I joke that I have a very tight karma due to all the “coincidences” I don’t readily perceive for a long time. Now that I have turned 50, I better understand why the “apple doesn’t fall far from the tree”. For a start, I was born in Hospital Auxulio Mutuo (Hospital of Mutual Help) and grew up in Isla Verde (Green Island), Puerto Rico. According to my various horoscopes: I am a “Rooster” in Chinese, a “Chain” in Arabic, a “Raven” in the Native American, a “Traveler” in African and a “Libra” in the West. From the day I was born, I inherited the grape vine as my sacred “tree”, green as my cosmic color (addressed by the heart chakra), Venus as my sacred planet and the elephant as my spirit animal. Naturally, the first time my family each officially picked their favorite colors (ask them…I swear its true), my father chose “red”; my mother, “yellow”, my sister, “pink” and, I chose “green”. At that tender age, I was totally oblivious to the butterfly effect this would cause on the chain of events linking “Green Cuisine”, the holistic umbrella for all of the projects I cook up.
Searching for my earliest memory, I recall precisely the first time I “cooked” and spilt blood for love. It happened when I was 3, the same afternoon my mom was giving birth to my sister in the hospital and I was at home alone with my father. While he was in the garage building a boat, I was inside, unsupervised. Knowing full well I was strictly prohibited to touch knives, I took the unusual opportunity to harvest fresh limes in the garden and make nectar. Long story short, I concocted the limeade, cut myself in the process, bandaged my wound without crying and delivered a sticky glass of pure bliss and abandon to my father (who promptly fainted at the sight of my blood). It was a memorable day for us all.
My mother (and her mother and her grandmother) were all comforting cooks who made soups from scratch and baked homemade pies for dessert. My mom followed James Beard recipes from his Fireside Cookbook and we always ate fresh foods including a salad. When I got my own Betty Crocker cookbook at age 7, I took to preparing a carefully planned dinner each week. And so I evolved, experimenting with every flavor in the spice rack, asking for electric beaters and omelette pans for birthdays, reading cookbooks like novels, whipping up feasts without blinking and thinking there was no better way to understand the world but through F&B (Food & Beverage) eyes. After high school, I attending a semester preparing classic French cuisine at the Cordon Bleu Cooking School in Paris followed by the coldest winters of my entire life at Cornell’s School of Hotel Administration where I prepared myself for a career in Hospitality and Service (“Life IS Service”, according to Cornell).
Over most of my professional life, I have prepped in kitchens, managed restaurants, directed F&B departments, taught cooking and wine classes, catered parties, sold wine, stomped grapes, grown gardens, published F&B articles & newsletters & magazines & calendars, food styled videos, organized fund raising food & wine festivals, cooked for charity and traveled the world studying wine harvests and rainforest medicinal herbs. As this blog evolves, I will include various F& B stories and diaries (some previously published and others not) of my adventures tying my GREEN CUISINE DBA and karma together.
In a cruel twist of fate, I was asked to leave hospitality for a time for a new career in “JAN SAN” (short for Janitorial & Sanitary Supplies). Like Cinderella after midnight, I abruptly found myself in a wet smelly bathroom counting toilets and studying trash bins whereas a few months prior, I had been uncorking a fruity Rossesse wine and growing artichokes on the Italian Riviera. Attempting to make lemonade out of a sour scenario, I joked that I was flushing out my resume with the addition of another dimension in to Green Cuisine for if you are what you eat, you also **** what you eat and I supplied the Greenest toilet tissue in town.
As the Zen saying goes, “You don’t know what you don’t know,” and I knew squat. Soon, I was learning a new language of abbreviations for Indoor Air Quality (IAQ), Sick Building Syndrome (SBS) and Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs). I discovered that Puerto Ricans have the highest rate of asthma in America making MAY the official “Asthma and Allergy Awareness Month” on the island. Once I got a bigger picture, I became an advocate for “Green Cleaning” using the T.E.A.M approach (Toss the toxicity, Economize on Energy, Appreciate the Atmosphere and Master your Materials) for Environmental Management Systems (EMS) following Environmentally Preferable Purchasing (EPP).
As defined by Executive Order #13101 signed by Clinton in 1998, an “environmentally preferable” product or service is: “One that has a lesser or reduced effect on human health and the environment when compared to a similar product or service used for the same purpose”.
EPP is an informed way to make a better buy. Between two paints, EPP chooses the odor-free version with no VOCs to avoid chocking fumes. Between two vacuums, EPP chooses a high efficiency particular air (HEPA) filter to eliminate swirling dust. Between two toilet papers, EPP chooses the processed chlorine free (PCF) tissue made from 100% recycled pulp with post-consumer waste (PCW) over a cuddly white brand which is marketed as “soft” but which brutally clear-cuts ancient forests in secret. To keep it simple, EPP recommends “Green Seal certified” products because they meet strict sustainable specifications for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). EPP is a healthier and safer way to spend your money when you have a choice which “costs” about the same (or just a wee bit more because “you are worth it”).
In karmic terms, nothing happens without a reason still, it was painful when my position was “eliminated” and I was swept aside like dirt. Now I crow what I know (and keep learning) concerning even deeper shades of GREEN in what we drive, where we go, what we eat, how we clean, what we buy, how we live and where we throw our “garbage” away. I am now involved with Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) helping Green businesses make real profits without costing the world in the future. It all comes around in the end.
