Dedication & Acknowledgements

Food wisdom and knowledge, and where mine came from.

Start with the awarrness of duality. Educational knowledge creates memory in the mind, experiential wisdom creates memory in the body, programming of mind and body happen simultaneously.

Optimal performance starts with what you avoid putting in your mind and body in the first place. So that the mind and body don’t have to do extra work filtering out toxins or recovering from consuming small doses of misinformation or toxic chemicals.

Hands on experience and experimentation is where wisdom comes from. It’s the body learning through repetition of motion, growing over time due to the induced training and exercise. This wisdom can also be transformed into unhealthy wisdom, know as bad habits. When something like getting drunk or smoking a cigarret become a good feeling, one should stop and think for a moment.

After researching processed foods my personal desire to prepare my own food started when I learned about profit motive.

Experimentation was all that made logical sense after I realized the shortcuts restaurants take to stay profitable, and that the cheaper ingredients they substituted into your food enables them to break even most the time. Meaning what often has to be done so that profits result.

It’s extremely rear to find an ethical business these days that’s also paying out profits to its shareholders, if it even has shareholders. Restaurants don’t have to tell its customers the whole truth.

Truth is you don’t know what’s in your food if you don’t prepare it yourself. Few pesticides, in your highly processed, little to no life, non-organic food, build up chemicals in the body causing it to be inflamed and more quickly wears out your organs over time. Not to mention it makes you heavier and lowers your energy levels more and more over time.

Here’s how I resolved this processed food issue.

The story begins with new Information and who I learned it from.

AMY MURRY — REVIVAL BAR and KITCHEN

The first person to enlighten me about food was Amy Murry, owner, and operator a farm to table, all organic, all in-house preparation restaurant in Berkeley CA. She was a real-life example of a restaurant looking to push the food consciousness movement to the next level of purity. Her beliefs revolved around vitality. She actually invented the word Vitalitarian, and based all her dishes off the desire to serve food that offered the most nutritional value possible. I was introduced to her through a video project. She was invited to be on Top Chef and needed to submit a video about her self to finish the submission process. I just so happen to be one of those people who worked on that video. Listening to Amy talk about food was astounding. Mostly because I was unaware that restaurant food wasn’t this way in the first place. She wanted to serve people healthy clean food…. which I thought was odd because don’t food providers have to server clean food? I mean healthy is like eating a salad right? This is just how my mind understood things at the time. Amy talked about how they butcher their own pigs, lambs, and beef right there in the restaurant and made charcuterie, goat bacon, and pates, all in-house, allowing nothing edible to go to wast. Even the cheese was made in-house, and the whey from it was used in the flatbread and/or cooked with the polenta. If that wasn’t enough she also intended to keep bees on the roof and serve vegetables from their own gardens that they kept nearby. These ideas were amazing to me! I had never heard about anything like this before in my life. And all she wanted was for people to experience what its like to eat vitaliterian food!

Amy started cooking in 1994, and after many years of traveling the world, she learned how vast the difference is in quality from restaurant to restaurant and wanted to show people the difference between freshly prepared, vital, delicious food and processed food. Amy’s intro to this other side of food clued me in on something I was completely ignorant of. First, ingredients matter, more specifically the source of those ingredients matters. Second, very little should be wasted. Third, most restaurants can’t provide source quality and end up compromising the customers’ health in the long run… and telling you would just not serve the best interest of the bus$ine$$$.

The prices at Revival Bar and Kitchen makes sense. Things are not overpriced. A burger and fries are the cheap and consistent options on the menu but the rest of the menu varies regularly and dishes that deserve a high price tag get one. All the meat is butchered in-house, even the burger… which is a big deal because most places you buy a burger from are feeding you a burger that has meat in it from god know how many different cows.

Meeting Amy made me aware of a whole new standard of food prep and quality. The difference in ingredient between what is served at a quality establishment and what people can get away with serving is astounding. I for one enjoy paying more for my food. Because I want people like Amy to stay in business and believe supporting people who care about the health of the community is one of the most important things we can do in life.

JOHNNY P. — Home Chef & Gpyse

The system around us is profiting off our high demand for low priced, low quietly food that actually ends up costing us more because it makes us sick over time. Johnny P. taught me that!!!!… and I’ll add in his sister Rachel P. because both of them were activist around the Non-GMO movement, as well supporters of the organic movement. Both are beautiful and skinny, with healthy skin and strong features. They have lots of energy and live exciting and happy lives… without any such finical backing that would qualify them as privileged or wealthy. They both work hard for their money and love spending it on quality experiences… and they refuse to sit back and do nothing while the world allows for the slaughtering of animals and the burning down of forest, destroying the world’s ecosystems and potentially making it uninhabitable for the generation to come… o yeah, and they’re also not into the patenting of seeds and taking mass control over the worlds food supply, neither am I for that matter.

Johnny was the first man in my life to take me out into the woods and show me how easy it is to find and gather food. And of course, after that, we took it home cooked a huge nettle pizza and feed all our friends. The nettle pizza made me feel amazing. and I normally feels heavy and sick after I eat pizza. Maybe just because its called pizza doesn’t mean is the same as any other pizza… so whats in a name? what’ in a recipe? break it down to what really matters? What ingredients are you using? and how plus where were they grown?

From the moment I met Johnny, my mind was expanded in a way it had never been before. I was new to the San Francisco Area and my curiosity levels were super high because I had just separated from the Coast Guard and had money in my savings that was intentionally set aside for starting a life in California. My girlfriend and I moved into a 1200sq foot two-story loft space and the first thing that went in was a new hardwood floor in the kitchen. Leah and I did it together, and It was the first thing we did in the space. The loft space was only two months new to us and I was instantly busy getting into my business degree at San Francisco State University. I balanced doing the work of building the space out and focusing on my degree at the same time. Meeting Johnny and having him move in and always be around was wonderful in so many ways. after meeting him at Occupy Oakland and interviewing him and the friends he was traveling with, I offered him an area inside the loft to build out his own bedroom.

He put in a raised floor and built walls. He added a little window and made the room look like a cottage in the woods. He and I cooked and built the loft out. Our relationship didn’t stop there because Johnny was already well on his way toward living a life outside the bull shit mainstream society sells in the media and on television. Actually just before Johnny and I linked up he was cooking for a crew of people filming a TV show all about wild foraging and preparing food at home. I was just the lucky one to stumble into his life at the same time the production of the show was ending. Johnny took me foraging for nettles and taught me to cook them, make tea from them, or even prep them as pizza toppings. It was Johnny who had real experience in a professional kitchen, as well as traveled with a tour nature show that shared wild foresting techniques and practices. So after Johnny moved in, I got to ask all the question waiting inside of me after filming with Amy.

I had no clue nature was so easy to work with and even less awareness of how tasty fresh greens are in comparison to store-bought greens. NO FUCKING CLUE the difference was astonishing. Flavor, Flavor, Flavor. Johnny and I did a few other things together. Such as distilling alcohol, pitted plums for plum wine, collected spring water and urban foraged lemons, dragon fruit, berries, and greens.

Johnny and I shared a love for bringing people together. So hosting gathering in the space was a regular thing. On top of that improving and building out the kitchen was in full force. Johny had plenty of experience working in a professional kitchen, so in no time a stainless steel countertop was added to the kitchen as well as an upgrade to the shelving and counter space. Johnny and I shared a passion for the rustic look, so many of the additions to the kitchen were handmade out of scrap pieces of hardwood, and other creative alternatives to what’s available in the store. I was even gifted a marble slab by Roman, a neighbor, and turned it into the perfect bread prepping area. While the shelves were going up, an upgrade in lifestyle also emerged. I started to use jars to hold all my raw ingredients. This elemental shift is the basis transformation that altered my way of thinking in the kitchen.

Then one day Johnny had a gathering and I was introduced to Jay Hole

JAY HOLE — Traveler, Chef, Chocolate Ambassador

Without knowing it I learned how to find great pleasure in preparing food for others, and more importantly for myself.

Jay Hole is a friend and mentor in the kitchen. He schooled me on food preparation. I watched him work as well as asked him questions till I got the answers I needed to take his style home with me and practice myself. I’ve always been a hands-on learner, a self-taught individual, and an artist, so the kitchen just became a new workshop and creative space for me.

Answering the need to be full, is something most often accomplish with spaghetti plus sauce from a jar or a pizza delivery to your door. … don’t get me wrong I still do this once and a while. The difference is the quality of noodles I buy, the sauce is homemade from heirloom tomatoes and the pizza dough is all from organic sprouted grains, because even how the flour was processed matters.

Why?

how do you have the time?

… you sound like me when I first met Jay. The answers will come, things like what is time, and how do I start to live a life inside of this new paradigm, are the conversation that makes up my blog. But just know every new thing is a chance to experiment, and having basic preparation skills under your belt will empower you to have to have the homecooked meals you deserve. Basics… basics is what Jay taught me. Like how to cook an egg, how to use a Vitamix, how to make sprouts, and how to understand how food like kimchi adds healthy bactaria to the body. I learned about preparation techniques that ancient cultures used to make food that kept their bodies healthy and full of life for thousands of years.

Jays’ food was one step beyond anyone else’s. It was so often surrounded by love and people from new parts of the world. Most often Jay would show up when we were having a gathering at our home, a place that came to be known as the Share House. We hosted anyone on the move and often met new people from all over the world because our doors were open to anyone on nights when a potluck was happening. I invited the neighborhood and it became a regular thing for a while. Jay always found this place in the kitchen during these parties. He was the chef, he brought ingredients, he held out on preparing anything until he was at the party, so his time spent at the party spent prepping and cooking. We often ate very late because of it, but when you get your hands on some of Jay’s food you put the idea for fast food way behind you.

Jay’s food was very slow. Like Alice Waters slow. When Johnny and Jay came together it was Thanksgiving and Christmas. I even think I invited Amy to one of our potlucks and the three of them were in the same room at the same time. — Back then I didn’t ever imagine writing a cookbook, but from them, I learned three very important lessons. Vitality, Source, and Peaceful Preparation.

Beyond these three individuals, there is a mix up of all the other experience I had in kitchens. I learned basics as a boy alone side my mother who use to cook from a book called Eat Right for Your Blood Type. I was the son of three who helped prep the family dinner on Mondays. I kept seeking out knowledge from books and soon the internet. Today my diet is easy because I can personally prepare food that fits my mood and physical body needs at the moment without compromising taste or nutritional quality. Actually, on the contrary, each dish I prepare for myself is inexpensive and carefully sourced, full of flavors, and prepared intentionally to serves the vital needs of my body without wasting a drop.

Many thanks to Johnny, Amy, and Jay.