12 Steps to Whole Foods

CHAPTER 6
Making Plant-Based
Main Dishes
Your Goal:
To begin making filling, enjoyable, plant-based main dishes to reduce or eliminate animal proteins, to
accompany your big salad for dinner.
What You’ll Need:
The only new tool you need this month is a large, inexpensive fine strainer to wash whole grains. A
regular colander won’t work, because we will be trying some new grains that are very small such as
quinoa. If you are used to buying refined grains (white rice, white flour), the refining process that strips
the grain of nutrition also gives you a clean product. Whole grains, however, come to you straight from
the field and must be rinsed well—especially quinoa, which sometimes has an outer layer of a bitter
natural chemical called saponin.
You will use inexpensive grains, beans, and other legumes that you can find at a health food store or
buying co-op.
The goal this month is not to make a vegetarian of you unless that’s your wish. At my house, only one
of us (my teen daughter) is a pure vegetarian, although we eat very little meat and virtually never eat it
at home unless we’re having carnivorous company over to dinner. The goal this month is, rather, to
make a significant shift toward eating more plant-based whole foods.
I will not try to indoctrinate you against meat eating altogether—after all,
the Bible warns against telling people to never eat meat. However, I
highly recommend reading The China Study by Colin Campbell, Ph.D.,
the most significant and scientific evidence for eating a much more plantbased
diet than most Americans are eating. Campbell, director of the
Division of Nutritional Sciences at Cornell University (former senior
advisor to the American Institute for Cancer Research), undertook the
largest nutrition study in history. He was raised on a cattle farm and fully
expected, as he set out to study liver cancer in Filipino children early in
his career, to find that sick children needed more protein.
He was astonished to repeatedly find the opposite of his original
assumptions: both animals and humans thrive on a highly plant-based
diet. They grow more tumors, develop more heart disease and autoimmune diseases, and die earlier
when they eat a diet comprised of 20% animal protein, which is precisely the Standard American Diet
© Copyright Robyn Openshaw 12 Steps to Whole Foods 157