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July 1994 Whole Food, Big Picture: What do we see on our plates? By Patrick Donnelly

 

The Whole Foods Project is a non-profit organization providing organic vegetarian meals for people with HIV/AIDS, cancer, heart disease, and other serious illnesses. Since many factors affect health, we make and encourage dietary choices that protext the environment, treat animals humanely, and reduce the incidence of world hunger. We need and welcome the assistance of volunteers in every aspect of our work, and also welcome, of course, financial contributions. Checks can be made out to The Tides Foundation/Whole Foods Project and mailed to: Whole Foods Project, 115 East 23rd Street, 10th Floor, New York, NY 10010. (212) 420-1828. [SIDEBAR]If you are a person with illness, please contact us so we can let you know about our future programs. In the meantime, we hope that when you look at your plate you see brown rice, millet, barley, soba noodles, tofu and tempeh, broccoli, cabbage, kale, collard greens, carrots, yams, squashes, sweet potatoes, shiitake mushrooms, sea vegetables, garlic, onions, ginger, miso soup, and green tea, because tradition and science have shown that these are among the many plant foods that help to prevent and heal illness.

One of Vietnamese monk and peace activistThich Nhat Hanh’s charming books of meditations begins this way: "If you are a poet, you will see that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist." The gentle burden of Nhat Hanh’s song is that all things are interrelated, nothing can be separated from anything else. He begins with clouds and paper; we could begin anywhere. But there is one thing that is more emblematic than any other of the interrelatedness of all things: and that is the food we eat.

What do we see when we look deeply into the food on our plates, with the eyes of a poet? As with Nhat Hanh’s paper, we could see clouds, rain, sun, wind and earth, because these are the phenomena that sustain everything that lives. But we can look deeper still. Do we see food that has been brought to our tables with loving care - or food full of pesticides, preservatives, additives, antibiotics, and growth hormones? Do we see food grown by methods that left the Earth healthy and fecund, or food whose production depleted and poisoned the land it grew on? Do we see food that is whole, full of vitamins, minerals and vital energy that we need to support our lives and health, or food whose integrity has been diminished by processing and "refining," leaving a kind of ghost of its presence on our plates and in our bodies?

If we look deeply into our food in this way, it can become a window on the past and on the future. Do we see mostly plants on our plate, making it more likely that we will be healthy and that there will be enough food for everyone to eat? Or do we see mostly food that came from animals, which represents their suffering, and causes ours, in the form of illnesses, pollution, waste of precious resources, famine, and untimely death? When we look at the food we choose to eat today, do we see justice and safety for the people that grew it, picked it, shipped it, sold it? If we are people already living with illness, is the food on our plates of the kind that will support our healing, or will it reinforce the imbalances that may have contributed to our becoming ill in the first place?

The Whole Foods Project is an unique organization in New York City that is dedicated to exploring these issues. We provide organic vegan meals and holistic nutrition education for people with HIV/AIDS, cancer, heart disease, and other life-challenging illnesses. About 75% of the people we work with are living with an immune imbalance that may be related to HIV. There are other organizations in New York and around the country that provide meals for people with AIDS. But ours is the only such organization that serves and teaches about a plant-based diet of whole grains, legumes, vegetables, and fruits, grown by sustainable agricultural methods. We do this in response to the substantial and growing body of research that indicates these foods are able to prevent and heal illness, and because our own deepest instincts tell us that personal healing is not separate from the healing of the planet,

We also offer a comprehensive program of nutrition education, including cooking classses, lectures and workshops, so people living with illness can learn how to find, choose and prepare health-supportive food for themselves. We offer our services to people at all stages of the immune imbalance that may be caused by HIV, because we believe that the nutritional support provided by whole vegetarian foods may prevent many from progressing to full-blown AIDS.

The Whole Foods Project served almost 18,000 meals last year, in a supportive social environment that helped to lessen the isolation that can accompany serious illness. We are not a soup kitchen or a cafeteria - our guests are made welcome at large round tables with fresh linens, flowers, and candles, and are served by friendly waiters (many of whom are also clients). This creates an opportunity for people to support one another and share information about healing resources. One of our most popular ongoing events is the Sunday Cabaret Suppers, weekly gatherings that offer not only gourment vegan food but also the healing power of music and laughter, courtesy of some of New York’s most talented musicians and comedians. One of our primary goals is to show by example that healthy food need not be boring, bland, or - sa is all too often the case - brown, so when our guests look deeply into the food we serve they have a chance to enjoy the magical colors, textures, and flavors of food that was grown with respect for the Earth and prepared with love. This is an experience that beckons us to life and sustains healing.

It will seem self-evident to many that the approach to nutrition I am describing is well founded, but we have met some surprising obstacles in our work. We have been told that our emphasis on an organic plant-based diet is elitist and unrealistic, especially for people with low incomes. We have been told that people of color are not uninterested in this food, and won’t frequent places where it is served. We have been told, by the head dietitian of a major food program for people with AIDS in New York City, that while she is herself a vegetarian and sympathizes with our approach, people simply are not capable of making the changes we are suggesting, however beneficial they might be. We have been told, by a medical advisor for a national publication for people with HIV, that it may not be responsible for us to recomment that people with HIV avoid sugar (which clinial research has shown to be an immune-suppressive) because people with low incomes, who may derive as many as half their daily calories from sugar foods, would not get enough calories. We have been frustrated to watch a major AIDS-service organization in New York City spending part of its multi-million-dollar budget to recommend for people with immune imbalance the food that is meaking the rest of America sick: "Eat whatever you want. Enjoy your favorite foods whenever you want - and more often. Pizza for breakfast, pancakes and syrup for dinner - go for it."

Our lives have been changed by looking deeply into whole foods, so we can also see possible paths over, under, and around these obstavles. We visualize that small food co-ops could be established in every neighborhood where people could have access to organic food cheaply. We see people of every color learning about and returning with enthusiasm to the health-supportive traditional diets of their ancient cultures (which in almost every instance were plant-based), leaving behind the foods that slavery and poverty drove them to. We see holistic dietitians and whole foods chefs working closely with people who have serious illnesses to support them through the slow, difficult and emotional process of making changes in their diet. We see people of every income being provided with correct nutritional information, and being motivated by this to make healthy choices for themselves.

The Whole Foods Project is itself going through a slow, difficult, emotional and exciting process of transformation. Richard Pierce, former chef at Angelica Kitchen in New York City, founded the project in 1991 as a program of the Manhattan Center for Living. Thousands of people have availed themselves of our services since that time. In January 1994 we decided that our goals could best be met by creating the Project as a separate non-profit organization, and we have made tremendous progress towards that goal in the last six months. We are working with community leaders to secure a new space in which we may resume our meal program and other services.

Our major focus now is fundraising. We have already received several corporate and foundation grants, and are the recipient of Federal funds to assist an organization creating a meal program in Brooklyn for people with AIDS. In May we hosted the premiere of a new documentary film by Gary Null, Living With AIDS Naturally, which focussed on holistic approaches to treating immune imbalance and featured our work prominently. We raised several thousand dollars from that event, and subsequent showings around the country will also benefit the Project. On June 9th we staged a unique benefit called the New Moon Carnival at St. John the Divine, which not only raised a substantial amount of money, but demonstrated just how elegant and sophisticated vegetarian food can be. Fifteen of New York’s top restaurants, including Union Square Care, The Markham, Nosmo King, Cascabel, The Odeon, and The Water Club prepared superb hors d’oeuvres made from whole grains, beans, vegetables, and fruits. The actress Tatum O’Neal in the carnival spirit. Even planning this event raised ethical issues having to do with vegetarianism and animal rights. We took heat from several of the restaurants who provided the marvelous food, because of the inclusion of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals on our Honorary Benefit Committee. PETA has struck fear into the hearts of many with their recent dramatic (and messy) "zappings" of designers using fur. The restaurant owners - some of whom serve meat at their establishments, though they did not do so at our event - were afraid of attracting PETA’s attention, even in this positive way. From the other end of the spectrum, we were criticized for featuring performers from New York’s Big Apple Circus, which uses animal acts (though, again, they did not do so at our event). In the process of producing this event we worked to find a common ground among many people with divergent views, and to build on the place where our views intersected.

From the Anglo-Saxon word hal came the English words happy, health, holy, and whole, and we named ourselves the Whole Foods Project to associate ourselves with all those nuances of meaning. If we eat the ghosts of food, we will ourselves become hungry ghosts of what we could be, but if we look into our plate and see wholeness, we may find that wholeness nurturing every aspect of our lives.

Patrick Donnelly is a person living with immune imbalance, who isn’t certain what role HIV plays in creating the illness called AIDS. He is Program Coordinator of the Whole Foods Project.

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