They said the weekend would ruin the economy

Happy Labor Day weekend!

Workers marched for the 8-hour day in 1886 and were told the economy would collapse. Ford put his plants on a 5-day week in 1926 and other companies called it reckless. The 40-hour week didn't become federal law until 1938. The lunch break, the thing we sometimes take for granted, came out of that same really long fight.

Every one of those sounded unreasonable before it happened. Within a generation nobody could remember it any other way.

I've been thinking about that in relation to food.

Count the restaurants in your neighborhood. Count how many are built around animals and how many are built around plants. Walk into a grocery store and look at how much floor space goes to meat, cheese, boxed cereal, and processed junk compared to produce. That ratio feels like the natural order of things. It isn't. It was built, by companies with advertising budgets, over about 100 years.

We've spent the last few months looking at exactly how. Breakfast cereal was invented to sell a product. Bacon and eggs became the American breakfast because a publicist ran a survey. Protein got attached to water bottles because somebody decided it should. None of that came from your body asking for it. It came from companies chasing bigger profits.

Which means it can be built differently.

Imagine wellness centers as common as urgent care, where you could stop in for an immunity boost and a hug. Imagine social juice bars on the corners where the bars are. Imagine fruit cups at the checkout instead of candy, so the impulse buy is a good one. Imagine commercials reminding you to get your fruits and vegetables in, with the same money and repetition behind them that sells soda. Imagine no need for a health food store, because that's the only kind there is. And then imagine how much healthier and happier our society would be.

None of that is far-fetched. It's the same machinery pointed somewhere else.

And imagine opening your refrigerator and not finding parts of an animal in it. What would be in there instead? For me it's a lot of color. Greens, herbs, cooked beans, roasted vegetables, something soaking or marinating, fruit ready to grab. It's a better looking fridge, and it's food that leaves me feeling well.

That's what last Sunday looked like. In class, plants were the default and nobody missed anything. We wrapped raw collard greens around black rice and veggies and made a creamy dressing out of hemp seeds. We made ricotta without the cow. In the men's class we made crispy tofu, worked beets into a hummus people went back for, and finished with chocolate with pistachios and pomegranate. We all enjoyed the food and nobody left feeling heavy.

Here's what I want you to think about. You don't have to wait for the culture to catch up. Your kitchen is one place where you

already decide what the default is.

Most people eat plants as the exception. A vegetable shows up on the side of the plate to balance out the thing in the middle. Flip it and reverse it 😉 Let plants be the rule and let everything else be occasional. No one has to approve that. You don't need a policy change or a new grocery store. You need one shopping trip.

Start with the shelf at eye level. Whatever is easiest to reach is what gets eaten, so make that the washed greens, the cut fruit, the container of cooked grains. Put the food that fights you into the back.

Every change that ever stuck started with people acting like it was already normal.

The next class is Sunday, September 27th, and we'll be cooking for fall. Come cook with me: www.Rubylathon.com/events

Dr. Ruby 🌿 | With love and light