North Atlanta Men's Club: Healthy Lives Seminar

The kitchen at my home was bursting with excitement on Tuesday evening, January 6th. Dick Williams, Ken Gregg, Ed Feldstein, Milt Tambor, Jerry Broder and Paul Elias (my nonmember friend) gathered to try our hand at cooking healthy food.
We started the evening with some discussion about the principles of healthy eating. We considered such issues as “Can you be too thin?”, “Do you get enough essential amino acids in a plant-based diet?”, and “What are the highest nutrition foods?” Regarding the first question, the answer is ‘no’, unless you are very ill, anorexic, an alcoholic, or something like that. Milt concluded that discussion by proclaiming, “But, you can be too rich, a billionaire rather than a millionaire, for example.”
We then watched a DVD healthy cooking demonstration by Joel Fuhrman, M.D. and his wife Lisa. Joel and Lisa showed us how to prepare salad dressing, high cruciferous vegetable bean soup, and bean burgers.
We than proceeded to the kitchen to try our hand at those very same recipes. I had prepared the soup the day before, but Ken, who has a magic touch with spices, enhanced the flavor with some carefully selected seasonings. Jerry, the restaurateur, supervised as I mashed up the beans, carefully adding just the right healthy ingredients. Ken and Ed formed the bean patties and in the oven they went. Dick did a masterful job of mixing up the salad dressing made from almond butter, flavored vinegar and spaghetti sauce. Everyone loved the dressing, which would soon be used for dipping our raw veggies and adding more flavor to the bean burgers. The dressing was everyone’s favorite.
While the burgers were baking in the oven we sat down to try the soup. Oops..it was a little bland. Each member seasoned the soup to taste and seemed to enjoy it very much. The bean burgers were also a hit, except for Milt, who doesn’t much like beans, or being a billionaire, for that matter.
We concluded that very healthy, plant-based food can be excellent, if you master the art of correct seasoning.
We ate and laughed and speculated who would be converted to the Veit variety of healthy eating. No complete converts, but some of the members said that were making better food choices as a result of the seminars. Hey, wars are sometimes won after a series of little battles.