Theology of Peace
It is my theological belief that health, the way we eat and live, determines our capacity for just peace building on our planet. Through a personal and public narrative of my life story, I hope to share my vocational calling to help our hungry back to a state of peace by way of embracing food as sacred, not just secular, and through a collective commitment to embracing what I call a plant-based life, that is a thriving life for ourselves, and each other, individually and collectively. Throughout my research and newfound transition to veganism as a chef, and health-focused media producer, I have developed a theology from plant-based living, through the ways we live and eat and connect, which determines our capacity for justice and the possibility of peace on earth as foundational for our future world. Through this personal and public narrative of my life story, I hope to share my vocational calling to help our hungry world nourish ourselves and each other back into a state of peace.
The foundational assumptions that fuel my assertions that integrated wellness is possible, come from my transition to veganism just three years ago. As a professional chef and media producer for the past 12 years, I was fearful of making this shift to the plant-based lifestyle because I thought it would be difficult to learn and would potentially create a great divide between me and the rest of the everyday world. Before making this life-changing shift, I always felt off about eating and using animals, and after getting more and more curious about the plant-based lifestyle through this transition, as soon as I did, resulted in unexpectedly transforming every area of my life from my physical, mental, and spiritual wellbeing. And I know that this total transformation occurs for all people who make this shift as well.
The 2020 global health crisis of our world was amplified by the novel coronavirus, and as soon as the pandemic began, I felt a direct communication from God to, verbatim, “no longer use animals”. At the time, this divine instruction shocked me and made me even more intrigued about this way of living, and I decided to learn as much as I could about animal agriculture. I also made the spiritual connection between coronavirus as a zoonotic disease, which is a type of infection that is spread between people and animals. Through this investigative process, I drew a further connection between the dysfunctional relationship that we have between humans and the animal kingdom.
My unique approach to plant-based living was inspired by my interest and curiosity in veganism before making the switch, which prepared me perfectly to develop Plant Based Made Easy, a global online community, digital cooking and social justice series, and companion cookbook series that has provided an accessible approach to making this shift as simple as possible for anyone interested around the world, which others in this space don’t often provide. My healing journey to plant-based living was the ultimate source of my understanding of why this transformative lifestyle can heal our world as individuals, as well as heal our communities and our planet.
Each of us is hungry for health at every stage of life, and my goal for this project is to help feed our hungry world with hope and encouragement through this work. This project will offer inspiration to help uplift and transform hearts and minds one bite and conversation at a time. The structural inequities that my project aims to mitigate are the assumptions that the chaos negativity and dysfunction that we are living in now is normal, which it is not, and not what God’s will to us for, which is simply to heal and mend and be at peace together. Tikkun Olam is a Hebrew social justice value to work to repair and mend the world to achieve just world peace. This chaos has been created by each of us, and therefore can and will be transformed by us. The ultimate assumption that I want to dismantle through my project is that there is nothing we can do to improve our world, which is simply not true. I believe that the healthier we are, the better we can be at contributing to a world of just peace, hence my ultimate inspiration for health and health-focused positive programming with a plant-based foundation is to improve our world at large through our own testimonies of hope and peace.
The biggest strength and challenge to this approach to just peace building in today’s modern world, is that it must face the most coveted cultural form of violence that still exists today –that is our violent use of animals, and our culinary illiteracy and deeply embedded biases that food is irrelevant, and that what we eat and how we speak and live doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things – when its fact, it matters most! Healthy food and living are the foundation for our individual and collective healing – as it all starts with how we fuel! I believe this transformation of ourselves, each other, and the world starts and ends at our tables and on our plates.