JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome back to Green is Good, and we’re so excited to have with us today Lisa Kitinoja. She’s the founder of the Postharvest Education Foundation. If you want to follow along while we chat with Lisa today, it’s www.postharvest.org. Welcome to Green is Good, Lisa. LISA KITINOJA: Thank you very much. I’m happy to be here. JOHN SHEGERIAN: You know, Lisa, you have a fascinating story that started back in my hometown of New York City and led to this great organization that you’ve created, the Postharvest Education Foundation. Can you share with our listeners your journey and your story, how you even got to this position on this planet and in your life? LISA KITINOJA: Sure, I will. I’m getting to practice this a bit now that I’m running a foundation. I have to speak at various activities and give some background. It’s a story that started when I was a child in Staten Island and I was about 10 years old and there was this big announcement in the newspaper that said that there was gonna be a 25-mile walkathon to end hunger so I joined up and as a 10-year-old, I couldn’t quite make 25 miles, but I did my very best to raise money to end hunger. Of course, that was just the beginning and I learned more and more about it and how widespread it was in the world and what a big problem it was so as a kid and a teenager, I was really interested in learning about food preservation and food storage and different ways of reducing food losses so when I went to college, that was what I studied. I studied agriculture, horticulture, vegetable crops, and I was able to put together what I learned from my family and what I learned from school in my education at UC – Davis and then I went on to Ohio State and got my doctorate and what I wound up doing was specializing in two things. One was how to teach informal groups like farmers, not university or high school education, but field based education, practical things, and then second, I really wanted to learn about international agriculture and reducing food losses, so I put those two together and became a consultant, worked in over 20 countries all over the world with all kinds of activities and all kinds of different organizations and that’s what brought me to kind of the end of my career, semi-retirement in 2011, and a few of my friends and colleagues got together and launched this foundation. We decided that we were gonna teach young people around the world how to do what we learned how to do and that’s to reduce losses by identifying all kinds of post harvest problems, giving them skills and resources in order to help farmers in their own communities. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Well, it’s not really a retirement for you. It’s really a new beginning, right? LISA KITINOJA: It sure is. I’m planning on working more now than before. JOHN SHEGERIAN: It’s such a fascinating story, Lisa, because you spent your life around the world in developing countries working in small farming communities working and learning and teaching. Did you found the Postharvest Education Program because you found that there’s a lack of opportunity of others teaching what you needed to teach and teaching what you’ve learned out in the field in all these other countries around the world? Is there not a lot of what you’re doing now in other parts of the world, teaching this kind of thing? LISA KITINOJA: Yeah, exactly. What I’ve found in almost 30 years of doing consulting work and working with all kinds of universities and the big donor agencies is that they have projects that are ostensibly designed to help farmers in countries but they send their experts in and out so fast that there’s really never any local capacity building or local expertise being developed and so I got to work on a lot of interesting projects and I got to solve problems and fly here and there and do all kinds of fun things but I wasn’t able really to stay long enough or to follow up anything that I had been teaching people and so what I noticed and what my colleagues noticed was that it’s just very frustrating for the people in these countries. They hear about these great new things they can do. They’re told that it’s possible but then the expert comes and goes so fast that they never get to actually do it so that was why we set up this foundation. It’s specifically designed to target these young people who want to become the experts in this field and work in their own countries and instead of having to fly an expert in from the U.S. or Europe to Africa or Asia, spend a huge amount of money, we can train 10 people for that amount of money and have them work in their own home countries and be the local experts. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s so great. That makes so much sense so talk a little bit about your foundation and for our listeners, again, who want to learn more about what Lisa is doing at the Postharvest Foundation, please go to www.postharvest.org. I’m on the site now. It’s a beautiful site. Talk a little bit what your attention is focused on there with regards to fruits, vegetables, and other types of agricultural issues. LISA KITINOJA: Basically, we have one big program that we work on every year. We recruit in November of each year a new batch of people that we call our Global E-Learners and we developed a program that doesn’t require a lot of money or a lot of travel but it does take a lot of time so we have young people every year who are interested in learning about reducing food losses. Almost all of them are working with fruits and vegetable crops because this, we found, was the most neglected of the crops. They are all working in developing countries so it’s open to anyone around the world. They’re all working with small farmers and basically, what we found was there’s plenty of private organizations that work with big farmers or governments even, projects that work with big farmers, so we are gonna work with the small ones and then we also target young people because they need jobs. They need skills to get into the workplace. We target women because they often are the ones who are handling the food for their families. They sometimes grow it, often work on processing it to things that can be stored longer and in places like West Africa, they’re even the marketing people so the women are really important and then also we look at organic food a lot of times because in these poor resource or low resource places, people are naturally producing organic foods only because they can’t afford the pesticides and fertilizers and so it’s easy for us to jump in and show them how they can maintain an organic production and handling system, thereby gaining more money for what they’re selling if they can get into that niche market and in the meantime, they can keep their foods really safe to eat locally so we target people who want to work with those groups and what we’ve found is there’s hundreds of them, thousands of them out there. Every year, we get a batch of applications and we take the top 20 or 30 and we work with them for a whole year so they work with us online. We do assignments with them. They write reports. They get feedback. We have chat sessions and LinkedIn group sessions. They get mentoring and if they complete that program, they get a tool kit that has all kinds of tools that they can use to measure quality and to help reduce food losses. Every year, the foundation holds a clothing workshop for this group of young people that finish their program and so last year, we went to Tanzania and we had a group of about 12 come from different countries around the world. This year, we’re hoping to have a workshop in West Africa, and two years ago we went to India, so we’re trying to get them not only to work with us in this clothing workshop, meet the experts we have from the U.S. and other countries that we have on the board of the foundation, but we want them to meet each other because then, they form this lifelong network where they help each other with things or they answer each other’s questions. They do projects together. The last few years, there’s been quite a bit of funding opportunities coming around for Postharvest projects and so they write project proposals together. They get funding to do training in their own countries and then the foundation just stays in the background but provides support. We’ll send them resources. We’ll send them information if they need it. We’ll help them design a project or help them find resource people. JOHN SHEGERIAN: For our listeners out there that just joined us, we’re so honored to have with us today Lisa Kitinoja. She’s the founder of the Postharvest Education Foundation. You can check out all the important work she is doing with her colleagues at www.postharvest.org. Lisa, now wait a second. You laid out a fascinating business model for your foundation so what you’re saying is everything that you’ve learned from your field around the world the last 30 years, you’re able to have started this foundation but really leverage the technological revolution to influence so many more people now with all of your knowledge using online teaching and online tools to spread the knowledge that you’ve learned over all these years. LISA KITINOJA: Yes, right, and what I’m amazed by myself is the low cost of this. Just for example, I’ve worked on projects where we’re given some funding to do training of trainers or capacity building. It will often cost maybe five, six, seven thousand per person to do a weeklong workshop and they barely get a glimpse of the field and how to become a professional or an expert. I’ve also seen organizations that offer workshops and short courses and they attract people from around the world. They’ll charge $5- to $10,000 for one week of education and so it’s completely out of the reach of these young people in poor nations so what we wanted to do was offer a program that was really reasonably priced so that everyone who wanted to participate could participate. We’ve kept the fees very low. In fact, I don’t want to advertise this too loudly but if someone tells me they can’t afford the fees, we just sort of waive them or find them a sponsor or something. We don’t turn them down because they can’t afford the fee. At the end of the program, we give them a tool kit that’s worth more than what they paid as their fees and so it turns out to be something that’s very low cost and very easy to access for people. We haven’t found that to be a barrier to do this educational activity. The main thing for me is that I want to make sure that by the time I retire completely that there are young people in all these different countries who can pick up the work that I had been doing and I love the idea- and this happens to me now after four or five years of providing education- when the phone rings and someone from a country in Africa asks me, ‘Can you come and help us on such and such a day for such and such a time?’ and I look at my calendar and I say, ‘No, I’m sorry. I can’t do that. I’m busy.’ I can follow it up by saying, ‘but there’s a local person that we have trained and has gone through this year of foundation training in postharvest specialist. They have tools, they have knowledge, they have skills. Please call them and they can help you’ and so that happens to me regularly now and it always puts a big smile on my face. JOHN SHEGERIAN: With your program at the Postharvest Foundation, you’ve in many ways democratized the learning process of the skills that you want and need these young people to learn by putting it online. It’s fascinating. Lisa, can you share a little bit about the whole importance and the foundational issue of your program? Why is it important for all these women farmers and young farmers and small farmers to learn to produce all this harvest, losses, and food waste, just so our listeners understand the importance why this is so critical to make a better and a more sustainable world for all of us to live in? LISA KITINOJA: Okay, well, thank you for that question because most of my education and my career where I was working on postharvest food losses, I often had to start out by explaining just what that was. What is postharvest handling and why am I working on food losses? More recently, some of the bigger organizations of the world have started to look at this and what they’ve documented is that globally, food losses are about 40 to 50%, so about half of the food that we grow is wasted. It just doesn’t get from the farm to the people who need to eat it. In countries where I’ve worked, it’s even higher than that. There are places where they don’t have electricity. They don’t have any way to cool something or put it in a refrigerator so they can have losses of 80% or even all of it can be lost if it’s attacked by pests or if it decays so what we have been doing is we are letting these young people document the losses in their own country first so that they’re sure that they know that this is a really big problem and then once they understand the scope of these losses and how to measure them, they know how to reduce them so it’s really becoming a great career opportunity for all of them. JOHN SHEGERIAN: And, for people that want to help your great mission and help the Postharvest Education Foundation train more young people around the world to be postharvest specialists, what’s the best way to help you and your mission, Lisa? LISA KITINOJA: Well, you’ve given the website address and that’s exactly the way to do it. We have a donation page and we’re trying this year to raise about $20,000 to bring our current batch of e-learners. We have 32 enrolled this year. We want to bring them to a closing workshop in West Africa and so that’s our goal for the year. Even bringing one is a big success story and the more we can bring, the better. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That is great and I hope that can happen and for our listeners out there that want to contribute to Lisa’s great mission at the Postharvest Foundation, please go to www.postharvest.org. Thank you, Lisa, for being a visionary sustainable farming evangelist and ambassador. You are truly living proof that green is good.

JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome back to Green is Good, and we’re so honored to have with us today Jim Barber. He’s the Managing Partner of Luke’s Toy Factory. Welcome to Green is Good, Jim. JIM BARBER: Thank you for having me on. I really appreciate it. JOHN SHEGERIAN: You know, Jim, you have a fascinating background that has nothing to do with the toy industry really. Can you share your journey and your story leading up to the founding of Luke’s Toy Factory? JIM BARBER: Well, sure. My main business for most of my life has been as a photography. I’m what’s known as a still life photographer. I do products. I do annual reports, advertising, all kinds of business to business photography so while I haven’t had direct contact with a manufacturing environment, I’ve had a lot of interaction with people in those businesses and as you’re sitting in the studio working on things, you spend a lot of time talking about the business so I kind of got a little background into all that and then a few years ago, I met someone who was in the toy business and we started talking about things and he told me about how all these toys were being recalled and my kids were all grown by that point so I thought this was a good chance to get rid of these toys and I was looking at them and I noticed that all of these toys were made in China and not only that but a couple of them, I think it was the Thomas the Tank Engine toys, were some of the toys that had been recalled and when you see something like that, there’s kind of a feeling of this isn’t right. These guys had to know they were doing this so that’s kind of where I got started with the idea of maybe there’s a better way to approach the whole toy industry. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Gotcha, and so how did that evolve and for our listeners out there that want to follow along as Jim and I have a chat today, you can go to his great website. It’s www.lukestoyfactory.com. How did that discussion and your epiphany evolve bringing in your son, Luke? How did that all come about then to making a business out of this? JIM BARBER: Well, there was a few false starts. We originally what happens is 85 or 80% of the toys are made in China that are sold here in the U.S. Generally, for a wooden toy, that involved like a team of 30 to 40 people, each who have a specific job, and they’re low paid, hard working, but they’re extremely low paid workers in China and that’s how these companies are able to make their profit on these toys even though they have to ship them halfway across the earth to get them here so what I started looking at was how can you make a wooden toy here economically? And at the same time, I had found out about this process. It was really being used for decking and outdoor furniture. It’s called wood plastic composite so what that is is you take a plastic material and you replace between 30 and 40% of it with wood, with sawdust from basically a waste stream and where we’re getting ours is from furniture from factories out in the Midwest and the interesting thing is is that that material, even though a big part of it now is wood, it can be injection molded. The injection molding process makes it much easier to make a toy without having to have a team of factory workers. Your injection mold is a big part of the process. You still have people that run the machinery and there’s a lot of support people but it’s not quite the same as the massive numbers they throw into toy production in China. JOHN SHEGERIAN: So, now technology has allowed an entrepreneur like you to transcend the old practices and really create a sustainable toy factory for the 21st century, a sustainable toy model for the 21st century? JIM BARBER: You know, the interesting thing too is that at the same time that this was developing, the whole 3D printing revolution was getting underway. I had actually gone to a national plastics convention down in Florida and that was the first place I saw a 3D printer. In the past, if you wanted to design a toy, you’d have to send it to some model maker and it would cost thousands to have them mock up a model. Now, you put it on a 3D printer and for less than $100, you’ve got a toy, so you can check it and make sure that it works. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That is really interesting. I’d never thought of that. All right, so now you get going and at what part do you bring Luke? You’re talking to your son, come on and join and let’s do this together. Where does that happen? Where does that magic happen? Because that’s exciting, to bring your son in, and when did that happen and when did you guys realize with this new technology, you can create a business that can make profit and you can enjoy but also a model that can withstand and to grow, together as a real business model? JIM BARBER: I gotta say, there’s starts and stops to this whole story, and originally, the guy who I had as a friend who was in the toy industry was gonna go in with me on this whole idea and he was a designer and I thought well, he’ll be the one to design these toys but his process of design was completely different from the much more highly technical process of injection molding design and it wasn’t something that he was really comfortable with and he had other issues and just decided that he was gonna bail out of it so I was left with this 3D printer that I had leased and an idea but nobody to follow up and my son, Luke, had just graduated college and it was at the time when no one was getting hired for anything, like three years ago, so I said ‘Luke, come and learn this 3D Cad program and see if you can figure it out,’ and he’s always been interested in toys and he’s always been interested in that area of things but he’s much more literal mind in terms of how you do things so he actually took to this program really well and within a couple of months, he had some pretty nice designs. In fact, the fire truck was one of the first things that we had designed. Our thinking was that if worse comes to worst and we can’t sell them any place else, we could go around to individual fire companies all around Connecticut and we can sell them like 100 at a time as a promotion. There’s always a fallback and it involves throwing these things in the back of our car and driving around from store to store. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That was your B plan? JIM BARBER: Yeah. There’s a B plan, there’s a C plan. JOHN SHEGERIAN: I like it. JIM BARBER: That’s how I got my designs going and once I found out what Luke could do and he’s the one that came up with this idea of how they fit together and so we’re aiming for like preschool kids because in terms of the toy business, that’s when they’re still playing with toys. By the time they’re 6 or 7 or 8, all of a sudden, there’s computers and iPads and that really pulls them away so we wanted to make a toy that was a little bit of a challenge so that they didn’t just sit and watch it play, which it what happens with so many toys now. They push a button and the toy buzzes and rides around and does whatever it does. To us, we want the kids to make the sound and we want the kids to push it around. We want to get back to the simple wooden toy that has kind of fallen by the wayside with all of this fancy electronic stuff so Luke had this all in hand and then it was up to me to figure out how do we make these things and I went around to a bunch of injection molders and what I found out was for the most part, anybody who made this kind of stuff went out of business 20 years ago when everybody switched to China and most of the injection molding businesses now are in high end things, medical, aerospace, automotive, and getting someone to even talk to me was really difficult but eventually, I met this guy up in Southington here in Connecticut and he was willing to talk to me and as soon as he saw the toys, he was like okay, I’m in, I love them, so he’s been a real guiding star in terms of how you actually make this happen. He put us in touch with a mold maker up in Massachusetts and he put us in touch with the company that’s supplying our materials and so he’s really made huge difference. JOHN SHEGERIAN: If you just joined us, we’ve got Jim Barber. He’s the Managing Partner of Luke’s Toy Factory. You can check out what him and his son, Luke, are doing at LukesToyFactory.com. So, let’s talk about this. You and Luke have a green toy product. It doesn’t have all of the hazards that the old toys had and it’s made out of recycled materials, recycled plastic, you said, and sawdust. Is this the magic sauce that you’re making your products out of? JIM BARBER: Well, here’s the thing. The recycled part of it at this point is the sawdust, which comes from furniture factories. I would like to say that I’m using recycled resin but at this point, I have to work with what’s available. The problem is you have a very rigorous testing procedure you have to go through with toys. Each toy, each color, each part of the toy, they actually scrape and test and take out bits of the material and test for heavy metals and arsenic and things like that, which, believe it or not, are in colors, especially the old colorants that were coming from China. Everyone is pushing to get rid of that but in terms of the plastic, no one wants, at this point, to certify to me that they can give me recycled plastic that is clean and can pass these tests so at this point, I’m using virgin plastic and recycled material so between 30 and 40% of this product is recycled. I wish I could say it was 100% and we’re working towards that but again, I’m a small guy. It’s me and my son, Luke, and so what happens is you gotta take what you can get. On the other hand, this company that makes our material, a company called Raytech out in Michigan, they actually flew two people over here to meet us and sit down with us and show us colors and have really been open to all of it so we’re trying to work on a way to get a stream from a post industrial source instead of post consumer source, which can then give us a chain of custody so we know this is where it was and this is how it got to where it is. JOHN SHEGERIAN: You know, Jim, in your new business life as an ecopreneur with Luke, talk a little bit about the fascinating balance between building a sustainable product but also safety and then also price because as we’ve done this show now over five year, whether you’re talking to Walmart or Coors or any of the other amazing and big and iconic brands from around the world or ecopreneurs like you that are really the innovators of the new generation and of the new economy, balancing sustainability with price and safety has become a journey. It’s never perfect. Can you talk a little bit about the balancing act that you always now have to adhere to and continue to watch while you build your business model? JIM BARBER: Well, that’s one of the reason, again, why we started with the idea of injection model, just to start an overview, is to make a wooden toy here , there are great people here in the U.S. that make wonderful wooden toys and I take nothing away from them. There are terrific handmade wonderful things. My daughter goes to college up in Vermont and you see these companies up there making these great things but they’re handmade and so that’s expensive and you have to pay a premium for that. What I’m trying to do is I’m trying to compete with the $15 to $20 toy that comes from China and to those people that are buying those toys, they can look at a $45 handmade wooden toy and it’s great but they’re not gonna buy that for their kids because they just can’t. That’s just the way of the world today so by using the injection molding process, you take out a certain amount of the need to make everything out of hand so you can injection mold it and the color is in the toy so you don’t have paint on the surface. We’ve designed them so there’s no metal axles, there’s no screws, nails, anything like that. When we test it, we have to use materials that are safe, which is why we have to balance the recycled plastic at this point with the virgin plastic but again, I think as we become bigger, we’ll have a better chance to say to these companies here’s what we want, solve the problem, and these companies will do it. They’re making this material without a buyer. They’re making it to lead people and that, I think, is a great thing. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Listen. When Steve Jobs built the iPhone, he didn’t know whether it was buying and you’re doing the same here. Talk a little bit. Are other toy companies green like yours and where is the toy business changing right now and where do you see it going in the months and years ahead, Jim? JIM BARBER: Well, I think if I had to say one toy company that I look on as a role model, it’s a company called Green Toys. They’re out in California. They make their toys out of recycled milk bottles, HDPE, and they make a different product. They make a completely different thing from us. They make a pure plastic toy. They make a toy that’s done in the style of plastic toys. What we’re trying to do is make our toy in the style of wooden toys with a little more detail than you can afford to make as a wood worker but they’re a great company. There was another company that briefly was using wood plastic composites here in the U.S., but again, with more of a plastic style but then they got bought by a Chinese company and they’re gone so basically, as far as I know, it’s us and Green Toys and then the great number of more handmade things. There’s certain kinds of things that it makes more sense to make here in the U.S. and there’s a lot of things that are made by more handmade kinds of methods that are great products. There is a whole world of American toy manufacturers but you have to look for them. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Right. Are you worried about others copying your idea? JIM BARBER: I don’t want them copying our designs, but if they copy the idea of making toys here in the U.S. sustainably and in some way I have a small part of making that happen, I’m perfectly happy. I’m not trying to become rich off of this. I’m trying to make toys for people who can afford them here in the U.S. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Are most of your sales now online or eventually, are you gonna into more of the traditional toy sales companies that are retail or are you gonna mix a balance of retail and online? What’s your vision and Luke’s vision on that? JIM BARBER: Right now, we’re gonna be mostly online and the biggest reason for that is two things. Creating a retail package is difficult and expensive. It’s a tough thing to do and right now, we don’t have the resources to do that and the second things is managing a retail environment where you have 5,000 retailers who each take 12 toys each means that that’s a lot of phone calls and a lot of billing and a lot of following up, whereas you can go for online retailers, which is where the business is going. Amazon and large retailers are killing the local market so that may change. It’s all in a state of flux, but right now, that’s where it’s going. JOHN SHEGERIAN: You know, Jim, with regards to doing business, right now, your business is all in the family with you and Luke. What other sustainable things are you guys doing now that you’ve got green on your mind with Luke’s Toy Factory in your own household? JIM BARBER: With the company ourselves and with us as a family, what we try to do is we try to buy locally. We try to work locally, keep that whole distance thing down to a minimum. JOHN SHEGERIAN: So, buy local and buy your toys from Luke’s Toy Factory. Jim, we’re gonna have you back on and hopefully, maybe even have Luke on with you one day. To learn more about the story of Luke’s Toy Factory or buy their toys, go to www.lukestoyfactory.com. Jim Barber, thank you for being an inspirational sustainable toy innovator for the 21st century. You are truly living proof that green is good.

JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome to another edition of Green is Good. We’re so honored today to have Colleen Patrick-Goudreau. She’s an author, speaker, teacher and compassionate crusader. Welcome to Green is Good, Colleen. COLLEEN PATRICK-GOUDREAU: Thank you, John. Thank you for having me. JOHN SHEGERIAN: If you’d like to follow along as we get the honor of talking with Colleen today, you could go to her great website, www.joyfulvegan.com. Colleen, before we get talking about all the great work you’re doing in terms of thought leadership as vegan royalty, can you share your story? What was your journey leading up to your great leadership in the vegan world? COLLEEN PATRICK-GOUDREAU: Well, you know, I’m like everybody else who grew up eating animals. I grew up on the east coast. I grew up in New Jersey, though you’re not supposed to hear that in my voice anymore because once I moved to California, you lose your accent. I grew up in New Jersey and I grew up in a family. I love animals. I loved my dog. I would go to the zoo. I loved clothes that had animals all over them. I always read books about animals. I watched movies about animals. In every way, I was taught that animals were a huge part of my life and my development and I didn’t know I was being fed animals. I had no idea and when I was starting to get the idea, I was given some pretty lame excuses and reasons and nothing ever changed and I continued to eat them and I don’t think I could say that I just went on eating them happily because it just really something in the back of your mind feeling uncomfortable with it and I think that’s where our excuses come from. If you’re comfortable with something, we don’t have to make justifications for it so when I was about 19, I read Diet for a New America and it was the first time I made the connection between the animals I was eating and the violence that I was contributing to. It started me on my own journey of learning everything I could about these issues and the most immediate thing I could do was not participate and so I stopped eating land animals and eventually I stopped eating anything that came out of the sea and then eventually anything that came off of or from an animal and I would say that moment when that happened, when I actually became vegan, it’s such an interesting phrase we use but it really is this moment of awakening and it was that for me. It was this moment of absolute awakening where I looked at the world through a completely different lens than I had before, completely different in the sense that it was very clear to me, not completely different in that this was a new feeling. I had been a compassionate person. Compassion was a huge part of who I was just as a person, even when I was eating animals. What happened when I became vegan was that all the blocks to enabling me to live compassionately unconditionally were removed and that’s really how I equate becoming vegan was that I literally started manifesting the values that had been inside of me in my behavior. JOHN SHEGERIAN: So cool. So, wow, back at 19, so you started really early. COLLEEN PATRICK-GOUDREAU: I was 19 when I stopped eating land animals. It took me a good seven years before I became vegan. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Right, gotcha, and you know, you’re the prolific author of six books and I’ll name some of them; The Joy of Vegan, which has become the Bible of vegan baking, The Vegan Table, Color Me Vegan, Vegan’s Daily Companion and all these books for our listeners out there, I own all of them. I highly encourage all of you to go on Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com or find them at other fine bookstores wherever you’re at. You’ve become a shining star and a huge beacon of hope in the vegan world. What is it like to be a force of nature and what are you up against in terms of conceptions and challenges that are thrown at the vegan industry or people who want to eat this way. What are you fighting in terms of misconceptions and other lies that have been just propagated out there against people who want to take us into the future and the right way of eating? COLLEEN PATRICK-GOUDREAU: Well, it’s really frustrating because people are so disempowered and my work is really dedicated to letting people kick back and get the information they need to feel empowered, to manifest their values of compassion and wellness. Whatever reason people are motivated to stop eating animals and anything that comes out of an animal, whatever reason they’re motivated to do so, I want to be there to debunk the myths and to give them the tools they need to do it. That’s really the gist of my work. It’s been the foundation of my work from the very beginning and I think I’ve been successful because I’ve been so clear in that mission. I’m not trying to do anything other than give people what they need. I always say I’m not asking you to merge with my values. I’m just asking you to live according to your own and it’s just really an incredible joy and honor to be part of these transformations. What’s frustrating is that from the outside, it looks like this is something that’s difficult, something that’s hard, something that’s niche, something that’s alternative when really this is about something we all care about and that really is compassion and most of us would never do to animals what we’re paying people to do and people think that there’s some sort of agenda and there’s something outside of what they’re used to and really, we’re talking about fruits and vegetable and nuts and seeds and beans and grains and herbs and spices, things that people are already eating but they don’t call vegan so everything I do is to kind of debunk those myths and demystify what people think of “vegan” and recognize that it’s something that’s already part of their lives. They just don’t label it vegan and that approach really worked for people because my work is very much based on accessibility and familiarity and quite literally, joy, so that’s what I try to bring to the table and it attracts people and it really works. The frustration is that I don’t have the millions and billions of dollars that the industries who are persuading people to buy their products have and that’s what we’re up against but I don’t dwell on that to much because I’m just trying to do my work and just kind of cut through all the noise. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Gotcha, and speaking of, you mentioned ethical and farming practices and what’s going on with animals right now is we had the founder of the sanctuary on a couple weeks back. Talk a little bit about your stance on ethical farming practices and what’s going on with animals now with regards to feeding America, feeding the world, and how can we be better steward of the planet by treating animals better than we’ve treated them historically? COLLEEN PATRICK-GOUDREAU: Well, you know, for me, the foundation of my work, especially around animal protection, comes from the belief that I don’t believe animals are here for us and I think so much of what has gone wrong in our society for the last several hundred/ thousand years, because we haven’t been farming animals for more than a thousand years, but that’s part of what the problem is. We’re missing that connection with animals and with nature and we see them as here for us and that, to me, is the problem and the solution isn’t that we’ll treat them better. The solution is don’t use them and they’re not here for us. They have their own desires and their own needs and their own lives and their own bodies and their own offspring and they’re not here for me so for me, I would rather see us move in the direction of getting us away from these very old strange practice of impregnating animals so that we can force her to lactate so that we can take her milk for what? We don’t even drunk our own human milk into adulthood. It doesn’t even make any sense. The animals whose milk we’re taking, their offspring don’t even drink their milk into adulthood. It doesn’t make any sense. Why would we go through that? Why would we go through the animals to get to the nutrients that the animals have in their flesh and secretions because they’re eating plants? So, we need to skip the middle animal and go directly to the plants for our nutrition and for everything we need rather than use all the resources that it takes to keep and to use and to kill animals. It’s not good for them. It’s not good for us so I don’t really think there’s a way to do it in a way that really honors (a) what we really do care about and (b) that honors the animals themselves and their own autonomy and ( c) the resources that it takes to farm animals. JOHN SHEGERIAN: For our listeners who just joined us, we’re so excited to have Colleen Patrick-Goudreau with us today. To learn more about all of Colleen’s important and great work, you can go to JoyfulVegan.com. You can learn more about what she’s doing. There’s podcasts there. All of her six books are there to buy and lots of other resources. Colleen, one of the top things now that are being discussed in society and in the media is this whole paleo versus vegan thing. What do you make of this whole paleo versus vegan? It sounds like almost like a UFC cage fights and it’s like it’s all or nothing to the death and paleos don’t want to hear anything about vegans and they think that that’s all wrong and vegans are really not too keen on this whole paleo publicity trend. What’s your take on this? COLLEEN PATRICK-GOUDREAU: You know, it’s just another diet and it’s so frustrating because people think there’s more credibility to it because you use buzz words like traditional and ancient and artisan and ancestors and paleo. You use these words that have these romantic notions associated with them and so then people think there’s something more credible about it. It’s a diet. It’s a diet just like the Atkins Diet is a diet and I don’t have to — that’s all it is and yet it’s taken off like crazy. The difference for me is that I don’t look at vegan as a diet. I don’t. For me, vegan is just a manifestation of compassion. It’s just another word for living compassionately and so for me, that’s the foundation of veganism so it’s talked about in the media a lot as a diet. It doesn’t have to be complicated. People are so confused. It comes back to what I said before. They’re so confused. They’re so disempowered. They hear all of these different things in the media about what they should eat, what they shouldn’t eat, the news study that came out that coffee’s good, that coffee’s not good, that wine is good, that wine’s not good, that this is a power food, oh blueberries, they’re the new power food. Just eat plants. It doesn’t have to be more complicated than make the foundation of your diet whole foods. Make the foundation of your diet whole foods. That’s the principle behind my book, Color Me Vegan. I’m not spouting a particular kind of diet. Here’s what I’m spouting. Eat by color. That’s all you need to do. That’s all you need to do is when you go to the grocery store, choose as much color as you can, as much variety of colors as you can because in the colored plant foods is all the phytochemicals and those phytochemicals affect different parts of our bodies in a really positive way so we’ve heard of beta carotene. Everyone knows beta-carotene in carrots. We know that the beta-carotene is really good for our eyes. We’ve heard of lycopene in tomatoes. We know lycopene is really good for the prostate so when you pick these different colors and eat these different colors, it affects the different parts of our bodies in a really positive way. You don’t have to follow a plan. You don’t have to buy certain recipes and certain books. It doesn’t have to be more complicated than eat by color and eat whole foods. JOHN SHEGERIAN: We love to give solutions on Green is Good and you bring up a great point. Coach some of our listeners out there that are thinking of making the switch and think that it’s too daunting of a process. Can you give some tips for making the switch to a plant based diet from an animal based diet and also some of your favorite tips that you integrate into your life? Are supplements necessary? Are any type of vitamins or any other type of things necessary? What should people do if they’re really on the fence right now and they really do want to make a switch and they’re just a little bit nervous to do so? COLLEEN PATRICK-GOUDREAU: Sure. First of all, I want to mention the 30-day vegan challenge because I have an online program right now called 30DayVeganChallenge.com. That’s where they can go. The book is coming out in January, 2015 and it answers all of these kinds of questions about supplements and cooking and making the time to cook and getting in the kitchen and chopping vegetables and eating out and traveling and all of it but to your question the first thing I would say is start where you’re at. A lot of people say, oh my God, I could totally give up chicken and meat. I could totally give up all of that but I could never give up X, right? It’s usually cheese so they say I could give up meat but I couldn’t give up cheese and I say okay, well give up meat and don’t give up cheese. Start somewhere but don’t do nothing because you can’t do everything. Do something and that’s the first thing I would say to people. People think that they have to do everything and so that’s why they feel like they can’t right away. They do nothing at all. Don’t do nothing because you can’t do everything. Start where you are. The second thing is I would say start supplementing things that are familiar to you, that’s part of your daily diet that are easy switches so start using plant based milk. The only beverage we have a requirement for is water but we’re so used to having milk in our culture so we’re so used to animal milk and of course, people know that there are a ton of plant milks out there. There’s soymilk, there’s almond milk, there’s hemp milk, there’s rice milk, there’s cashew milk, peanut milk. You can make milk from any grain, any nut, any seed, so start switching out the milks that you’re using, maybe for your cereal, maybe for your coffee, maybe for baking, and same thing with butter. Earth Balance is an amazing, wonderful — it’s a non-dairy butter and people say, oh, it’s fake butter. No, it’s butter. It’s just made from plant fat rather than animal fat, so start switching out those things that you can so it means you’re still having all of the familiar things in your repertoire but you’re just having more healthful, compassionate versions so those are the places I would start and raise the bar a little bit. Get back in the kitchen. People complain that they don’t have time to chop vegetables. We have the time to chop vegetables. We’re not making the time to chop vegetables. It doesn’t take more than 15 minutes a day to chop some vegetables, put them in some containers, put them in the refrigerator so that when we come home and it’s time for dinner, we go oh, it’s chopped up. I can make a soup. I can make a stir-fry. I can make something healthy rather than just pulling out a frozen pizza because we think we don’t have time. JOHN SHEGERIAN: You know, Colleen, we’re down to the last four minutes or so, and there’s so many questions I want to ask you and I want our listeners to learn more about you but more specifically, we’re going into interesting times in terms of leadership roles and folks that are really showing us a better way and I’ve been a huge fan of yours forever and you are a force of nature. Who writes six books? Most people are just happy to get one book out in their life and you’ve done six so I’m just fascinated and I know our listeners would be interested. What gets you up out of bed in the morning? What drives you? How have you become such an important force of nature in this new food evolution, which has really, in so many ways, become a food revolution, but it’s the appropriate evolution , and who has been your heroes? Who has inspired you to go do the great work and the important work that you’re currently doing? COLLEEN PATRICK-GOUDREAU: Well, thank you. You know, what gets me out of bed in the morning is the animals. I do this for them. This is all for the animals and that includes human animals and what drives me is that I know that to be their voice is such an incredible honor. They don’t have a voice and they need us to speak for them so to be able to get up every morning and make that the main thing on my to-do list, that’s pretty motivating and then the second thing is that I know that in doing that, it’s working and I hear from so many people all around the world who tell me that their lives have been transformed because of a podcast of mine that they listened to or a book of mine that they’ve read or a talk that I gave that they heard and how can I not keep going? I know something’s working for people so that really motivates me. My inspiration aside from the animals are the people who are open, the people who say I want to be better. I want to do it differently. I’m open. Tell me how I can do this differently. We’re not gonna be perfect. None of us are perfect. This is not about purity. This is not about a certification in perfection. This is about doing the best we can to make the most compassionate choices and I know there are millions of people out there who want to make the right choices. Those are the people who are my inspiration who come and say I’m open, just tell me. Guide me. And that’s what motivates me. It’s the most beautiful thing. I know people are good people who want to do the right thing and I’m just honored that I can provide some guidance, provide some tools to make that possible for them. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Colleen, we’re down to the last two minutes or so. Talk about your latest campaign around the 30-Day Vegan Challenge, which is your new book coming out January 2015. Share what you did with that and how that’s going so far. COLLEEN PATRICK-GOUDREAU: Yeah, that’s really exciting, so the 30-Day Vegan Challenge is coming out in January, hopefully maybe the holidays of 2014 and I decided to go to the public, our community of amazing people who believe in this work and who know how important it is and we funded to publish the book and I’m in the process right now of editing and doing the photography and I’m on the hiring out all of the professionals to do all of the work to make this a beautiful special book and this is a book that literally guides people, gives them the tools they need to make this transition and to do it joyfully and healthfully and confidently so it was pretty amazing. I’ve had books published by, obviously, traditional publishers including Random House and it was just an honor to go directly to my public and say let’s do this together. That way I don’t have to ask anybody else for their permission. I just need your support so it’s been amazing. JOHN SHEGERIAN: We’re gonna have you back on to further discuss the 30-Day Vegan Challenge and to buy all of Colleen’s great books, you can go on Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com, or go into one of your local bookstores and buy and enjoy her great books and start cooking vegan. Go to JoyfulVegan.com to learn more about Colleen. You can buy all of her books there or listen to her podcasts. Thank you, Colleen, for being an inspiring visionary vegan-preneur and compassionate crusader. You are truly living proof that green is good.