Ken Botts has been in food service for over 35 years, since he discovered the financial rewards of frying chicken and slinging pizza as a teenager trying to pay for his own car insurance. At age 18, he discovered Diet for a Small Planet, by Francis Moore Lappé, and made the connection between the food we eat and the world we inhabit.
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Ashley Rhinehart is Food and Nutrition Manager at the Humane Society of the United States. A military brat by upbringing and a pediatric nurse by training, Ashley is uniquely positioned to advocate for plant-based nutrition in high places.
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Eric O’Grey co-stars in a 6-minute video that’s been viewed over 50 millions times. He’s been on NPR, Rachael Ray, Oprah.com, and Today.com. He runs multiple marathons a year, advocates for animal rescue and plant-based diets, and is in the process of inking a book deal.
All because of a scruffy, obese, middle-aged rescue dog.
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Sandi Kronick is founder and CEO of Eastern Carolina Organics (ECO), an innovative food hub company that connects medium-scale organic farmers with local and far-flung markets. Located in Durham, NC, ECO is part of a new breed of mission-driven for-profit companies looking to help us eat better within a capitalist framework.
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Keegan Kuhn was raised with two rules: don’t hurt anybody, and question authority.
Judging by what’s he’s become and what he’s accomplished, I think those two rules may comprise a necessary and sufficient philosophy of child-rearing.
Keegan is an accomplished bio-intensive farm and garden developer, a social activist, and a documentary filmmaker whose latest project, What the Health?, promises to rip the cover off the pharmaceutical / medical / agricultural conspiracy to ruin our health.
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Vlad Chituc is a behavioral economics researcher at Duke University. He works with Dan Ariely at the Center for Advanced Hindsight, and focuses on issues of ethics, morality, and decision-making.
When we chatted briefly a few weeks ago about his veganism and his commitment to reduce animal suffering, I was struck by his contrarian views and the really cool research behind them.
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Antonia Demas, PhD, is founder and director of the Food Studies Institute, an organization that creates and promotes nutrition-based curricula for elementary schools.
From the Food Studies Institute website: “Her curriculum, Food Is Elementary, has been used successfully in more than 3,000 schools in 33 states. She consults throughout the U.S. and abroad and trains and certifies teachers as food educators. Dr. Demas is a Visiting Scholar at Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health and at the University of Illinois Medical School.”
Dr Demas was an early student of T. Colin Campbell at Cornell, and upon discovering his research, immediately began working to translate it from the Ivory Tower into the Real World.
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Robert Whitaker has written some of the most dystopian, disturbing, and fascinating stories of evil unleashed that I’ve ever read.
Unfortunately for us, he’s not a fiction writer. Instead, he reports on the psychiatric industry.
In his 2010 book, Anatomy of an Epidemic, which won the Investigative Reporters and Editors’ 2010 book award, Whitaker showed how the story told by the American Psychiatric Association – that mental illnesses were caused by known chemical imbalances in the brain, and modern wonder drugs were safe and effective – was a deadly lie.
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Susan Benigas is executive director of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine (ACLM) and founder of the Plantrician Project. Through these and other efforts, Susan is in the forefront of the movement to educate doctors about the healing power of diet and lifestyle.
Susan got into this world as a marketer (which parallels my own path). She discovered firsthand how important marketing chops are to getting the word out about health in her work on St. Louis’ Hooked on Health initiative, and her corporate health promotion business, Amp it Up for Life.
What I really admire about Susan is her energetic optimism. It’s a quality I find in leaders who succeed in creating change against all odds. In our conversation, we discuss those odds, and the stakes, and why lifestyle medicine and the healing power of a whole food, plant-based diet will ultimately prevail.
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Samantha Carrie Johnson, at age 30, has already accomplished several lifetimes worth of personal and social achievement. A chef, restauranteur, entrepreneur, actor, model, Miss Pennsylvania 2007, and MTV reality show star, Samantha devotes her energy and her time to raising consciousness, promoting plant-based health, and keeping her own life balanced.
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