These are a few of the people I am blessed to know and be inspired by: Reuben, Ethan, Zachary, Chris, Dani, Hudro, Red & Dan, Amy, Solla, Ani, Tonya, Ysanne, Annie, Urduja, Boris, Anna, Julia, Caroline, Nicolas, Erica, Soren, George, Jónsi & Alex, Alfred, Benji, Gilles, Charlie, Amelia, BA, Jo. If you think you should have been on this list and I omitted you, you’re probably right; I did so for the sake of brevity, not because I don’t love you.
Photo by Suki Zoe
There are some foods that have the power to change your life.
There are certain foods that when you eat them, your body is in heaven, your cells start singing, your mind becomes ecstatic. “Yes,” they cry in unison, “Yes, these are the foods that I have been waiting for. These are the foods that I have been craving, that my body has been missing my whole life.” Sometimes, it is a particular nutrient you have been lacking. But more often with these foods it is their synergistic properties. They have a magical energy that comes not only from the synergy of their nutritional composition but from the way they are grown, the lands they are from, their history. Many of them are sacred plants in their countries of origin.
There are many amazing foods I have omitted from this book, foods that are more commonly recognized as superfoods: vegetables like broccoli, kale and cucumbers, fruits like cranberries, blueberries and grapefruit, sprouts like lentils, sunflower or alfalfa. I was tempted to include avocados and olives, buckwheat and oats, all foods I eat on a daily basis. But these are foods that most of us are familiar with, and if you are not then there are plenty of books out there that do cover them. This book is about the new breed of superfoods that are unique to the West in the 21st century. Never before have we had access to such a wide variety of plant foods. Some of them we are accustomed to in different forms, like cacao; others have been around for a few decades now, like spirulina; some are widely known in their country of origin, but novel to Europe and the U.S., like goji berries; and some others are utterly brand new to us, like purple corn extract. When I was a child, avocados and kiwis were considered exotic; now they are standard fare in every shopping basket. I believe that such is the potency and vitality of the foods in this book that as people catch on to them, they are going to revolutionize the way we eat, shop and live.
These foods are transformative. By eating such high-potency foods they change the very nature of our reality. They affect our consciousness and raise our energetic level to a degree that has profound implications in all areas of our lives. It is not possible to eat these foods on a daily basis and not feel altered. We live in a culture that is intrinsically false; fueled on junk food, media lies, false gods and political whores, we have forgotten how to be our true selves. These foods help us realign, connect with who we really are, and tune into our higher selves. The more we eat this way, the more we live in our power. This can be a hard adjustment to make in a world where the individual is fundamentally disempowered. Revealing our inner core is usually painful; as we let the masks of self-deception slip away, we have to let go of people and life situations which have been holding us back and preventing us