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Days before BlogHer '11, I had the honor and pleasure to interview author Kathy Freston, whose most recent book, Veganist, took her "quantum wellness" approach to the next level.
With veganism seeming to become at once more lauded (Bill! Clinton! Is a vegan!) and vilified (Ginnifer Goodwin! Quit! Being a vegan!) by the mainstream, it was great to get Kathy's perspective on the changing face of veganism in America. As it happens, I'm heading out to VidaVeganCon, the first-ever vegan blogger conference (as an attendee) this weekend, so the timing to publish this could not be better.
Thank you very much for talking to me, and to the BlogHer community! The intersection of health and food and sustainability is one of the strong areas of interest our community has. Now that you're such a well-known healthy living advocate and best-selling author, people may not really know how you got started on this path. Can you share a little bit about how you personally got focused on healthy living ... and when you realized you had something valuable to share with others?
I got started because I was searching for answers myself. I evolved into a writer, because I was always looking for the deeper meaning in relationships or understand my own spiritual evolution better, how to become a deeper, more expanded person. I was a writer on all of these subjects, but I realized that one thing I didn't have much consciousness about at all was the food I was eating. Here I was thinking about how to be conscious about relationships, how to meditate and how to visualize, and how to bring forth abundance in my life, but I wasn't thinking about food and its effect on my body and the world around me. I thought I would be hypocritical if I didn't look more deeply into where my food came from, and what it did to my body and to the sustainability of the planet, and of course the animals whose lives were sacrificed to become my food.
I started looking around for spiritual teachers who wrote about it, and I really didn't find that much. I was surprised, because it seemed so elemental, such a vital component of wellness. Body, mind and spirit, and how they all intersect. Food seems to answer all of those vectors. I was not finding the guidance I was looking for.
I started doing a research and came to very strong conclusions about what I should be eating. I evolved into somewhat of an expert on it, just from being personally interested in it. I started writing about it and blogging for the Huffington Post and got an unbelievable response, pretty evenly divided. That blog turned into a book, which turned into television appearances, and now I'm kind of obsessed with the subject.
Appearing on the Oprah Winfrey show seems like it would be a major turning point in anyone's career. How did that come about? And do you feel that was the catalyst I'm assuming it would be?
It was definitely a turning point -- both for me and my career, but also for the conversation about conscious eating in this country. She has 9 million viewers. They are very interested in what she's interested in. Suddenly she was talking about thinking about where her food came from, and if she was comfortable with the process of how meat, chicken and dairy came to her. So a lot of other people started thinking about it. And it was certainly a huge turning point for me, to have Oprah be interested in your book!
It vaults it into the national conversation. I had been on her show before about relationships. The food show was entirely different. And I think her producers were shocked she wanted to talk about it, given her experience with the meat industry. I was prepared not to talk about eating consciously or veganism. But Oprah's curiosity is what it is, and she went there, so we talked. And everything changed right then.
Do you ever get impatient with the pace of change?
I'm realistic that people aren't going to turn overnight. I don't really get impatient because I look at my own process. I didn't know what I didn't know until I knew it. Who am I to look at someone else's pace and tell them it's not good enough. It's not
