Food & Nutrition

Our food philosophy is very simple.  We seek to reduce our impact on the earth by eating a vegetarian diet and buying local produce.  This way of eating reduces the amount of land required to grow our food and also helps create jobs and stimulate the economy in the area where we live.  We also aim to be as healthy as possible by eating food that is pesticide free or organic, full of healthy vitamins & minerals, and rich in whole grains.  We limit the number of processed foods we eat and prefer to eat healthy meals made at home.

Photo of Eggplant Parmesan made with flax meal & flax pasta with organic tomato & mushroom sauce

A healthy vegetarian diet is preferable to the Standard American Diet.

Eat natural food from the earth and reduce your impact on the earth’s ecosystem…  To this end, some of the benefits of the vegetarian diet include:

• Vegetarians tend reap a number of health benefits from their diet (Leitzmann, 2005), and also tend to live longer than meat-eaters (Segasothy & Philips, 1999)
• Save a lot of money by eating vegetarian (read this interesting article)
• Protects you from food borne illness (read this factsheet)

What do we miss by not eating meat?

• Higher risk of cancer, heart disease, stroke, diabetes, bone loss, and obesity(Leitzmann, 2005)
• Contributing to global warming, pollution, and famine

By going vegetarian, you can reduce the impact of your food consumption on the earth:

• Reduce famine by freeing up grain fed to livestock
• Preserve the fish population in the oceans and rivers
• An easy lifestyle change that requires little effort and has a large impact
• Don’t support the factory farms and inhumane treatment of animals–bad ideas all the way around!

A number of other resources relevant to vegetarian lifestyles can be found here:

http://www.mypyramid.gov/tips_resources/vegetarian_diets.html
www.goveg.com

http://www.pcrm.org/health/veginfo/vsk/

http://www.whfoods.com/genpage.php?tname=diet&dbid=6

Scholarly references

Leitzmann C:
Vegetarian Diets: What Are the Advantages?
Diet Diversification and Health Promotion. Forum Nutr. Basel, Karger, 2005, vol 57, pp 147-156

M. Segasothy and P.A. Phillips Vegetarian diet: panacea for modern lifestyle diseases?
Q J Med 1999; 92: 531-544