Please remember the official challenge was held in October, so if you have any concerns, comments or questions please get in touch with me: jeannepoirier@yahoo.com
15 Day Plant-Rich Diet Challenge!
How is your challenge going? Did you try non-dairy milk in your beverage? Have an experience to share? Email us here.
Week 1 Breakfast Challenge – Eat a plant-based breakfast!
Plant-Based Recipe of the Day
Plant-based Banana Bread with Toasted Walnuts
Like us, do you also like a slice (or 2) of a light, fluffy and delicious banana bread with a cup of coffee in the morning? Or how about eating it as a snack during the day? Or even better, maybe pack it in your lunch box? Try baking this magic bread/cake!
By Vegan Richa
-
Prep Time: 15 Minutes
-
Cook Time: 55 Minutes
-
Total Time: 1 Hour 10 Minutes
-
Servings: 6
Fact for the Day: Meat Production’s Role in Land Degradation
Factory farms have a tremendously detrimental impact on both our land availability and soil health. Industrialized livestock production uses a significant amount of land surface – and one-third of the planet’s arable (farmable) land is occupied by crops for livestock feed, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.
-
Overgrazing without sufficient recovery periods causes soil erosion. The damage caused by animal hooves is devastating.
-
Monoculture-based overfarming is done to produce corn, soy, and oats to feed animals. This reduces available nutrition in the soil. To supplement this depletion, farmers use fertilizers and pesticides, which have numerous residual impacts, including the pollution of waterways and decline in pollinator populations.
-
Deforestation to make way for more pastures causes the soil to lose protection from tree canopy cover and root systems, thus exacerbating soil erosion.
Read the full article here.
Bonus Tip: Time in the kitchen
For some people, one of the biggest challenges to adopting a plant-rich diet is that they think they’ll spend the rest of their lives in the kitchen, doing nothing but cooking and cleaning dishes all day.
While it’s true that healthier eating generally means that we need to get into the kitchen and start making more of our own food, there are easy strategies that we can implement to cut down on time spent cooking and washing dishes.
One of the most basic is simply to make enough for several meals each time you cook so that you only need to cook every couple of days. For example, last night’s leftovers can be packed for today’s lunch and/or served for tonight’s dinner. And you can always make extra to freeze for an easy meal at a later date.
Another great strategy is to make “one-pot” meals to minimize the number of dirty dishes. Click HERE for a great 4-minute video showing how to make five easy and delicious one-pot plant-based dinners (recipes are below the video).
And guess what? Washing dishes is a whole lot easier when you’re cooking plant-based meals because there’s no grease! Plus, some dishes need nothing more than a quick rinse with water.
One thing to keep in mind as we start doing more cooking is that there is nothing more important for our health than eating nutritious food. We literally ARE what we eat. Knowing this may help us to adopt a new perspective on cooking, i.e. it is a wonderful opportunity to ensure optimal health for ourselves and our families (and…to get creative!).
In tomorrow’s email, we’ll explore “batch cooking” which is where you make a large quantity of food at one time that will last for multiple days. That’s another way to cut down on cooking and cleaning.
Speaker Series Day 5 – Kelvin Ng
Kelvin is an engineer and the Business Development Director for ASEAN and Green Monday – a program to encourage eating plant-based meals once a week to fight climate change.
He is a former executive with YUM! Brands, and shares the current trends and economic benefits of the growing plant-based product market and its exciting ability to reverse climate change and improve human health.
That’s it for Day 5!
See you soon (aka tomorrow),
The ESRAG Plant-Rich Diet Task Force
(P.S. Please feel free to contact us at any time with questions and/or comments.)
This Task Force resides under the Environmental Sustainability Rotary Action Group (ESRAG) and operates in accordance with Rotary International policy, but is not an agency of, nor controlled by, Rotary International.