My first and last meeting as a Beam Green member

Last night, I was very excited to attend my first Beam Green meeting as a full member. After loving the first two meetings I attended, I signed up and invited a couple other bloggers to come to August's meeting with me.

The weather was a tad nast when I left work last night, so I waited out a short rain storm at Bonobo's, enjoying their Coco Malt shake (coconut meat, coconut water & "live chocolate malt") over A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers. Loving this read so far!

I then headed uptown to Tavern on the Green, where Beam Green meetings are held. As usual, there was a glorious bouquet of juices from Liquiteria...

...and a spread of fresh fruit & veggies, sushi rolls from Whole Foods and cookies from Babycakes.
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The "Mr. Greens" juice from Liquiteria is delicious. It pretty much contains everything but the kitchen sink...beets, greens, ginger, algae, yo mama...I dunno, but it's great.

We also got to sample some food from a local raw delivery service called Three Wishes, which was a nice surprise. Their raw lasagna is almost as good as Pure's. Almost.

My plate was leaning a bit by the time I got to snap a terrible picture. Most of the pictures that follow are terrible too, but you get the idea! The lighting was just not workin' for me.

My main plate had a pile of crudites and Whole Foods maki, as well as a nori roll sample from the Three Wishes table.

Sometimes the simplest stuff is the best!

Mary Boehmer, founder of Beam Green, took the stage after we'd all had a chance to mingle and nosh a bit...

Followed by a Q&A session with Gene Stone, one of the founders of Stogo vegan ice cream shop here in NYC. I learned that Stogo features vegan ice creams with soy, coconut or hemp bases (all sweetened with agave). The most popular flavor is salted caramel, but the most "manly" flavor is mint chocolate chip! Apparently, the dudes favor that one. Not sure what the logic behind that is, but I do know that the boyf is consistent with that tendency. How funny!

He also ghost-wrote The Engine 2 Diet, which is a month-long vegan diet plan that was tried on a house full of firefighters with great success in lowering cholesterol and reducing risk of disease. Gene told us he has ghost-written dozens of books, including autobiographies of celebrities and the like. Who knows--you might have read something he wrote!

I was in extremely good company last night. Somehow, I managed not to get a picture of Gena, but of course, she was there, along with Dori, Missy and Melissa.

And for my contribution to the cause (besides the membership fee, that is), I wanted to share the wealth by introducing my favorite Brooklyn bloggers to Beam Green: Sarah, Vani and Olga!

Huzzah for bloggers loving Beam Green!

But back to Stogo: don't think we didn't get to sample the goods!

We were each served a scoop of their vanilla and chocolate coconut-based ice creams, which I enjoyed a little too much alongside a cup of tea and macaroon from Babycakes. Mother o'Gawd, I could live on this stuff.

After the necessary ice cream break, we heard from Gil Jacobs, a local colonic hydrotherapist. I heard him speak at the first Beam Green meeting I attended and got a lot from his overarching take on cleansing and becoming more healthy (highlights from which you can read here).

The theme of his brief talk last night was disease and illness. While I could see the logic behind what he was saying (if only from his point of view as a raw vegan and colonic hydrotherapist), I fear he may have alienated those in the audience new to his style of speaking. He presents cleansing (as a verb, not a noun) in a cut-and-dry manner that is at the same time likely overwhelming to anyone steeped in the Standard American Diet. He was saying that illness and disease (everything from cancer to diabetes) originate in the buildup of toxins in the body, and that furthermore, children born of people with a high level of toxicity begin life with inherent problems which will likely manifest themselves similarly (drug addiction, obesity, diabetes, etc.). I am over-simplifying here, but this is clearly not territory where I am comfortable! I will cut myself off with a "you had to be there."

Lastly, we listened to David Phillips speak about going green spiritually.

To be perfectly honest, this guy lost me. The basis of his teaching is Kabbalah, and what I took from him was encouragement to bury our own egos (garbage?) in order to find the root of what ails us spiritually and then solve it by forgoing personal agenda. I think. We all received a book on green Kabbalah to accompany this lecture, so I guess I'll have to refer back to it at some point!

In conclusion, this is what I thought of the Kabbalah talk:

Fruity. (Kidding, those are my apricots from the farmer's market. I just wanted to squeeze 'em in!)

Overall, I'd say my my day turned into a date with a coconut!

(Date-Coconut rolls from the bulk bins at Integral Yoga. AMAZING. But just another awkward picture insert.)

Between the above snack, my shake from Bonobo's and ice cream from Stogo, I may just have consumed several entire coconuts yesterday! That is the way to roll, dawgs. Maximum delicious.

But this story does not have a happy ending, alas. At the very end of the meeting, Mary informed us that it would, in fact, be the last. She has been offered an opportunity (still a mystery, as yet) that she cannot turn down, making last night both my first and last meeting as a Beam Green member! I'm so bummed, especially when I'd just gotten a couple other bloggers in on it with me. We'll just have to try and come up with an equally awesome excuse to hang out! Luckily, I have plenty of ideas, most of them involving food. (Is there really any other kind of idea?)

Beam Green's Newest Member: Me!

This post is way overdue, but I attended my second Beam Green event a couple weeks ago (July 22) and promised myself I would give it some air time on the blog. You see, I'm Beam Green's newest member! I really believe in the organization's cause (the Green Baby Movement), love the things I've learned at the past two meetings (read about my first here) and most of all, I love surrounding myself with these ladies.

To be among like-minded people is one of the best feelings in the world, so I have to pay great respect to Beam Green's founder, Mary Boehmer. (Advance apologies for poor photos from the meeting.)

Month after month, she manages to bring together the greatest minds in nutrition, well-being and environmentalism. In just two meetings I have learned so much that I felt compelled to take notes. Listening to Mary and all her guests speak, the urge to preserve the knowledge being offered to me has been overwhelming. I love it. Mary encourages a plant-based, eco-friendly lifestyle that speaks to me on such a basic level that I leave Beam Green meetings with a feeling of having just discovered the key to how I am meant to exist. Moreover, I've discovered a whole community of people who want to exist that way, too! That's deep, people!

Please note that you needn't be a New Yorker to join Beam Green. Each meeting is available via live webcast and well worth the $20 membership fee each month, wherever you may be. I guarantee it, for whatever my guarantee is worth. (An eggplant?)

At July's meeting, we heard from Jared Koch, co-author of Clean Plates NYC, the Green Depot and Greengrass Life, an organic wheatgrass service. For a fun and very detailed play-by-play of the whole meeting, please read my friend Dori's post about her first Beam Green experience. I was so glad she was able to come!

I also got to see Danielle again--we'd met at Candle 79 when a bunch of us bloggers had dinner with VeggieGirl in June. It was nice to be able to chat some more this time since there were so many of us at that dinner. It was also nice to watch her do a wheatgrass shot before I did so that I'd have fair warning in case it was horrible! Thanks for taking one for the team, Danielle. :)

Luckily, she said it wasn't bad at all, and I can confirm that! Greengrass Life's wheatgrass is grown with love and truly sweeter than any wheatgrass I've ever had. Not that I have so much experience with it, but if I was ever to make it a habit, it'd be Greengrass Life or nothin'.

Here is a shot of Jared Koch, the nutritionist who co-wrote Clean Plates NYC:

The book is a directory of Manhattan restaurants that serve food made with high-quality ingredients and prepared using responsible, healthy techniques. This tiny volume is money in the bank! (Especially since my copy is signed!) Not that I need any more weight in my big-arse purse, but for just a couple extra ounces, I can wander New York with the confidence that I'm never more than a few blocks from a restaurant that will make me a delicious, healthy meal. Jared and his food critic co-author, Alex van Buren, have painstakingly reviewed countless restaurants to compile this directory of 75 places to grab a tasty and nutritious bite.

Restaurants that made the cut include everything from the familiar Chipotle to the high end Blue Hill, which I have in fact had the pleasure of experiencing, though at their farm location near Tarrytown. Not a meal I will soon forget!

And as if you need another reason to check out Beam Green, our own Gena (below, left) is Beam Green's resident health counselor, and one of my favorite like-minded ladies to spend time with. Bonus points!

Do give a thought to trying out a Beam Green meeting. If you're reading my blog in the first place, chances are you would find Beam Green extremely relevant. For any New York area readers, I have a few free passes, so please feel free to shoot me an email and you can attend your first meeting on me! If nothing else, be prepared to make a few new friends at Beam Green. If not, I'll buy you an eggplant.

Nuts (Pate) for Beam Green

Last night I mentioned that I'd had the chance to attend this month's Beam Green meeting, courtesy of Gena's invitation. I'll always be grateful for that, as I really got a lot out of it! Just so you know what we're talking about, allow me to poach a bit from one of Gena's older posts on the subject:

Beam Green is a fun, eco-conscious, and inspiring social club for women, devoted to imparting green knowledge to the next generation of parents. Its goal is “to be a positive eco-educational community for families that will assist in the creation of children who are strong, vibrant, and healthy that they contribute to the world in countless ways.”

I began my evening appropriately by treating myself to dinner at Bonobo's, a casual raw cafe in the Flatiron district of Manhattan. I ordered the nori roll, which turned out to be probably the prettiest thing I've eaten in a while.

I also had to have a coconut chai, which will from now on be a requisite to dining here. SO GOOD! As for the contents of my nori roll, you're allowed your choice of the live nut pates plus five vegetables, all of which is wrapped in seaweed and served with greens and a house-made dressing.

The vegetables I chose were beets, bell peppers, zucchini, red cabbage and sprouts.

I let the Bonobo's staff coach me in my pate choice, which ended up being half dill-sunflower seed and half walnut. I can't even remember what-all spices were involved!

Excellent recommendations, for sure. I think the restaurant's employees took pity on me when they saw what must have been a look of bewilderment on my face, confronted with so many choices of fillings. They generously let me sample nut pates until I'd found the magic combo. I was also very happy with my choice of salad dressing, which was their sweet basil. I could eat this meal every day!

On to the main event, which was held at Tavern on the Green. My camera's battery drew its final breath with the above picture, so I have no photos, but you can go here for an idea of what the scene looked like. The attendees were basically all women, except for the tech crew and the featured speaker, Gil Jacobs. I noticed a range in age among the women present. I suspect I was at the younger end of the spectrum (which was well represented). Since the founder herself, Mary Boehmer, is no older than I am, I doubt that the oldest women there were any more "matured" than my own mother. Mary's mother is very involved in Beam Green as well, so quite literally I was able to see no less than two generations represented at the meeting.

You might be wondering why someone at my stage of life would bother with an organization devoted to the Green Baby Movement, when I'm clearly not anywhere close to bearing children myself. To answer that unspoken question, I'm going to poach from Gena one more time, because I think she said it really well:

"...it’s an old cliché, but true, that living unburdened by a sense of mortality really is the great joy of youth. Which is why we all should commit ourselves as fervently as we can to doing our part in the Green Baby Movement—starting with our own bodies, and ending with the way we choose to raise our children."

I can't argue with that! And so it was that I attended my first Beam Green meeting.

There were some familiar faces in the room when I arrived, so I was glad to catch up with fellow bloggers Emily and Melissa during the meeting. I also got to meet Katherine, and it was great getting to know her a bit between lecture segments. And of course, I met Gena "in real life" for the first time. After dozens of emails exchanged since she started her blog, it was really exciting to finally meet her in person. She's definitely everything you would want Beam Green's resident Healthy Lifestyle Coach to be! Here's hoping last night was just one of many future meetings, Beam Green and otherwise.

As for the lecture, I have to say, Gil Jacobs was a completely vibrant and magnetic presence. There's more meaning to that statement than meets the eye - I learned so much from his talk that I found myself taking copious notes througout. In case you're not familiar with his name, Gil is one of the foremost colonic therapists in New York City (and beyond, most likely). As you might assume, the bulk (heh) of his job concerns ridding the body of toxins, which is of particular importance to those adopting or following a diet involving raw foods.

While his talk (I might even call it a dance, at certain points!) couldn't help but discuss the importance of raw foods in the diet, what I took from it was not necessarily an urgent need to shift my eating habits towards the raw end of the spectrum, let alone embrace the "colonic action," as he called it. The way he discussed detox and keeping the body as clean and free of disease as possible was very accessible to someone following the Standard American Diet (SAD), and those of us on the receiving end need not have felt coerced into the raw lifestyle (unless one was already inclined to do so).

If I were to choose one word to associate with the talk, it would be PERSPECTIVE. This is something we lose sight of often, and the diet is no exception, wherever we may fall on the health spectrum.

Here are some highlights from Gil's introduction to cleansing:

• Raw food has the capacity to awaken blockages and release them. Raw fruits and vegetables have a negative ionic charge, which is optimal for the human body. Because processed foods, meat, dairy, etc. carry a positive ionic charge, that which remains impacted in the colon can be dislodged by the raw foods because their opposite charges attract each other. In this way, the putrified (old, bad-food waste) matter can then be eliminated.
• Organic is trumped by Order. It is important to consume foods in the correct order for optimal digestion, because whether or not the food was organic means nothing when the order in which it was eaten causes fermentation. (His example was to point out that Person A, who eats organic raw almonds--which take hours to digest--followed by an organic salad might as well not have bothered spending the money to buy the fancy organic products, when Person B is better off having eaten a head of conventional lettuce--which takes minutes to digest--from a bodega followed by Blue Diamond roasted almonds.) For more on proper eating order and food combining, see Gena's Digestive Health and Cleansing 101 page.
• If you are new to cleansing, be sure to keep some "good heroin" in your diet--foods that you love and which may not be optimally healthy but keep the body from detoxing too quickly and causing unpleasant "quitter's flu" symptoms.

The above points are but a tiny percentage of the information I took in. I have been reading on this subject for about a month now, so Gil's talk helped me to flesh out my beginner's knowledge. That said, for someone completely new to the idea of cleansing through diet (and colonics, if necessary), I have to admit, this would have been a lot to handle in the first shot. Exhibit A: audience member who raised her hand to ask, "What's a colonic?" Cue Gil to back up a few steps. And he did, quite graciously, too. Lucky for me, I was keeping up--for the most part!

Back to the notion of PERSPECTIVE, I now want to highlight what Gil talked about concerning the greater picture of our health:

• Keep a macrocosmic scope. Improving your lifestyle is about feeling better, preventing illness (physical and mental) and raising the next generation to be healthy. It is not about fitting into a smaller pair of jeans.
• The goal (whether or not this involves raw foods) is to elevate yourself from your current condition. I think this is a great point, because it applies to everyone and reminds us that it's all relative. We all come from different places mentally and health-wise, and the idea should be to improve upon your current condition, not to adjust to someone else's health standard overnight. Which leads me to the next (and most important, IMHO) highlight...
• "Progress, not perfection."

While Gil's lecture might have overwhelmed one who is brand new to the kind of health- and eco-conscious community represented at Beam Green, I really felt that his overriding message spoke to everyone, regardless of how they feel about the practices he espouses.

Beam Green, I'll be back! For those of you in the NYC area, Gena has extended a complimentary invitation to attend the next meeting on July 22 (I hear there's wheatgrass involved!). Click here to learn how to RSVP.

For some reason I don't really feel like posting pictures of the chicken I just had for dinner! ;) I'll be back with that recipe another time. For now, good night, and happy weekend!

RIP Michael Jackson (my first love, no joke) and Farrah Fawcett. :(