“We cannot wait for governments – we must act immediately – and moving to a plant-based diet is the most impactful thing any individual can do”
Dr Richard Nicholson, Councillor for Haywards Heath
In July 2022, Haywards Heath Town Council became the first town in Europe to endorse the Plant Based Treaty, this was later followed by the City of Edinburgh Council in January 2023.
Dr Richard Nicholson, Councillor for Haywards Heath says, “The South East of England has endured the highest ever summer temperatures in history and people’s properties have been destroyed by fire and flood. We cannot wait for governments – we must all act immediately – and moving to a plant-based diet is the most impactful thing any individual can do to help address the grave situation we face. I’d encourage all Town, District, County and Metro councils to sign the Plant Based Treaty immediately.”
A coalition of groups is urging town and city councillors up and down the country to support sustainable diets by signing the Plant Based Treaty.
You can read the Plant Based Treaty in full here but, in a nutshell, it is a promise from the towns and cities who sign, not to build new or expand existing animal farms; to promote the benefits of plant-based diets in hospitals and schools; to teach farmers how to transition from animal to arable farming; and to redirect subsidies to fruits and vegetables growers so that everyone has access to healthy food.
Twenty cities have so far endorsed the Plant Based Treaty – in India, Turkey, the USA, and the UK – have you written to your town council? It’s easy to do. The nice people at the Plant Based Treaty have written the letter for you (which you are free to personalise) and have already worked out who the councillors are for each town so all you have to do is add your name 😀
I’m thrilled to tell you that issue 3 of the LUV4All (Love Unity Voice) magazine is out now and free to read here. It’s full of wonderful articles by wonderful people and I’ve been given permission to share it with you. First up is something by Dr Will Tuttle that’s right on the money!
“Everybody, soon or late, sits down to a banquet of consequences.” – Robert Louis Stevenson
The spinning fury at the core of our culture, animal agriculture, not only exploits and destroys the lives and purposes of animals, it does the same to humans as well, and we see this playing out now with this draconian lockdown of healthy people, eroding mental health, human rights, and economic independence, and destroying countless small and medium businesses (including vegan ones).
In my lectures over the years, I’ve described animal agriculture as a Trojan horse: on the surface it appears to be a helpful gift, but on closer examination, and with deeper understanding, we see clearly that it is an utterly harmful force in our individual and collective lives, incessantly damaging the health of our ecosystems and society, as well as our physical, psychological, and spiritual well-being.
Animal agriculture is also the hidden cause of the COVID pandemic, and of the dominant narrative that is imprisoning billions of people in fear and confusion in their homes, and eroding our capacity to speak up and defend our basic freedoms. We are reaping the harvest that we have been sowing for decades and centuries. This is our banquet of consequences. Our culture has created a vast system of animal enslavement that heartlessly condemns billions of sentient beings — whose interests are as significant to them as ours are to us — to lives of misery, terror, and pain. Their purposes are stolen and they are reduced to mere material units of production in a rapacious economic system that sells them by the pound. They are impregnated on rape racks, their offspring immediately stolen, exploited, and killed, and all are forcibly vaccinated and drugged, tracked, microchipped, mercilessly mutilated and oppressed, and brutally killed in an unnecessary, ugly, surreal prison-world devoid of meaning and respect. Animal agriculture defines our society.
Those of us who purchase the flesh and secretions of these unfortunate beings, which is most of humanity worldwide, are the causal forces propelling this system ever onward with the flood of money we spend — votes we cast — driving its ongoing and reckless devastation. Thus, as we persist in engineering and imposing a dystopian future on billions of beings, we now see the gaping maw of a dystopian future looming before our eyes. Mandatory confinement, separation of family members, loss of basic freedoms, forced vaccinations, routine microchipping, mass tracking and surveillance: all these standard factory-farm practices are now being openly discussed and planned by health officials, pharmaceutical representatives, and government agencies. What we relentlessly inflict on farmed animals we see manifesting in our human world, and, ironically, we seem powerless and strangely uninspired to stop it.
Why is this? Why are we so unable to see the obvious and respond with clarity, vitality, and solidarity to these insidious existential dangers to us and to our children? Why are we immobilized by fear and mesmerized by the voices of authority, unable to connect with either our intuitive wisdom or to think critically about our situation? Why the nearly-blind allegiance to mainstream media narratives and medical-pharmaceutical forces that we should by now have learned to question? Why do we find those relative few who dare to speak up and question the dominant COVID narrative to be so threatening?
It is because animal agriculture not only exploits animals, it exploits us. As we exploit and abuse, we will be exploited and abused. Each one of us, as we purchase meat, dairy, or egg products, becomes an invisible killer to the cows, pigs, hens, and fishes we are exploiting. We directly but invisibly cause terror, pain, and death, and we compound it further by eating it and feeding it to our vulnerable and innocent children, ritually indoctrinating them as we were. We are the invisible killers, but we repress this awareness, and project it outward, impulsively terrified of invisible killers, which seem to be everywhere.
We spend billions on military defense to protect ourselves from lurking terrorists, and now are even more frightened by microscopic enemies, the hordes of viruses, pathogens, and other unseen agents of death arising and projected from our unfaced violence.
This is our shadow: our repressed awareness, guilt, and shame, propelling us to give our power away to authorities in the vain hope they will protect us. At war with animals, nature, and each other, we make war on invisible viruses as well, completely failing to understand them in our fear-based materialist delusion. We see and suspect enemies and threats everywhere because we are the enemies and threats, and our fear sends us into the waiting arms of the merciless global conglomerates, who provide both the narrative and the toxic “solution.” They will profit from us more in power even than in dollars. They have purchased both media and government, and we find ourselves, the wounded and programmed dominators of animals, increasingly dominated by impersonal forces beyond our control.
There is but one way to human freedom, and to a world of health and harmony, and that is the way of ahimsa — non-harmfulness to other beings — a vegan world of respect for all. We will be worthy of understanding and appreciating ourselves and everyone on this beautiful and abundant planet when we dismantle the entrenched narrative of human superiority and entitlement. A new story is yearning to be born in our human culture. It has ancient roots, and this current emergency (emerge-and-see), if we respond appropriately, can put us on a higher path of liberation and healing.
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Click here for the conclusion of this article and links to more of Dr Tuttle’s writing.
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Despite the fact that animal farming is the cause of COVID-19 and a myriad of other preventable infectious diseases; despite the fact that animal products weaken the body’s immune system; and that deficiency in the intake of whole grains, fruits, nuts, legumes, seeds and vegetables leads to degenerative diseases, we see daily, evidence that the general public have not been told how to protect themselves against the pandemic. My jaw drops as I pass the long lines of cars – people exercising their right to shop for basic necessities during lockdown – queuing to order ‘food’ at the McDonald’s drive-thru. It’s so long it goes all the way across McDonald’s car park and that of the neighbouring superstore, out onto the road and right up to the roundabout where it causes a traffic jam. It’s like most people are in The Matrix and they don’t want to take the red pill.
From the Foreword by Neal Barnard, M.D.: The writing of this book was motivated by the observation that many parents are unclear about how best to nourish their children at different stages of development. Well-intentioned parents like you want to do the very best for the long-term health and well-being of their children. They need help knowing where to begin.
Our hope is that by assembling an expert panel of doctors and nutritionists and by providing well-researched, easy-to-read information on healthy eating during childhood, we can help you promote excellent health for your children throughout their lives.
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Boy I wish I’d had this book when my children were little, then I wouldn’t have been misled by my GP who pleaded with me not to make my baby vegan, saying that children need dairy for at least their first five years! I was very young, inexperienced and, since it was way before the internet, there was no one else to ask. It was another eleven years before we had enough information to understand that he was wrong, and our transition from vegetarianism to veganism left us feeling better than ever.
But that didn’t prevent us being misjudged by another GP when I took my youngest to the doctor when she was about 11 because she was getting recurring headaches. I’d assumed she was suffering from migraines but as soon as the GP heard we were vegan she sucked in her breath over her teeth and said with confidence
“Calcium deficiency!”
I insisted that that wasn’t it, we get enough calcium from our fruit and vegetables, but she would not be dissuaded from her conclusion and sent us away after telling us to take some multi-vitamins, without doing any tests or examination. Some months later, thanks to a good GP advising us to go the optician and see if the headaches were due to a need for glasses, it was discovered that there was haemorrhaging behind her eyes caused by a benign brain tumour.
The world and medical practitioners are so much more enlightened nowadays though aren’t they? Thanks to the internet and such widely available information shared online by vegan individuals, groups and organisations. So you’d think that no one would be in danger of getting the kind of bad advice we got back then.
I was shocked to discover a few weeks ago that that’s not true. A friend of mine took her eleven and a half month-old baby for her ‘one year review’ by a Health Visitor at a children’s centre in Brighton and was told she should be transitioning her baby off breast milk and onto cows’ milk – for the calcium!!!!!!!
Thankfully my friend knows better but lots of people, like me all those years ago, will be swayed by this shockingly bad advice. That’s why this book is brilliant. Because it comes from the Physicians’ Committee for Responsible Medicine, written by Amy Lanou, Ph.D. who is Nutrition Director of the Physicians’ Committee (or she was when this was first published back in 2002 – oh I wish I’d had it then!) and got her doctoral degree from Cornell University, readers can rest assured that the book can be relied upon. And it’s got so much! From a healthy pregnancy to healthy breast feeding to healthy nutrition for your child for the rest of his or her life, this book tells you everything you need to know 🙂
And it even provides you with a ton of healthy delicious recipes:
I bought this one for my friend, but now I’m going to get another one for me!
Author: Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine with Amy Lanou, Ph.D.
Congratulations Carol. You can give us your address privately on our contact form (at the bottom of the About page) and we’ll get the book to you asap 😀
This webinar is a great resource for people who want to persuade their local schools, councillors and MP to introduce healthy, plant-based meal options onto the school menu 🙂
We are not fully raw; we still enjoy cooked potatoes, and lentils; we have rolled oats for breakfast; we eat tofu. But we do include as much raw as we can in our diet and it makes us feel great. Energised. I love juicing fruits and greens and making them into ice pops. I love frozen bananas instead of shop-bought ice cream. I love raw, and semi-raw cakes and treats which contain no sugar or added sweetener, and no gluten, are actually good for me, and yet make me feel indulgent as they are superior in taste and feel-good factor to traditional sugar-laden sweets. I am excited about all the new things I have learned this year about raw foods and how good they make me feel and I am grateful to so many people who have shared their experiences so that I can learn more.
One of these people is Kristina Carrillo-Bucaram, better known as FullyRawKristina
This lady is a positive inspiration, and though many of us may not be in a position to live as she does – such large quantities organic fresh produce are very expensive – we can each do as much as we can within our own means and feel better for it. For example, I have found that when I tried to be fully raw I got too skinny and simply wasn’t eating enough. Now that I compromise by adding cooked potatoes and lentils, for example, to my raw fruit and veggies, I feel great, am back to my normal weight and still getting a very nutritious diet. I love this video because Kristina encourages us to look at her example, and take from it what works for us. It’s all about experimenting until we get it right and being our own best, our own happiest, in our own way.
I didn’t have all the ingredients on her list, nor the equipment (Vitamix and food processor) so I made do with what I had and made my own version. Making raw recipes is a great idea for children to be able to do on their own or with little supervision because there’s no hot oven to worry about and, in the case of using these manual tools, there’s no sharp blades either.
Hand-crank BL30 manual juicer with different screens and hand-crank whisk.
For the base:
2 cups of carrot juice pulp
1 and a half cups of sultanas
Half a cup of medjool dates
Half a tablespoon of cinnamon
1 teaspoon of vanilla essence
For the icing:
1 and a half cups of raw cashews (soaked for 3 hours -or overnight- in the fridge)
Half a cup of filtered water
Half a cup of medjool dates
1 tablespoon of fresh pineapple juice
1 teaspoon of vanilla
Now, if you have a blender and a food processor, you can follow Kristina’s instructions, but if, like me, you’re making do without, here’s how I suggest you continue 😉 :
First put the carrots through the juicer and collect the pulp. Put 2 cups full of pulp into a mixing bowl.
Then take the juicer apart, rinse it and put it back together, replacing the holey screen with the smooth one. Put the sultanas, followed by the dates (after you’ve cut out the pits) through the juicer. These come out as a stiff, sticky rope of fruity goodness.
Add the mushed sultanas and dates to the carrot pulp and mix well. Your food processor is your arm and a large fork. Really get stuck in and combine that stuff! It’s not easy – I had to sit down! – but think how much you will have earned that cake when you’ve finished! 🙂
Then add the cinnamon and vanilla and mix well. When you’ve got a moist mixture with all the ingredients and flavours well-combined you’re ready to mould it into a cake shape.
Cut a circle of parchment paper to fit the removable bottom of your cake tin. Then cut a rectangular piece to line the sides of the tin. Spoon your mixture into the lined tin and press it down so that it fills the bottom evenly. Place the tin in the freezer for an hour to help the cake set in this shape. While it’s setting, wash up your juicer and bowl and everything so that you can use it all again to make the icing.
Put a little fresh pineapple or lemon if you’ve got it, through the juicer (using the holey screen) and put aside 1 tablespoon of juice. Then change to the smooth screen and put your soaked cashews through the juicer (after draining and rinsing with fresh filtered water). Put the mushed cashews into your mixing bowl.
Put your pitted dates through and add the resultant sticky rope to the cashews. Mix well -and again this is going to require some effort – with a fork. Add half a cup of filtered water, plus 1 tablespoon of the juice you made and 1 teaspoon of vanilla essence. Mix it all well with your fork. You will notice it’s not as smooth as Kristina’s but as long as you’ve got all the flavours well combined it will taste just as delicious. To make it as smooth as possible I also gave it a good whisk with my hand-crank whisk.
Put this mixture into the fridge and wait until your cake has been in the freezer for a full hour.
Now, this is the exciting bit where you see all your hard work come together:
Take your tin out of the freezer and carefully push the base of your tin up to remove the cake. Slide the paper off the base of the tin and onto a plate. Your cake should now be standing proudly, unsupported, on your plate.
Take your soft nutty icing out of the fridge and cover your cake. Add decorative nuts or fruits if you like.
And that’s it! 😀
Slice it carefully, and then remove each slice with a pie-slice (triangular thing) if you’ve got it, and share it with lucky family and friends. Keep what’s left, if any, in the fridge.
This is delicious and incredibly sweet – though my family says “absolutely not too sweet!”
And I can now confirm that it tastes even better on day 2, and sooooo good on day 3. After that it was all gone 😉
1. They are high in antioxidants. They’re rated the fourth highest in antioxidants out of all the fruits, only to be beaten by blackberries, cranberries and raspberries. Antioxidants play a role in keeping our cardiovascular system in tip top shape
2. They’re a great source of vitamin C, which plays a large part in keeping our immune system strong and healthy. Vitamin C can also help fight stress.
3. Strawberries contain magnesium, a mineral that helps our body produce energy and maintain strong bones and healthy teeth.
4. Because they contain potassium, strawberries can help your muscles and nerves function properly, lower your risk of high blood pressure and can help your body maintain healthy electrolyte levels.
5. Given their high antioxidant and anti inflammatory benefits, strawberries are considered a cancer-fighting food.
Oooh, can’t wait til summer – bring on the strawberries! 🙂