Love, Peace and Vegetables
Recipes for Conscious Living
- 2022 INDIES Finalist
- Finalist, Cooking (Adult Nonfiction)
Love, Peace and Vegetables is a broad, holistic cookbook that rethinks the roles that food should play in people’s lives.
Marcela Benson’s Love, Peace and Vegetables is a generous compilation of recipes, philosophies, and lessons learned from vegetable-based living.
Focusing her energy on live foods and their expert preparation, Benson delivers ample instructions for making delicious, attractive, and nutritious meals that include sweet sauces, crunchy nibs, nutty patties, aromatic herbs, and a variety of global ingredients. The book is an encouraging guide for anyone looking to expand their culinary repertoire via the inclusion of colorful, unprocessed food.
Drawing on her extensive spiritual and dietary training, Benson relays steps that can be taken to reshape consumption lifestyles into evolved acts of self-love. With the knowledge that many people are passive eaters who welcome whatever is before them, the book shares choices, recommendations, and cultures surrounding eating and food preparation that are intentional, aware, and conscientious. Here: meats, sugar, and dairy are out; hearty nuts, sweeteners like xylitol, and cream alternatives like coconut milk are in.
Whether covering blended soups, Middle Eastern falafel, or vanilla ice cream, the book extends an incredible amount of care to teach not only the preparation of live foods, but also to share information about the technologies and techniques needed to cultivate a broad selection of dishes. It also acknowledges that adopting a live food diet requires a period of adjustment; it counsels newcomers through the processes of adapting.
Encouraging the use of equipment like dehydrators, nut milk bags, and blenders for the manipulation and shaping of food, this book will represent new culinary paradigms for many. Here, meal planning, and thinking about ingredients sometimes days in advance, is required. A significant number of the recipes call for beans to be sprouted, or for fermentation to take place, making their prep times lengthy. But there’s also something here to please every palate, from chagaccino to kamut to Hijiki seaweed salad.
Vibrant, full-color photography and nature-inspired watercolor illustrations make the book a visual treasure to page through, though some of the book’s terms are unexplained or under explained. The book’s heft and scope are both generous and an occasional impediment.
Stretching the imagination when it comes to consumables, Love, Peace and Vegetables is a broad, holistic cookbook that’s moved forward by its far-reaching, empowering, and subversive ideas about the roles that food should play in people’s lives.
Reviewed by
Katrina Spencer
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
