Campbell - The PlantPure Nation cookbook: the official companion cookbook to the breakthrough film ... with over 150 plant-based recipes

I was sixteen years old, in a high school near Cornell and dreaming of studying nutrition, when I met my husband, Nelson Campbell, and his family.

I grew up in a small rural town. My parents were raised on dairy farms and I too lived on a family dairy farm in the beautiful Finger Lakes region of upstate New York, until my father took a job with Cornell Cooperative Extension as a dairy consultant and educator.

At that time, Nelsons father, Dr. T. Colin Campbell, was also at Cornell and in the middle of the research in China that would become the best-selling book The China Study . Though Colin often traveled back and forth as he gathered data and compiled results, the first time Nelson brought me home for dinner, he happened to be there.

Colin loves to talk about his research, and I love asking questions. During one of my first visits to their home, Colin spent hours showing me slides of family pictures and his travels around the world doing research. He shared what researchers were learning about the incredible differences in health between those who ate a plant-based diet and those who ate a meat- and dairy-heavy Western diet, discussing his earlier work in the Philippines and at Virginia Tech on the negative effects of animal proteins. This may not have been what Nelson had in mind when hed invited mebut I was fascinated.

In my teen years, I loved to cook for my parents and siblings. Id grown up eating a traditional diet of meat and dairy, supplemented by fresh vegetables grown in my fathers large gardens, but especially after meeting Nelsons family, I began experimenting with vegetarian and vegan recipes.

I went on to study nutrition at Cornell, but in my classes I met the harsh reality of nutritional instruction during that time. It was the 1980s, and plant-based nutrition was far from mainstream. Despite the incredible findings in China, Colins colleagues, even those in his own department, were shunning, sometimes even mocking him. I became disillusioned by the ignorance, ego, and cowardice in this field. Though I still earned a minor in nutrition education, I decided on a different career path: childhood education.

As a public school teacher, I brought my passion for helping young people make the right food choices into the classroom. I incorporated food and nutrition into my curriculum any way I could, teaching my students to take responsibility for their diet and health. At home, Nelson and I did the same for our three children, and our family has been cooking and eating primarily plant-based cuisine for more than twenty-five years. But we both felt it was important to spread this knowledge further.

Over the past four years, Nelson has pursued a dream of building a socially conscious company committed to bringing his fathers message into the mainstream. This company has developed a foods-based wellness program that brings the benefits of plant-based eating to a larger, more diverse audience. Ive been fortunate to play my own part in this effort, providing culinary education and consultation for our clients, and helping in the development and testing of the meals used in the program. Its a role that allows me to apply all the knowledge Ive gained over the past twenty-five years, and seeing the differences the program has made in our clients lives has been nothing short of exhilarating.