Changing The Diet In The African-American Community | The Invisible Vegan (Full Documentary) | Tonic

[Music] there's a way to make an entrance my destiny it was now a conspiracy of witches download veli today oh [Music] i grew up in dc eating the standard american diet meat dairy fruit veggies bread and i remember my grandma would make me these big breakfasts with like sausage eggs and fluffy butter biscuits you know i live for them and at the time i never questioned what i ate if it tasted good i ate it and got seconds so what are you making i'm making some turkey legs and turkey wings spaghetti and a salad my entire family eats meat so that's what i knew and that's all i knew by the time i became a teenager i had heard of vegetarianism but i had no idea what a vegan was and then when i was 20 i moved to los angeles and that's where i learned what a vegan was [Music] i was like you know that's the white people's stuff [Music] but then i worked on a lifestyle series where we were interviewing bobet davis the owner of this vegan restaurant called stuff i eat she was 65 at the time and her body trumped mine she was the first black female vegan that i ever met i don't eat no meat no dairy no sweets only ripe vegetables fresh fruit and whole wheat she unknowingly inspired me to read up on plant-based diets and the more i read the more i became inspired to go vegan every culture has a relationship with food and african americans are no different what we have however is a very vexed relationship with food i think because we've been told that we ate low on the hog if you will we have been chastised and talked about with regard to what is referred to as soul food and so i like to empower african-american people to understand where their food comes from just making like a homemade base just olive oil garlic i hate to be ignorant but it tastes like white people food it doesn't taste like white people i feel like white food when i initially identified veganism as a white thing it was because i didn't know my history to associate veganism and vegetarianism with whiteness you're totally discounting our cultural heritage a lot of our histories have been erased because of colonialism that's embedded in k-12 education black people were not abducted and put on ships and enslaved as someone who didn't understand anything didn't know how to raise land didn't have any spiritual ideas didn't have other ideas around nutrition or harvesting the land when you look at traditional west african diets they are diets that are plant-based low in fat and also contain very little meat west africans who were used to eating this traditional west african diet were essentially dragged from their homes shipped across the ocean and then confined to plantations where they were literally fed the garbage of the plantation it didn't dawn on me at that time though my ancestors come from a rich land with rich soil and rich farmers all i knew was we turned scraps into soul food and i thought that was our only culinary legacy that's the most pervasive narrative primarily because the majority of african americans were in the south but first of all i challenge people to think about where the south is people are eating different things depending upon where they were located during the period of enslavement if you're in the southwest you necessarily have access to more peppers and if you're on the chesapeake you have access to the water people foraged they went into the woods and they found berries and they found other greenery we need to be very careful about how we talk about our food cultures as if we're a monolithic culture because we're not [Music] and historically many of our political leaders have rejected meat and embraced healthy plant-based food ways coretta scott king and her son dexter scott king vegans radical feminists and activists angela davis is a vegan rosa parks was a vegetarian [Music] i was a sophomore at amherst college and our black student union brought dick gregory to campus to talk about the state of black america our black student union knew him as a civil rights icon as a humorist we did not know that he had become vegetarian and vegan and raw he was actually mentored by dr alvina fulton who was a naturopathic doctor who opened the very first health food store on the south side of chicago in the 1950s she's just one example the father of raw gourmet cuisine is our reese la tom from panama and you have rastafarians who tend to follow an ital diet which is a clean way of eating designed for health and vitality mostly organic non-processed foods with very few animal products if any so plant-based eating has many historic roots in the black culture it's not a white thing and not knowing that is an ignorant thing [Music] in my career i've been told that the foods that define soul food lexicon are southern foods so it becomes soul specifically assigned to black people because in the 60s mary baraka eldritch cleaver and other black nationalists wanted to make the argument that black people had culture we have culture in our language we have culture in our clothing we have culture in our food i'm from the midwest grew up in saint louis so the kind of foods that i ate you know a lot of barbecue and a lot of ribs a lot of you know tri-tip brisket well i ain't get brisket too i got a little money i'm sorry i'll be honest with you we have brisket and i'm just talking i give brisket to like two summers ago it's funny because before i went vegan i didn't like a lot of soul food like i didn't eat cornbread macaroni and cheese potato salad stuff and i ain't like none of that and people will always say to me like girl you ain't black so you can imagine once i went vegan my black card got completely revoked probably about 15 years ago now i was at a party and i just happened to mention or answer a question and say that i was vegan i think why was it eating something at the party and this woman overheard me and she looked at me and rolled her eyes and just looked me up and down and said you mean you haven't had a piece of fried chicken in 15 years and i said no i guess i you know i never thought about it and she just rolled her eyes and walked away and just sat down and shook her head at me that was the first time that really really it hit me that someone could think that i wasn't black enough because i wasn't eating soul food but i learned veganism and vegetarianism from black people why should your black card be forfeit because you have decided that your health and wellness is not predicated on eating like animal proteins or consuming animal secretions in your body your black card should be contingent on your commitment to black liberation and not on these stereotypes that have been handed down to us by other people your rejection of those stereotypes i think speaks more to who we are as individuals than anything else your black heart might get taken away though if you have not seen the color purple there's this conflicting dichotomy in black america like on the one hand we hate when we're stereotyped but on the other hand we criticize blacks for stepping outside of those stereotypes like if you're black and you're not a democrat uncle tom if you're black and you ain't christian you're a heretic if you don't get down with soul food you bougie this is societal it's not particular we don't allow people to have choice because we feel that your choices somehow reflect me veganism carries such a heavy definition it means so much more to so many people veganism is an activist term i think african americans shy away from that because they're like we don't want all of that i don't want to be the annoying vegan you know that oh i'm a vegan but at the same time i almost want to be the example that wasn't there for me growing up i saw movies like soul food which represented black food culture but in a very stereotypical way yeah we did have soul food back in the day and in season seven now of the walking dead seeing morgan being a vegan in this post-apocalyptic dystopian universe where people are eating whatever they can and girlfriends as well the character lynn she was played by persia white she was a vegan she was the first black female vegan i remember actually seeing on tv so because a lot of images of black female vegans aren't really that mainstream it's foreign to a lot of people in the black community [Music] even the black church is starting to set better examples it used to be that we go to church and we're in church all day long and you would have dinner and so forth at the church you knew what you were going to have right we always knew you were going to get your fried chicken your greens there was ham there was pound cake you looked forward to that because it was a part of a ritual nowadays we're also choosing foods that are going to say we believe in this healthy way of living and so you end up with a lot of baked food which is not a bad thing at all and i've been told about communities where the church has inserted itself in a very major way to say we are not going to let our congregation die of heart disease and diabetes health is not simply about diet we're going to get a little bit more into that in just a moment but we tell ourselves with that and so we've created this atmosphere that simply says don't drink don't smoke don't do that and then there are some of us who don't drink and don't smoke and we'll look at the person who consumes alcohol as if they are doing something that's completely unhealthy but yet while we are not consuming alcohol we're loading up on sugar [Music] no no you don't have wine before you go to bed it's just butter pecan [Applause] but see that butter pecan ain't in leviticus is it it would be total anarchy if you close on the popeyes that's all i'm saying anarchy it'd be like the movie purge there's a folklore that says you could tell where the african americans black people had been the negroes the colors had been because you could just follow the trail of chicken bones the chicken bone express right it's what it was called so again what i try to do with my work is empower people with those stories i'm like yeah they're funny and so forth but that's part of our history there's no need to be ashamed the shame comes in when you don't know the history and you allow other people to tell it to you in which case it gets distorted at the same time knowing that and being able to counter that i think you have a better chance of responding from a position of empowerment versus one of subjugation i used to love fried chicken and i'm not even coming from a cooney place just being real like whenever you go to gatherings and there was always this big mountainous pile of golden crispy fried chicken and it's like 14 by 16 aluminum anyway obviously when i became a vegan that had to go and i hear a lot of people say i don't know how you can go without chicken and that's real like i totally get it it is one of the harder things to give up be honest come on everybody try to act all sophisticated but if you was going to eat something you're going to go get some popeyes and will nobody judge you i'll be looking at you like [Music] a food like chicken also for many african americans because they came through the south perhaps or had family members who came through the south it became a staple on many sunday dinner tables and so it's a comfort food it's a familiar food it's a food that reminds people of home and family and so part of that i can't give it up is as much about taste as it is about connection and again belonging foods like fried chicken that are associated with black culture are denounced by dominant culture you know it just comes off as an attack on black food ways and since we're constantly criticized you know like our music is too violent our clothes are too ghetto our english ain't good enough there's a big difference between saying go vegan because soul food is evil don't eat it anymore and let's build on soul food let's see how we can preserve our legacy and still be healthy [Music] i honestly don't remember the last time i went to a funeral where someone died of old age it's always degenerative disease cancer heart problems lupus but it's never old age [Music] as i read more and more vegan literature there was this reoccurring theme that meat and dairy especially were linked to a lot of the diseases when i was in my early 20s i appeared healthy but i struggled i had severe pain and bloating when it was that time of the month i had internal hemorrhoids so i bled every time i defecated i would constantly get yeast and bacterial infections which is an embarrassing problem for a woman because you don't want men to think you're baking bread down there when i went vegan all those problems went away and i no longer needed the antibiotics the pain pills the creams that is when i learned the real healing power of food if you can eat your medicine as far as in the foods there's no reason to take in a pharmaceutical which has side effects and the side effects one being that somebody had to die or some animal had to die for you to get over acid reflux when you shouldn't have acid reflux in the first place in theory if you can start to eat better eat cleaners feel stronger your body is taking the nutrients from the food that you eat and healing itself or you can just go ahead and drink your nine pepsis and then eventually you gotta deal with your diabetes and you don't have to do that until your food get cut off and i ain't going with the grimmest possibility of just saying your foot go get cut up [Music] if what you eat causes your disease stop the disease by changing what you eat for example if you have diabetes you go to a vegan whole foods pattern food consumption your diabetic state reverses itself you no longer have a diabetic condition internally and he basically weaned himself off of his insulin like he just changed his eating habits exactly and the doctors kept telling me that you need to take influence insulin you just change your head and change the different stuff that he was eating and then how long have you been offering your insulin since uh october last year yeah so it's about to be a year so many things related to their diet that they would never ever want to accept like they just don't believe in it even to the moment you just tell them like look man the pork chops killing you be like he poached i would have african-americans coming in telling me oh doc i've got [ __ ] colon or i've got irritable bowel disease and i would tell them look what i want you to do is eliminate all dairy foods from your diet for two weeks come back and see me and let's see if the problem clears up and i would say that in at least eight cases out of ten the problem disappeared there's a very strong association between habitual consumption of dairy foods and prostate cancer it significantly raises the risk of prostate cancer and prostate cancer is a major problem for african american males [Music] so what's going on with your diet man so the beginning of the year cut out all meat man and uh it was going real well but i relapsed relapsed tremendously but it's so funny because once i did that as soon as i started eating the processed food the fast food the meat man heartburn acid indigestion i mean back pains i mean everything that that everything came back like immediately and i was like damn this stuff is really killing us man why is it that dairy alternatives are not as available to us in our communities when we can't even digest it to begin with the food that's actually available to us is making us sick and it's making us unhealthy that's really reprehensible because that's an egregious form of institutional racism to intentionally harm the health of a large swath of our population so that industry operatives can profit from [Music] was educating myself on fibroids i googled it i talked to people found out that 70 of women have fibroid tumors and a lot of black women really suffer from fibroid tumors there came a time when i said okay i'm going to stop taking birth control i'm going to stop putting all this stuff in my body give my body a rest well 2014 i went ahead and had the surgery and had them removed but in the course of me getting ready for that surgery and then even after i was educated on what foods are iron rich foods that i would definitely need because i was suffering from anemia i was always tired always cold people would always tell me eat red meat eat red meat because it gives you more protein eat red meat because it builds up your blood i gorged myself on meat i went off birth control and then i found out i had 22 fibroids and so i was like okay everything it was like a record scratch on my life you know i was like this is crazy because i knew i wanted kids there was no way i could get pregnant without many fibroids so thankfully i was able to have the surgery to get those eliminated and i just made a complete change in my thought and what i thought about food right after the surgery i said you know what i'm not going to be eating the same things i ate before i gotta live better my body's a temple you know i felt like i was able to start over after that i am thankful to be at this point to where my fibroids are gone there is a possibility of them coming back but i live my life trying to make sure that i give my body every chance in the world to do right so when someone approaches me like you did about eating vegan or just introducing me to a new way of healthier living why would i not want to try that because i've seen the other side of it i've seen the intensive care unit i've seen what happens when your blood's not built up enough from nutrients i've seen all that and so why would i not you know try something new [Music] [Music] pcrm did a study looking at diet and menstrual issues but specifically fibroids and what we know is that diets that have a lot of compounds in them that stimulate inflammatory hormones and compounds within our bodies increase the risk of developing fibroids and or the severity of the symptoms that are associated with having them and again animal foods are the leading culprit in that regard because they stimulate the growth of fibroids and also make them much more painful and symptomatic if a woman develops them so after learning all this stuff my question was if a plant-based vegan diet is scientifically proven to be healthier for you and prevent diseases why aren't our doctors giving us this information [Music] 50 years of research have told us that plant-based foods are healthiest so you're not going to hear that from your doctor and the reason that you're not is because doctors get four hours or fewer of nutrition in their entire four years of medical school if they get it at all in western medicine we operate from the disease model we are in the business of treating sick people it's unrealistic as populous for us just to expect physicians being ignorant and having a strong financial interest not to to tell us anything about nutrition at all we pay doctors through third party insurances and those insurance companies will pay me to prescribe a drug to you but they won't pay me to sit and talk to you for a half an hour to an hour about changing your diet there's a lot of people who buy into the standard u.s western medical science you know and i i think our community deserves better than that and we need a holistic approach so when i see people of color repping the holistic then it gets interesting the entire medical industrial complex ranging from the insurance companies the hospitals they all have an interest in the population as a whole continuing on and advancing the nutricidal pattern of food consumption that we have it is popular in the mainstream vegan movement to actually promote veganism as a cure-all making people feel as if it's the individuals responsibility to take control of their health and it really ignores a lot of the systemic factors that actually make it difficult for a lot of people to come to to the health or the harmony that they need [Music] kaiser permanente is finally endorsing a plant-based diet for optimum health so the more light that we shed on these issues the more we force the power that be to come clean if one cop kills one black person a month people march they put it all over social media and they really gum for change which they should then you have diseases killing members of our community by the millions does the violence inflicted upon our bodies through the poor food choices were given not warrant comparable outrage and attention by activists it's been set up to keep us almost in a daze asleep we need to politicize our food choices having a healthy body is political being able to have a lot of energy so that we can fight those larger battles for some people of color particularly those who aren't informed about nutrition and so forth some of the vegan books and films that come from dominant culture that promote veganism they kind of feel like vehicles for social imperialism we come from the hull up who are you to tell me how to live my life who are you to tell me how to eat kind of mentality because of our history and it's justified a lot of the ways that organizations communicate they use a very missionary and colonialistic approach for example we're going to go and teach those people how to eat properly it assumes that these particular groups which are usually non-white communities working class communities they've become the white man's burden they don't have wisdoms or knowledge systems that are of equal value or even better value in terms of understanding their own nutrition we're in the age of black lives matter and black lives matter on so many different levels and for me i commit that as a food scholar by saying yeah we do so that means our whole life matters our histories our present our future and so when we're in this space where everyone is telling us what we should be doing both in the community and from outside the community i see that as a need and a desire to rule my black body you need to bring me in line i need to walk a certain way i need to talk a certain way i need to eat a certain set of foodstuffs in order to be an acceptable black body in this particular cultural moment as much as i would like to see people adopt a plant-based diet i can't force it on people i'm providing information so that you can make an informed decision and then i let it go that's it i'm not vested in it beyond that not everybody's gonna do it it took me a long time to realize that not everybody is going to do it and then there's a matter of access i remember i was watching this food documentary on veganism and then this white chick she was making a point about how easy it is to go vegan like you can just go to your neighborhood health store and i'm watching this like okay you know for the affluent white woman living in the upper middle class neighborhood with the whole foods on the corner like i'm sure it is easy to just go vegan but a lot of minority neighborhoods don't have health food stores and why is that why is it that people living in minority neighborhoods don't have access to fresh affordable healthy food and why isn't that a point worth bringing up a food desert by definition is an area where there is not access to either a grocery store or healthy foods within like a mile or more unless the neighborhood is going through gentrification where they're more affluent young whites moving in then you start to see these healthier options coming i grew up surrounded by nothing but fast food chains and carryouts i didn't even have the awareness to see that as a problem the closest grocery store that i go to is safeway and they have organic vegetables and foods there but sometimes i do find that i'm not pleased with the way a lot of their vegetables look at this like this doesn't look it doesn't look fresh this is the kind of organic stuff you have here many people who are working one to two jobs they're not making living wages and so the ability for them to afford the food is just too high you also have people who have to use various means of transportation or to get access to healthy food we found out recently that one area where the bus actually prohibits people who are riding the bus to take more than two bags of groceries on the bus well if your means of getting your fresh groceries is going to be on a bus and you can only bring two bags of groceries home and you have children that's going to make things very difficult for you health is the front lines you can't just have health just in a vacuum of privilege right health is about access it's about economics it's about the psychology it's about the organization of the community to provide certain things most of us can figure out the biggest incentives for exploiting others which is profit that word drives so many too often to look other ways to approve their actions that they would not normally they would not normally stand up to scrutiny under capitalism both humans and animals are typically working for the profit of others a system which is inherently about exploiting and keeping them oppressed sees no problem in allowing it to continue i founded food empowerment project and i currently run it we are a vegan food justice organization where we work to encourage people to go vegan for the sake of the animals we also work on access to healthy foods in communities of color and low-income communities because the lack of access to healthy foods in this country has become a privilege instead of a right which it should be back in dc one of the guys i went to high school with ronnie webb school without walls 0-4 baby he started a non-profit called the green scheme and on a grassroots level his organization goes into at-risk communities which are predominantly communities of color and they promote health awareness they teach people about urban agriculture techniques the green scheme they also use urban agriculture as a weapon to help people in the community back against lack of access urban agriculture is basically growing food in the city and growing it in crazy places i guess what people would consider crazy places so right now we're behind an apartment complex in southeast dc and we have a hoop house i also went to school without walls with xavier when i went to interview him in his garden he let me take some of his lettuce and his lattice gang was real strong i mean real strong but um i'm engaged we're trying to create something new that the people control that the people dictate to create new access to food so right now anybody that lives in this surrounding community or neighborhood in a few months we have access to kale collard greens turnip greens carrots tomatoes some more okra beets radishes all types of stuff that's awesome it's perfect it's perfect fruit just a perfect vegetable right there god just was like that means go eat that in order to be healthy we can't settle for foods that kill us so the same way we rally for police and neighborhoods to get their situation together less rally for clean organic affordable food in our neighborhoods so there's the issue of access but let's say more people in marginalized communities had access to healthier affordable food would they eat it [Music] people don't understand how nutrition affects our bodies how it affects our wellness how it affects our appearance how it affects our energy levels but we are taught the importance of having a mobile phone i mean if we got cable if we got the new unions you know i mean whatever we can pull that off you know shoes is like 350 dollars now i'm like jeans is 150 you know a piece so in the hood we the freshest it get so but then we skip on what really matters somebody got to say that because that's not politically correct you say that you catch all kind of flat but real talk i don't want to see no humans on my feet you know what i mean and i'm eating dairy quickly give me the organic super kale grown down the block you know what i mean and i wear some flip-flops eating plant-based meals that's an invisible choice it won't get you the nods and the high-fives and the instagram likes as jordan's or a nice hair weave but you really gotta question yourself if your desire to be seen as fresh outweighs your desire to actually be fresh and healthy and don't even psych yourself out without but it's too expensive there's plenty of ways to be vegan on a budget do you spend your your money here or do you spend it on medicine later on [Music] go to ewg.org which stands for environmental working group and they have a list of the fruits and vegetables that are most sprayed and least sprayed the least spraying are by default organic but they don't carry the higher price tag and swap out your white rice for brown rice swap out your white pasta for whole grain pasta these things are easy to do and they're cheap it's really not a matter of a vegan diet being more expensive than a carnivorous diet it more so depends on what you buy because when i wasn't a vegan i would turn the salmon for protein now three or more salmon steaks they'll run me like ten dollars or more whereas if i get a block of organic tofu which is three servings of protein that only runs me of course if i decide to get the fancy vegan crab cakes from whole foods like that's gonna set me back same thing with eating out or we decided to do asian my veggie chow mein is gonna be cheaper than the shrimp chow mein so if you eat meat you eat within your means if you're a vegan you eat within your means i'm of the perspective because of my own experience i've been on plant-based since i was on food stamps you know what i mean so it wasn't a question it was about oh this ain't healthy well the same hustle i applied or whatever else i'm about to apply my hustle to getting the food organic hustle something that's not gonna kill us but it's gonna make us healthy you know what i'm saying and you can still use the same mentality on flipping something or selling something or pitching it [Music] yeah so i'm gonna take you guys to see my girl chef nina and she's gonna put you on some vegan game do you know the menu did she tell you the menu yet she told me to me but i don't want to tell you guys okay here we go no it's not a here we go type i don't want to tell you it's like it's so delicious i want you guys to be surprised here come the bubble guts i tasted my first piece of vegan steak i think about 15 years ago yeah and i hated it some time ago some vegan food tastes like styrofoam with barbecue sauce on it not gonna lie but that has changed tremendously if you really need that meaty taste they have a lot of good products on the market to accommodate you and help you transition to me and they're bombed recently i went to check out this new company called impossible foods that makes plant-based meat alternatives impossible foods goal is to make meat and cheese like products from plants we're not just simply trying to make a veggie burger we want to have a product that's identical to the taste the cooking and the smell of meat it was on point [Music] alternative meat sources help people transition because it doesn't break up their routine someone who eats chicken on a daily basis or likes to eat beef and there's a product that is similar to what they're used to having the same taste they're gonna be more willing to implement that into their diet if you have a veggie burger that tastes close enough to meat man just give me the damn veggie burger so i'm gonna have you join me in the kitchen come on in i even ran some vegan taste tests to my friends to see if they could get down with the taste and trust me they wouldn't laugh for me like like not even for my film these flapjacks are almost ready subjects i'll use the terminology that brings you right okay so i'm gonna come over and put one on each of your plates and then we've got coconut butter with mango whipped in so just so i'm clear for for the mango butter you're saying all you did was coconut oil and then mango and blended it together and blended it together nice all right so it's hot let's start with that because we're gonna have quite a bit to eat the more appealing the more beautiful it is the more you're gonna enjoy it right yes and have fun with food have fun with food because you know what as a chef this plate is my palace what do you think so far this is in a delicious right yeah and one that is really protein plants you don't have a lot of fillers gums that are going to clog the arteries clog the body up stay awake feel right but what we want to stay away from is that pork can have these pounds let me walk right down that up the other thing that's important in the vegan diet as in any diet life is sweet right so we have to have some sweets so i think that should segue us into our next meal or dessert yeah so we're gonna do it okay so we're gonna make a chocolate pudding everybody okay absolutely yeah we're not gonna use the typical cream and all the different things that go into that to make a pudding so what's going to make it creamy we're just going to uh [Applause] [Music] so i'm more excited about this because it's pudding and from what i understand i'm not the only lactose intolerant person at the table no one at this table but now you're giving us puddings so we're super excited so let's do this i'm just gonna scoop and then once again because i like options i've got some raspberries i've got a little bit of granola and then i have some desiccated coconut flakes this is like the lightest if you've never told me what was in this you wouldn't know yeah a lot of times i don't and we're eating it right out of the blender but if it was ice cold goodness and yes you can do that you know for somebody who didn't eat vegan before you sure didn't murder that i'm just i'm just saying he did some damage on that pudding i will say this is delicious thank you this is delicious you have i am a believer thank you you need to stay in your bowl i love my fries but as you can see like vegan food it's legit it's cool and what i like about it is in the kitchen it challenges you a lot of people may need to take cooking classes and that's fine that's perfectly okay go to vegan restaurants or vegan-friendly restaurants and explore different dishes you may need to expand your repertoire but it's definitely not limiting it's gonna actually open you up to having something more than just chicken on your plate well all these breakfast cereals over here are vegan that's my lane that's the one that i'm driving in i'm just gonna put some almond milk or soy milk on top of that and call it a day what pasta is already vegan amen this is like you know what all these ramen noodles that we're about to eat this is affordable this is my life you know taco bell we're not gonna put any sour cream or cheese on this we're we have these bean burritos and this seven layer burrito is now a five layer burrito but that's still gonna be okay and what the cinnamon twists are vegan this is what we're gonna eat [Music] part of my vegan journey was retraining my taste buds it's not necessarily that hot wings taste better than kale it's just i grew up eating hot wings i've eaten hot wings for decades [Music] this is the funny thing people talk about vegan food as though it exists outside of our food system like you know like i'm going to eat this apple and this is a vegan apple the apple was already vegan before we put a qualifier on it vegan food isn't nasty it is our perception of food and our insistence of putting food into little boxes and labeling things very specifically when i first tasted kale i was like okay this is some nasty [ __ ] like it was all better but because i knew how good it was for you i i just started eating it despite the taste and eventually i started to like it now i'm hooked you can juice it with some strawberries and bananas coconut water boom so just having like just trying out new things kale chips so many different things you know you can explore dr milton mills did two great lectures are we designed to eat meat and the biology of disgust both on youtube my favorite argument is when you compare humans to natural carnivores so you take a lion if a lion sees like a live piece of meat a zebra or even like a gazelle carcass you know he's going to salivate and get excited he's gonna want to bite into it but with humans if i see a live cow or a pig carcass by nature i'm gonna be disgusted like i'm not gonna want to bite into it in order to consume it humans have to take off the head take away the fur take away the feathers we have to take away everything that reminds us it's an animal and then we add seasoning to it pepper onion basil oregano which are all plant-based seasonings then we have to cook it to completely change the properties so what we're really doing that we don't realize is we're taking this meat and we're trying to make it taste more plant-like he made some other good points too [Music] it wouldn't be my style to shy away from sex because it's a huge part of the human experience so let's do it i just [Music] what you put into your body affects your hygiene particularly your body odor so when i ate garbage i was not 100 pleased with my smell south of the border i mean it was by no means catfish but there was just this like you know all-day odor after a long day or run at the gym and so if a man wanted to be intimate i didn't feel comfortable going right into it i would always say oh let me go pee and i'll run to the bathroom and do a smell check and then once i change to a more plant-based diet let's just say when you eat clean you smell clean no matter what time of day you won't need to do small checks you know there's a lot of talk around the politics of respectability with black women and that we don't talk about things like that and if you're a person who has a womb and a vagina and you're dealing with certain issues like inflammation pms or you're dry and it's hard to engage in you know sexual intercourse you may not know that certain things you're doing could affect that furthermore there's actually an association with plant-based diets and both potency and virility studies have shown that the more meat and animal food than people eat their fertility tends to go down and also their virality their ability to perform in the bedroom is that much less i'm in my late 50s and i don't have any problems with functioning i'm 51 years old now i like when i hear that and i know that but i don't have to take any blue pills or yellow pills i don't have to take any pills to be john sally my wife taps me i tap her back i just wrote that [ __ ] oh my god i can't believe i said it and for any man struggling with erectile dysfunction i would urge you try a plant-based diet according to the physicians committee for responsible medicine impotence is a blood flow condition that stems from poor vascular health so if you adopt a plant-based diet your arteries open up and when your arteries open up blood flow starts and someone else will probably stand up [Music] i used to feel cool like going places you know based on my appearance you know what i'm saying you don't think like you see me you be like this [ __ ] don't eat meat this [ __ ] vegan you know what i'm saying you know based on our courage based on my occurrence you wouldn't think that and i used to get such a kick and thrill out of oh now i'm part taking that stuff right there man that stuff the kid you know what i'm saying like i used to motivate you know what i'm saying motivate make me feel good you know what i'm saying so i'm just eager to get back to that leader king king mentality man just tighten all the way back up again man i love it and lead by example man leave by example my fiance and i used to work at the same production company and his male friends would give him so much crap over the vegan lunches i used to give to him like it was it was all in fun but it kind of hinted at this idea that there was something effeminate about you know salads and plant-based foods and there's always been this association with men and their big rack of ribs on the grill and as i did it like real men eat meat yeah i eat the meat of a coconut eat a banana but as far as eating a dead animal that doesn't make you a real man i get so angry about the gendering of food i'm angry at the mainstream community that thinks that veganism or like eating vegetables is feminizing and that eating meat is fetishized as more masculine and i also get angry with with vegan activists who try to fight against that toxic masculinity by presenting veganism as not threatening somehow to masculinity like no no no you can still be masculine and eat tofu i had a colleague tell me he went home for the holiday and when they were passing the ham and everything he didn't take any and his his grandmother said oh you didn't get a ham he said no grandma you know i stopped eating it and it wasn't her response it was the other men around the table who immediately began to associate that with feminization aren't you gonna try some of my honey roasted i am i'm i'm afraid i don't i don't eat pork man don't eat pork a black man that don't eat pork is a traitor to his race i've never i've never even done it's going to be a whole new taste experience it is they got they got the tacos i don't want to say what type of taco meat they're going to have in the tacos like what does it say they have um walnut cranberry meat this is why i say people think food is just food no it is filled with so many layers right of expectation of anticipation of you should you shouldn't it is a heavy heavy heavy material object that carries so much power the masculine aspect of my diet is really that i eat for energy i eat to empower myself i eat as a form of discipline but i choose to be disciplined you know to me that's an expression of masculinity live by code you live by your wisdom your experience these are things that i attribute to manhood when i see men frown up at healthy foods it shows me a lack of awareness like a lack of regard for your own well-being and just a lack of ambition to want to do better for yourself and those are qualities that i associate with children not men real masculinity is not about arrogance it's about humility and about compassion and caring and doing one's part within the overall scheme of things for the greater good you get to be 45 and 50 and you're doped up on pills you now just starting to get old enough to really develop some wisdom and that you can really be the patriarch if you're vegan it helps you stay in line with your life purpose and that's what masculinity is all about being a protector being on purpose being vital so that you can provide not rhyme is that rancho boy didn't mean a rash one time okay all right so this is a was it buffalo you say what i definitely take these down there's all this focus on women how we feel about our bodies and oh all women want to look like barbie in the same sentence men want to look like gi joe so because there's this myth that becoming vegan makes one really skinny a lot of men won't even entertain a plant-based diet so this all looks beautiful colorful thank you displayed there's no meat here none which is blowing my mind right and i like to work out and keep our muscles tight right how this doesn't look like it would help this one i would pass out in my workout sure and i understand what you're saying and what you're thinking the thing i love about this we could put legumes in this that's going to give you more protein the bulk up so you've got your garbanzo beans your black beans your white beans your kidney beans red beans and then you can get into your lentils black eyed peas we have what's called muscle dysmorphia so we want to be slow you know what i mean because all the superheroes are small you know i mean superman is swole you know everybody who is a man is slow so if you don't fit that athletic bill then what's your psychological disposition men don't have to sacrifice their weight to switch to a healthy plant-based diet david carter nfl defensive lineman 300-pound vegan a gorilla is 800 pounds raw foodist a cow is 1 000 pound raw foodist hippopotamus raw foodist elephant vegan giraffe vegan the largest mammals on the planet don't eat meat i eat plants left iron my book that i wrote with my wife and my trainer scott shetler was an experiment i'm a long distance runner i've been skinny all my life but i want to show the power of plants and i want to gain 20 pounds and everybody say yeah you can gain weight but you can't be doing all that cardio i was like no no i'm gonna keep running i went from 167 to 187 and you don't have to mess up your liver and your kidneys taking all kind of powdered isolate proteins all this stuff and spending eighty dollars a keg you know it's just real foods i eat a lot of pumpkin seeds a lot of yams there are several male athletes who've accomplished fifth physique on a plant-based diet so how did your game change when you became a vegetarian do you feel like that impacted your game oh yeah i went vegetarian in my sixth year it was so funny because i was like 2 35 i went down to 219 my cousin set up like a black match running up and down about but uh i no longer have back pain i used to always have back problems i found out how to compact the colon all that sugar all that iced tea shellfish lobster and shrimp literally i would have back pains two or three days your body is going in the spasm trying to get it out back problems this is what happens when you eat things that don't digest [Music] before i became vegan i gotten up to about 167 pounds and i had mixed emotions about that size like part of me knew i shouldn't get caught up in this whole like eurocentric idea of beauty that revolves around being really skinny but you know deep down i cannot deny the fact that i just wanted to be skinnier i only like saying that out loud so when i first went vegan i went down like 20 pounds over the course of a few months without working out or anything and then my weight pretty much it just stabilized instead of doing the slow climb it was doing when i ate meat but aside from the physical change becoming vegan it helped me develop a whole new relationship with my body when my weight was higher i was eating garbage you know i was drinking all the time i was never working out so i was in this constant state of guilt and constantly mad at myself because i couldn't maintain a sex i didn't love my body i didn't take pride in it but now size six or not i don't have that guilt because i know i eat the way that i'm supposed to so when you value yourself it changes the relationship you have with your body whether you are four or 14. [Music] here she comes you better watch your step [Music] she's gonna break your heart [Music] i started in modeling and i was always my whole life a very small person my family they're all very meaning very thin people i grew up on meat and potatoes kind of diet and you know vegetables were just kind of an afterthought [Music] my relationship with food has always been tricky i actually grew up dealing with eating disorders [Music] i don't think i ever really got pleasure from food or enjoyed it until i started eating this way i actually started eating for nourishment and it's been a really big part of my healing journey not focusing so much on numbers sizes but really how am i feeling how am i looking how's my energy how's my overall health how's my mind how's all these other things that really matter [Music] women of color we tend to have more curves you know personally i didn't get the ass but you know you want something you lose some but for some women veganism can come across as an attack on the black female body image people have good intentions when they're saying this is what you can look like if you take on this particular type of diet i noticed with the research i had done in the last 12 years looking at visual representations of the better or perfect vegan body images mostly of white or light-skinned people thin people younger people able-bodied people most people aren't even thinking about it when they put campaigns out to go vegan when they choose who they're going to model for a magazine that is pro-vegan or animal rights or vegetarian understand that hey we are actually excluding most of the world if we continue to promote that the pure or the healthy vegan body adheres to all of these ideas around health that's actually connected to whiteness it took a while before i actually came across vegan women of color who even had a fuller body type so i actually believed this idea that if you eat vegan you automatically become really skinny i try not to kind of perpetuate that rhetoric and understand that there's plenty of evidence that shows that there are people of all body types that are healthy and unhealthy depending on their you know nutritional situation just like a meat-based diet you know people who follow plant-based diets will have different aesthetic outcomes it depends on how much you eat whether you still consume a lot of carbs or if your foods are high in sugar how much you work out and so forth and you look at jlo serena beyonce they all endorse plant-based eating and they have curves for days actually the first time i have more curves than i've ever had my weight has been pretty consistent for these entire 30 years i'm told and i believe that i look younger than i am thank you and that's a huge benefit for me and i honestly see veganism as a window this is the way that i'm living to be happy to be healthy to be fulfilled if i step in your kitchen and it looks dirty like i'm not eating anything from it not even a sill bag of chips i'm good so i look at these factory farms with the same scrutiny because that's where the meat is held that's supposed to go in my body and the more videos i saw in modern farming practices there's no way i'm eating it there's no way i'm ever going to give that to my child like you have dead and diseased animals mixed in with the live ones standing in their own poop for weeks nothing about that registers is clean to me and then i was reading tracy's book by any greens necessary and apparently they allow a certain percentage of feces in the meat so i'm good when cows are going through that slaughterhouse process and they're sliced they're hung up on metal hooks and their stomachs are sliced open everything falls out onto the equipment the way animals are murdered the way they are gathered the way they are farmed the diseases they carry that right there should be enough not to eat it if i took you to this place downtown los angeles this chicken warehouse whatever they want to call it and at a certain time of day when they are murdering all the chickens you can smell the death and there's people lined up to get these chickens because they felt well they killed them fresh and i sat there and i couldn't believe the smell if you were to smell where they were you wouldn't want to eat a lot of people say well i don't eat chicken anymore i don't eat beef so i eat fish and they can't seem to let go of the fish fish is the holdout that's the thing there must be some meat on their plate and it's going to be a fish fish is contaminated with mercury and with arsenics and with other industrial pollutants and it gets in the flesh of the fish and you cannot cook it out there are also a lot of parasites in the water that get into the fish's digestive tract let me tell you i went fishing maybe three four years ago i don't want to totally gross you out but i have this very graphic image in my head where i'm like it made it hard for me to ever eat fish because i got it out the water and all of these worms came out of it i'm not joking and they had someone on deck that like you know cut the fish for you prepared it and they were like oh it's normal this may have been the way it's always been right but this is not the way it's going to be with me before so people turn their noses up at a diet that consists of fresh fruits and vegetables but parasite infested disease rotting meat with two percent crap in it is okay so we'll go ahead and head in here if you want to follow me and i'll let you know who likes their space who's friendly some of the goats and sheep here are really shy and kind of don't want as much attention so you want to make sure we keep them comfortable she goes over to every person it's a two teeth okay okay i just want to make sure we cool just want to make sure we cool it's estimated about 260 million male chicks are killed every single year in the u.s upon their birth this is done with really cruel methods such as being electrocuted on electrified kill plate being gassed or simply just being thrown into a trash can to suffocate [Applause] thank you hi my name is genesis and i'm eight years old i am vegan and an activist because i don't believe animals should be put in slaughterhouses and circuses people who don't have to eat animals to live all my favorite foods like pizza and mac and cheese i can still eat in a vegan version i became an activist to protest for what's right to show kids they have a voice i help people who are blinded they don't know what's happening to the animals i'm here for a purpose my purpose is to get the whole world to go vegan thank you for helping me peace she wasn't even four years old she always had chicken nuggets that was her favorite meal at the time she said hey mom where do we get our food from and i told her we kill animals for the food that she was eating and she was devastated and i didn't even know she knew what death meant at that age and she said well we have to kill what is it i said well chickens and cows and she said you know what i don't ever want to eat this again my six-year-old brother i told him one day when we were driving there was this girl and it was ran over and he said look it's a dennis girl i'm like yeah that's the same as your meat and stuff and he said no it's not i said yeah because they kill animals for it and how do you like that he said i don't like that so then he he went vegetarian and then i convinced him to go vegan just from him saying you know the milk that you're drinking comes from a cow's boob and i was like do you like to drink out of mama cow's boo and he said i don't want to drink out of no one's boob so i was like yeah go vegan up until a few years ago i really didn't care about animal rights i'm not proud of that at all but it's the truth [Music] i remember when i was working at a talent agency years ago and one of the actresses came in telling me about how she rescued this baby squirrel and she took said squirrel to a rescue shelter in malibu where he had a clear side view of the ocean organic acorns and whatever the hell was and i remember i was just so annoyed because i was like you know what somewhere there's a squirrel that's living the life better than me and my irritation at that moment kind of summed up how i felt about animal rights like this is a privileged issue unfortunately in some ways that it is because we do afford the ability to be worried about another species to be worried about what's happening to animals when many people are just striving for survival if you are living in an inner city where you're dodging bullets just to get home or you are struggling just to put food on the table from day to day those are your primary concerns and you have less time less energy less mental space to devote to seemingly as esoteric as animal rights i think people who are doing vegan outreach or trying to campaign for veganism they have to be aware of that and that when you just approach someone and say that you should focus only on saving animals it makes invisible the material struggles that most of the people united states if not the world have and just trying to survive as humans themselves i acknowledge that we as a movement need to be better about that i don't think it means us going into communities of color and saying this is what you should and shouldn't do it doesn't mean comparing slavery to animals and things like that which i find defensive i think it's more looking at these structures that have been in place that exploit and kill living beings we've been robbed collectively of our empathy i want black people to have that empathy back maybe i'll try to take out meat from my diet once a week or maybe i'll stop using makeup that is tested on animals to start where you're at and not make it about you know just doing this overnight thing what are y'all going to have for lunch first things no actually i was thinking about a kale shake already nice monday i might not have any meat i might do a little meatless back when humans were hunters and gatherers violence against animals it was somewhat justified you know they didn't have the wide variety of alternatives we have today but now you know all the sadistic inhumane animal practices they got going on they're not only barbaric but it's completely unnecessary and coming from a spiritual place in my opinion i think the whole thing has just become really ungodly they get the pigs and stuff and they keep them in cages and then they can barely even move and they take them and they kill them for the food but we don't have to eat animals i think it's important that you become inspired by things that make you feel good and it makes me feel good to know that 7 500 land animals didn't have to die because of me per year we're handed this narrative that we can only care about one thing at a time and that if you care about other species communities then that somehow mitigates your commitment to black liberation and that's a lie that's a lie that white supremacy has given us we can care about more than one thing and indeed we're compelled to care about more than one thing because our liberation is linked animal liberation and black liberation and queer liberation are all connected to one another i eventually want to get to a place where abuse is not something so embedded in my lifestyle i'm challenging people of color like i'm calling my people to task the same way we want people to take arms for our calls the same way we want people to be compassionate for us you know i put the ball in your court like if you see this cruelty if it doesn't bother you okay sit tight but if you know in your heart that what happens in these tapes is wrong be strong and be disciplined enough to eat that conviction for me i grew up in dc and i had certain examples you know i had the strong black woman the independent black woman i didn't have the compassionate black woman so that's why there's like a break in my empathy but to hear a woman like you you're setting an example like you're an example that a lot of people don't have thank you who with a heart can watch when a cow cries when his calf is taken away from it i mean how can somebody then just be so bold to say but i have to have this to live when you don't what right do i have to take another sentient being's life when i don't need it to survive and what right would i have anyway is what really motivates me when i first embarked on my own vegan journey i felt very alone i felt disconnected from the mainstream vegan community and i didn't see myself represented and that's a common theme that i've heard other people saying people of color every time i've had conversations with them about veganism it's immediately off-putting to them because the way the veganism is offered to us it seems like this almost elitist thing that is only available for certain segments of the population i worry sometimes about being used as a token instead of recognizing that we have every right to be there we have just as much knowledge and experience to be talking on these issues and you don't need to just bring me out when the chattayada which is the mexican rodeo comes to town i can't tell you how many people come up to me mostly young women of color who say do you know how good it feels to have someone who looks like me up there the need is out there but we have a movement that seems to be very focused on not us and if you don't want to do it for the animals do it for people do it for our community animal rights and human rights intersect you know we live in an ecosystem where you think they put in these factory farms when you look at factory farming and animals raised for food you also see this taking place where you have high concentrated amounts of manure of animals and where these animals are being raised are in communities of color so in north carolina you have predominantly black communities living around pig farms where they are suffering from nosebleeds and headaches and nausea they can't open their windows because the flies and the stench their property values go down because who wants to live near a pig farm so that's why by stopping eating animal products by not drinking that milk by not eating any animal products you are not participating in a system that also causes harm to communities living in these areas which are predominantly communities of color and that's just scaling it down to a smaller problem specific to our communities this is a worldwide problem raising animals for human consumption consumes enormous amounts of resources one of the reasons that global hunger is such a problem is because we grow enough food to feed every human being on this planet several times over but the reason there's a shortage of food is because we take that food instead of eating it directly we turn around and feed it to animals and that in essence creates scarcity because roughly estimated it takes about 13 pounds of feed to put one pound of tissue on a cow the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions is animal based agribusiness factory farming the poop and the burps from animals that are factory farm they create more global warming emissions and all of the world's transportation combined and that is the world over that's just not in the united states it's the world over it's the rainforest that are being demolished so that cattle can graze to produce meat it's the water that's being polluted it's the soil that's being eroded so factory farming for meat and dairy-based diets are the biggest contributor to global warming the real elephant in the room is that a lot of people of color don't really give a bleep about the environment even me personally growing up like i watch captain planet i never litter i did earth day once or twice in school but that's like as deep as it got the examples for that kind of thinking just weren't there in my community i believe that when we get people to critically think about their world their behaviors will change as well talking about veganism or dietary veganism isn't the only way to get people to not eat me the reality is we all need to be thinking about this stuff because we all live on planet earth [Music] so this this is for someone like me so i'm gonna help you out it's very difficult because everything you said was incredible but first of all i couldn't come up with those ingredients probably couldn't find them yes you could and wouldn't know what to do with them i mean me personally a novice you have a computer absolutely okay it's very important for african americans to teach each other because we have a lot of distrust about what is good for us what's healthy for us a lot of times we don't even trust each other so it's important who the messenger is so i commend and applaud all of the folks out there who are getting the message out through social media where it's palatable for everybody to understand and the folks out there who are getting the message out through hip-hop what we're trying to do and what we are actually doing is we're making sure that a new thing is born here today and it's called health and wellness mixed with hip-hop the tenth element of hip-hop is health and wellness so hip-hop is the biggest force on planet earth when it comes to youth and we want to take that energy and put environmentalism in them put health and wellness in it and make sure that this is a sustainable movement that people all around the world can be a part of i think it's important for the youth to see somebody that's college educated getting their master's degree and staying in the community doing work gives them that sense of community and responsibility and for the elders to know that there's younger people that they can feel happy about so i think it's just about being a positive influence and kind of just being a good reflection [Music] and i think it's important everything you know saying whatever we do we can do it in our own space it like encourages everybody else and the more black people go vegan but you know the the higher the potential is for it to become a part of the national consciousness we've seen trends of black hair being appropriated our language being appropriated like have black people go vegan and i tell you what in a couple of weeks like the animal exploitation industry is going to be shaking in the leather boots because we have such power i don't want to be an invisible vegan i can't teach and uplift others from an invisible space i want to be the visible black female vegan example i wish i had growing up [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: Tonic

Views: 784,269

Keywords: Tonic, Yoga, Recipes, health, exercise, cedric the entertainer, the invisible vegan full movie, the invisible vegan documentary, the invisible vegan trailer, the invisible vegan summary, black community documentary, black community mental health, black community food, african american food history, african american food culture, african american food traditions, african american food dishes, african american veganism, vegan documentary

Id: 0BqB4MZRMgI

Length: 79min 23sec (4763 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 12 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/zodmagus]

I also like the fact that they talk about stereotypes and how black people use to see and in some cases still see veganism as a white thing. We've heard u/mykectown speak about this thoroughly.