Aloha from Hawaii!

Robyn Openshaw - Mar 23, 2012 - This Post May Contain Affiliate Links

I’ve just returned from a heaven of pineapples and papaya, teaching on Maui and Oahu. Thank you so much to my friends there, the Vegetarian Society of Hawaii, and Down to Earth Markets, for hosting my lectures. Many thanks to GSG reader and my friend Debbie Tuttle (shown below with her husband Tom, and my friend Ben and me) who organized the whole Hawaii trip.

In the photo below of the “Dine Out” event they hosted after the Honolulu event, you can see event organizers Anjie Pham, Jim Thompson, Ori Ann Li, and Lorraine Sakaguchi, who are delightful and committed to helping the world eat more plants—and encouraging others to not eat our friends, the animals. I have never met more detail oriented, kind, committed people. And Sylvia Thompson has a fabulous takeout / delivery raw-food service called Licious Dishes—absolutely fabulous food we ate all week. Thank you to Dr. Karl Seff who graciously opened his home to us, and Dr. Steve Blake in Maui for running our event there.

It turns out that wherever I go, about 50 cities a year, I find a big group of people who

–need help and inspiration returning to whole foods, to restore their health

–don’t know how to eat any more because they’ve been bullied and brainwashed by food cults

–want someone to help and inspire their family, friends, children they bring with them

I don’t like trying to get people to adopt labels or join food cults or extremism. (Of course I’m friendly to some movements in the nutrition space—vegetarian, vegan, raw food, alkaline food.) What I do like, staying out of pointless debates and marginalizing, is helping people learn how to eat more plants. That much is certain: eating more plants in their raw state means less disease, more energy, more abundance, more positive mood, pretty hair and skin, strong bones. It also means fewer animals live in misery and die to end up on a plate.

Just for fun after the lectures, Ben and I spent some time at the Pearl Harbor memorials, the Polynesian Cultural Center, the North Shore, hiking, paddle boarding, and lying around on Waikiki Beach. We came home tan and relaxed, and I can’t wait to visit Hawaii again.