Raw Sustainability!

I am just thrilled to have been a guest speaker at Vancouver’s RAW Foundation for their exceptional 200-hour Raw Food Educator Program this past weekend.

Janice Skoreyko, Founder of RAW Foundation and Canada’s leading Raw Food educator, has been a guest on Bif Naked’s Rock Star Cooking show, has just launched her new DVD “Raw Food to Live For!” in Whole Foods Market, and is finishing up her first recipe book. Amazing!

Janice has acquired an astounding body of knowledge from her studies around the globe, and empowers every student that graces her culinary arts school with the astonishing benefits of adopting a living foods diet.

As if this weren’t enough, for the  incredible 200-hour Raw Food Educator Program she has truly outdone herself by assembling a panel of expert speakers from eight different related disciplines to further enrich the deep knowledge she’s instilling in the lucky students.

Raw Food is food that is not processed or cooked at high temperatures (read: roasted, baked or fried) so that the maximum quantity and quality of nature’s nourishing nutrients go into your body, instead of being lost before they even get there. While the building blocks of the diet are fruits, vegetables, seeds, and nuts, don’t kid yourself – raw cuisine is as elaborate and diverse as any other!

From a sustainability perspective, raw food is exciting for several reasons. Primarily, it does not include meat or animal products. In case you haven’t heard, growing meat for food is possibly the single biggest contributor to global warming and climate change.

Look for more detailed information in some of my other posts. The verdict – even if if you do eat meat, eat less. At lot less. If you do eat meat or other animal products, do your best to buy from a local or grass-fed source for meat and cruelty-free, free range and organic sources for eggs and dairy. It’s the biggest single move you can make for the planet, and is also a much better move for your health.

Furthermore, raw food is all plant based, uncooked food. Whatever “waste” you make (read: not wrappers and plastic – only orange peels and apple cores!)  is perfect material for compost. It is by definition the closest thing to nature’s closed loop life cycle whereby any left overs become nutrients for more plants. Awesome!

If you haven’t tried a 100% raw food diet, don’t fret – simply start by adding more living foods to your current diet to increase the healthy benefits nature’s food can give you. Instead of a few leaves on the side of the plate – make your salad the main course! Add nuts and avocados to your greens for protein and healthy fats, some shredded carrots and beets, and whatever else is in season. Your planet, and your body, with thank you!

For more information on raw food education, contact the best – the RAW Foundation at 778-839-8424 or info @ rawfoundation.ca. If nothing else, sign up for their free newsletter and get free recipes each month for raw and living foods you can easily make yourself!  

Raw food and sustainability go hand in hand. Personal and planetary health in a single step. Try it out!

~ Graeme Hodson-Walker

$3,000,000,000 (that’s Billion) and counting in tax breaks to oil companies since 2009 – when Harper said he would stop doing just that.

In 2009 if you looked at the 20 most profitable companies worldwide, 7 of the 20 were oil companies. And their combined profit was roughly equal to the other 13 companies from all other industries added together.

So it’s the most profitable industry globally. Add to this the fact that governments subsidize oil and gas to the tune of $800 billion a year globally and $1.4 billion annually in Canada alone. You have to ask: Why are governments subsidizing the most profitable industry and why subsidize climate change?

The only way to affect change is to take action. Thanks to the Climate Action Network for their subsidy ticker at the link below. Click it to see the current total! Then take 60 seconds to send the pre-written email message to the Prime Minister who represents us to let him know what you think about it.

http://www.climateactionnetwork.ca/e/fossil-tax-breaks/oil-barrel/index.html

Thorium! The world’s sustainable fuel source?

I get so excited to hear about SOLUTIONS, and here’s one with incredible potential.

Thorium, a chemically-stable flouride salt, is gaining momentum as a safe, cheap, and sustainable replacement for volatile uranium in nuclear power generators. 

Thorium turns to a liquid at a much lower temperature than uranium and does not have to operate at such high pressures, so Liquid Flouride Thorium Reactors, or LFTRs (say, “Lifters”), do not require the massive safety walls that are normally needed to contain uranium reactions. What’s more, LFTRs do not necessarily need to be located next to a large body of water for cooling.

In an emergency power loss, a frozen plug at the base of the LFTR core would melt automatically, letting the hot thorium run into a containment chamber where it’s heat could dissipate slowly, without the immediate need for cooling water, power, or any human intervention.

These safety properties reduce as much as 80% of the cost of building current reactors, and drastically reduces the requirements for their large size and infrastructure. In fact, design already exist for thorium reactors that could fit on the back of flatbed truck! Thorium does produce radioactive materials, yet they dissipate in hundreds, not tens of thousands, of years.

Thorium also burns at a very high efficiency, compared with us only getting about 1% of the potential out of each unit of uranium. Thorium is 4x more abundant than uranium, so these two metrics mean that thorium is about 200x more efficient than uranium and MILLIONS of times more efficient than fossil fuels! A mere football-field sized amount of Thorium is enough to power the entire world for a year.

And what about fossil fuels? Well, get this: LFTR can manufacture substitutes! A LFTR can be used to split water (H2O) and combine it with CO2 that is harvested from the atmosphere to produce hydrogen, methanol, ammonia, and dimethyl ether (a direct replacement for diesel fuel).  Imagine – carbon neutral gasoline and diesel, sustainable and self-produced. Incredible!

Thorium reactors can be small, cheap, safe, and highly efficient. They can offer a distributed energy production model that could power entire cities, towns, individual homes, cars, trucks and…? The potential is enormous.

Got some time? Watch Kirk Sorenson in his riveting TED talk , just posted today.

~ Graeme Hodson-Walker.