Plant-Based Eating Radical Self-Care

Happy Sunday-ish . Y’all, it’s 1 am Monday, and I just woke up from a Sunday evening “nap.” It’s been a wonderfully full weekend and I guess I needed the rest. But I can’t skip giving you the weekly From Thy Bounty message. So, here it goes.

This week I started the 10-Day Plant Based Eating Excursion with a few PBFs. And we’re just chugging along during the prep days and I re-realized how important that preparation time is. For one of the prep days I ask the participants to watch any of the films that are available about Plant Based Eating. I watched How Not to Die on Amazon Prime.

The information shared convinced me that this is not just something that has been fun to do, it’s absolutely necessary particularly as I think of the lifestyle diseases and their prevalence among American poor and communities of color.

I started this journey as a form of “radical self care.” I’m not even sure I knew the power of what I was saying then but it both sounded and felt good. Now, as I study more about this, changing my eating, I realize, has been an implicit battle against disease, misinformation of long held beliefs, stereotypes, etc. And, as I share with this community and beyond, I am encouraged that we have the power to change what’s happening to our health and those around us just by choosing to eat more plants. Now, that is radical! And perhaps it is what civil rights activist Audre Lorde meant by self-care as political warfare in her 1988 essays Burst of Light.

Have a great week that is full of grace