- like factory farm conditions forced on billions of animals. And it is causing the inflation of the price of grain on the global market pushing a billion and more of our fellow human beings over the brink of poverty and into the almost inescapable trap of chronic hunger. All of these conditions for suffering can be transformed when enough of us realize the power of eating a plant-based diet. None of us can be truly free while others are trapped in suffering by our unconscious actions.
I met my wife, Julie, soon after reading Robbin’s book and our family has since then been enjoying the culinary pleasures and sense of wellness of a vegan lifestyle. In 1994, we moved to Maui where I began my career as an elementary school Hawaiian language immersion teacher. At first my students teased me about my lau‘ai (plant food) lunches, but soon they grew interested and often asked to sample my veggie burger sandwich or bean burrito with homemade salsa. In my heart I began to feel the urge to share and teach more about this vitally important part of my life. From year to year that inner intention grew.
In 1999, this desire to serve was met with an opportunity more awesome than any I could have created on my own. I was invited to help co-create a family-based Hawaiian immersion public charter school which would focus on language, culture, and indigenous health. As a curriculum developer at Ke Kula ‘o Samuel M. Kamakau school, I found myself working with leaders in the Hawaiian community to improve health through the return to a traditional, predominantly plant-based Hawaiian diet pattern.* Our whole school began to experience ‘Ai Pono (Right Eating), an experiential program led by Herbert Kealoha Hoe. Not only were we learning about a diet pattern that was radically different than the SAD (Standard American Diet) one , but we were experiencing the happy alternative and our learning community could feel the vibrant health it fostered. One young mother, for instance, was amazed after a few days on this plant-based diet to find that she had significantly more breast milk for her nursing infant daughter.
It was at about this time that my wife cued me in on the work of Antonia Demas, Ph.D., who has won national awards for her entirely vegan curriculum, “Food is Elementary.” I was soon on the telephone with Dr. Demas, and she enthusiastically agreed to serve as a consultant and source of inspiration for our blossoming Hawaiian-culture-based food literacy education program.
Dr. Demas’ seminal doctoral study at Cornell University demonstrated through meticulous statistically powerful research that when students are empowered to prepare and eat unfamiliar healthy vegan foods in their classrooms, they are much more likely to choose those same healthy foods when they are offered in the school cafeteria as part of the school lunch program. In other words, she had found a powerful recipe for nurturing healthy eating behaviors, reversing childhood obesity trends and transforming our world.
Old dietary habits die hard, but new ones are fostered naturally with great fun and fiesta in the classroom and cafeteria with recipes that flood the senses with the spectrum of colors, tastes, and delicate aromas of the vegetable kingdom. Children love to prepare and eat healthy food. My older son’s specialty is tofu seasoned with fresh herbs from his Grandma’s garden. He and his brother are healthy lifelong vegans. Our Hawaiian immersion students regularly ask their teachers what food they will be preparing for their next papa ‘aiaola or food literacy class which is one of the highlights of their school experiences. Once they have prepared a beautiful recipe such as a raw fruit tart or limu (seaweed) salad, they take personal insult should anyone say anything slightly negative about their creations. Food literacy teachers are constantly challenged to expand our repertoire of healthy recipes. The recently published Vegan World Fusion Cuisine cookbook is a wonderful teaching resource. Dishes from all corners of the globe are placed at our finger tips: from Kalalau’s Coco Ulu Soup to Mayan Wonder Bars. Each page offers wisdom quotes from the cultures of the world and each recipe reminds us to prepare our food as an offering of love, for the benefit of the world. Imagine a fully equipped food literacy kitchen classroom in every elementary, middle, and high school in America. Imagine that classroom lit up by an inspired full-time food educator, trained by the likes of Antonia Demas or Mark Reinfield and Bo Rinaldi, authors of the Vegan World Fusion Cuisine cookbook and executive chefs of the renowned Blossoming Lotus vegan restaurants. Imagine all students preparing plant-based foods in that classroom which are then served in an exciting and evolving school meal program which reaches out to families as well.
Can you imagine a vegan world where human potential for healing and compassion is fully realized, and a great transformation of our planet towards love and light will, sooner or later, occur? I believe that the power of the fork and organic garden is mightier than that of the factory farm and fast food chain. This may seem rather far out, but my life experiences have revealed to me that our good intentions can be matched by a Creative Force much more dazzling than anything I am able to imagine and create on my own.
* Like most world indigenous food ways, the traditional Hawaiian diet is based on whole food carbohydrates. In fact the four staples of the pre-contact Hawaiian diet–taro, sweet potato, breadfruit, and banana–are so significant in traditional Hawaiian spirituality that they were deified as kinolau (bodyforms) of the four major Hawaiian Gods: Kane, Lono, Ku and Kanaloa respectively. Embibing these foods, thus, is a kind of communion, a taking in of the God’s body to bring mana (spiritual power and sustenance) to our own body. What a different relationship with food this represents than the status quo of our modern fast-food nation!
by Robert Kai Irwin