Over the summer I've been fortunate to travel widely in support of my new cookbook, Easy Peasy Vegan Eats. It's been a fun adventure being on the road, visiting new locations, sampling local cuisine, and meeting new people. During this time, I've also been doing a lot of thinking about my vegan personal chef business as well as this blog. Most of my entries focus on the food I've been cooking, the classes I've been teaching and restaurants I've been eating in. I enjoy getting to share all of this with you, but there are times when I feel like I want to be saying so much more. After all, the reason I do what I do is because of the animals. That has always been my purpose, but I feel like this sometimes gets overlooked in the busy day to day activities of running a food service business.
This has recently come to the forefront of attention since I just started taking a food writing class at my local college. The aim of the class is to help students learn to write restaurant reviews, food blogs and cookbooks. While these are all worthy aspirations, something about those goals felt inadequate to me, like I was selling myself short. Sure, there is always room for improvement in all of those areas and I will gladly accept critique of my work in order to become a better writer and blogger. But I'm much more of an activist than a food writer, an ethical epicure if you will, and I want to communicate from that perspective. So, from time to time, and maybe eventually more often than not, you will see blog posts featuring animal issues and the ethics of eating vegan. It matters more to me than a pretty photo or a tasty new recipe. But don't worry; you'll still get plenty of those, too!
I look forward to expanding the content of this blog and hope you will enjoy taking the journey with me.
For the animals.
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Having known you for quite some time now, this continues to make sense with your trajectory. I think we all want our lives to have meaning and purpose, and not just for oneself but others. And although feeding people is certainly noble, saving lives adds a whole other dimension to that. The fact that veganism is your philosophy as well as your work creates an integrity of living that I laud and applaud. Feed someone a meal and they eat for a day, teach them about the value of life and how to live love more fully, their lives become greater too and the power of compassion expands in the world. I am excited for your next steps and influence. I will take the liberty of suggesting music as a part of your life that I hear about but have yet to see. Maybe some vegan song messaging? Or musical recipes with added vegan video input? Thank you for all that you do and your increasing circles of influence.
ReplyDeleteI like this idea of feeding people not just food, but love, and nourishing bodies and souls in the process. When I'm inspired through music, perhaps I'll take that next step of integrating all of these creative juices, so to speak, as you suggest.
ReplyDeleteThank you for sharing your thoughts, Eric.