Food as Medicine at Plant-Based Wellness Center!

This is a special #LunchBreakLIVE with Madeleine and Will Tuttle doing a workshop called Food as Medicine at Ellora Wellness, founded by Vanessa Marsot.

Here is Vanessa’s description of what was taught in the workshop:

Madeleine and Will Tuttle, author of the international bestseller The World Peace Diet recently visited vegan organic wellness center, Ellora Wellness in Altadena, to do #LunchbreakLIVE, and give a 4-hour workshop entitled, Food As Medicine.

For #LunchBreakLIVE, Madeleine showed us how to make zero-waste oat milk, which could then be flavored to create chocolate milk, chai, and golden milk. The leftover oats can be eaten as porridge. No packaging waste and every ingredient is used!

After #LunchBreakLIVE, they took us on a journey into the Food As Medicine Workshop. We started with the Circle of Compassion’s Worldwide Prayer Circle for Animals, when we held hands, and proclaimed three times, “Compassion encircles the earth for all beings,” which Madeleine and Will say every single day at noon. Will next pointed out that food is a metaphor for love, nurturance, life, and community bonding. It’s the foundational way in which we incorporate the beliefs of our society. But it’s also violence, misery, anxiety, terror, pain–and all this is horrific and meaningless. There’s nothing more meaningless than animals coming to the end of their life, alone, with people who kill them when they simply don’t want to die. Their whole life has been terror and pain, and confinement, for no good reason.

This violence, chasing material objects, and getting into conflicts interpersonally and internationally, show that we have not answered the questions of why we’re here on this planet. We’re not just eating food that is harming us, but we’re using sentient beings as disposable objects. This is the foundation of our economic system–food production is the largest system on earth, and animal agriculture is a major part.

This is not to blame anyone. We’re born into it and wounded by it. It affects all institutions. We’re all harmed by this system. We cope by getting depressed or feeling superior. To see clearly is to see the beauty of food–the beauty the earth gives us, incredible gifts emerging from the soil. We can develop a harmonious relationship by growing plant foods, or continue in an abusive system that causes terror and anguish. Humans have been trying to create a world of justice and peace, spirituality and love, yet we’re filling our bodies with violence and pain by eating animals. When we integrate this understanding into our daily lives, our relationships come from a place of kindness, love, and compassion.

We crush the spiritual dimension completely in ourselves by eating another being. And our consciousness becomes material, not eternal. We thus become slaves of corporations. By liberating animals, we are awakening our inner blessings, saving and healing ourselves.