Author, speaker, spiritual teacher and mystical poet
What book is on your bedside table?
The Bloodless Revolution: A Cultural History of Vegetarianism from 1600 to Modern Times by Tristram Stuart (W.W. Norton & Co).
Page-turner or doorstop?
The pages turn themselves. This is the history of food that your grocer, mother, and history professor never told you about.
Would you put it on your Desert Island list of must-haves?
Both desert and dessert. It is a read-and-re-read must-have in the lifeboat, even if the sharks are circling.
Describe the book in one sentence.
The story of how discovering India confronted Christian Europe with millions of people whose vegetarian diet echoed the idyllic descriptions of the Garden of Eden and gave rise to the whole-food culture.
If you designed a poster for the book, what would it look like?
It would show all the major European philosophers and intellectuals at a huge dinner table debating whether to be a vegetarian or carnivore.
List three new words you learned from reading it.
That seldom happens, but okay:
noirism and biocentrism and, oh well, two will have to do.
To whom would you recommend this
book?
Epigastrically challenged omnivorous polyglots, vegan PETA-loving tofu-munching herbivores, anyone killing themselves with junk food, philosophers, political scientists, history buffs, and anyone who hates being lied to. People who eat food.
How often did you find yourself re-reading a paragraph because it was so delicious?
Often enough that I began to think of myself as a bovine book browser with four stomachs trying to absorb the rudiments of the subject. Moo is OOM spelled backwards.
They say that everyone has one great novel in them. What would yours be about?
The adventures of a boy and a girl who turn the world upside-down looking for historical truth. They find it, write a book, but can’t get a publisher to touch it—too smart for the market. Jeb Bush is president. Gas and water cost the same. McDonald’s introduces a new GMO salad with their “whatever” burger.
