Feed Your Dreams

Vegetable Alchemy: Sustainable Food for an Active Life.  Why sustainable?  First because, it has to sustain the  world.  Second, because it has to sustain me.  The world needs to grow, raise and consume Sustainable Goods to keep the planet in better order.  Why active?  Because without being active your body will put on weight, decay and not maintain good quality. The body needs exercise.  Food and activity sustain life.

At one time my dream was to become a professional golfer and all that came with it.  My travels, worked out, and thoughts were all about golf. I planned my life and living and dating around that dream.  I had a certain height, weight, a regimen to cross train and practice, with a soft flexible vision of how my life would unfold from income to girlfriend to family.  For various reasons I could not accomplish that dream and had to turn to the reality goal of making a living. I did not find a new dream in sports and ended up, because of my background to turning to an industry with much different habits with the goal of being a successful Chef.

workouts add a touch of ginger to carrot juice

I was not as familiar with that goal as a dream.  I thrust it upon myself as the alternative. I could use my learned talents coming from a restaurant family and apply them to what I found was a market opportunity. There were few American Chefs at the time and I felt it was open territory to build a whole new genre of farm to table Chefs and suppliers with principle. My goal was to build an industry. And the success that came depended on developing a larger vision for The American Cooking Movement nationally and internationally, which we did. But personally as I Chef I lacked personal goals, (which included but was not limited to...) no work out, no set work day, no focused income, no consistent living style, and no stable relationship. I left all basically to the whim of the food and beverage gods and what was needed to succeed. In one small sense I did.  But going forward, I am now driven by new thoughts of the future with the knowledge that a welcomed discipline will accompany my new interest for this success.

I am setting out to make my living based on the discipline of being an athlete while adding the creative work from food and beverage used in becoming a Chef.  As I test various elements that work to combine an active life as an amateur sportsman with food that sustains the activity, I add a routine and objectivity which are key, including the nutritionally rich food that will keep this slowly transforming body in shape. 

In the beginning, my new routine started with a daily floor mat workout.  While I suppose it showed effort, it became clear early on, I was naive.  To make a Chef lifestyle change and break into being even simplest of amateur athletes, way more discipline was involved, and that same kind of discipline that goes inot conditioning will be key to this transformational success.  First I have to burn more weight left from another lifestyle. I added cross training in swimming, running, hitting golf balls, biking, riding a horse and other various sports.  But soon after that it was evident that lifestyle and diet play a bigger role.  My food and beverage are key. Why work out, then put on weight as I crossed back into the lifestyle and recipes of me as a former renegade Chef ? For a complete 'make into' I have to push harder and into a new regimen, as the Chef lifestyle laughingly usurps the sports discipline that I had as a golfer. Add a new dream and purpose and what was at first reluctant nod has become accepting a willing positive change.   

Sustainable food whether as fuel, as fashion, as health, as taste has to have purpose. It should be delicious, look fantastically inviting and be efficient for the body.  It should be affordable and have an ingrain sense of passion in recipe. With my new quest, I have picked up at least fifty small and large books on plant based eating as my focus is plant based for Sustainable Living.  To date what I have gleaned is that plant base will offer me Sustainable Food.  Now to design plant based food for a much more active body with a much longer term future than it did when it was not plant based in the sustainable mode.

So this is my quest.  Good luck in your own. Hopefully you will see the valuable components in sustainable food based on plant based living.   More to share tomorrow.....The Vegetable Alchemist.