Our First Chapter

Almost 15 years ago, I hired a chef and started taking the first small steps in a grassroots strategy to share the healing message of plant-based nutrition. Kim, who has been cooking plant-based for well over 30 years, soon joined this effort after winding down her career as a K12 teacher and has been involved with me ever since coordinating all things culinary.

Because healthy plant-based food options were less common in those days, we decided to focus first on developing plant-based dishes incorporating the flavors and textures familiar to mainstream eaters. We worked hard in our little R&D kitchen to develop meals we could use in a 10-day immersion program, then undertook our first program in the small town of Wake Forest, NC. We recruited a group of mainstream eaters, provided our meals and some nutrition/culinary education to these folks, and performed pre and post biometric testing. We were astonished to see how the numbers changed in such a short period of time. Average cholesterol levels plummeted by about 25%, and most people taking medications were able to reduce or eliminate those medications by the end of the program. I remember calling my father to share the results, and even he was surprised at the rapidity and magnitude of the change.

We conducted more immersion programs, including at a sports apparel company in our local community, and kept getting the same results. At that point, we knew we were on to something big, so we started working on the next step of our strategy, which was to scale our production of plant-based foods so we could support regional, and then nationwide, immersion programming. This meant launching a foods business, which we quickly learned was far more complex and difficult than we had ever imagined. Fortunately, though, an opportunity developed for creating a platform we could stand on later to better execute this strategy.

Specifically, I had just endured a difficult political experience with the Kentucky legislature, which motivated me to think about how we could drive a storyline for a film. I thought if we could produce a movie showing people how the message of plant-based nutrition had been suppressed for decades by powerful interests, we might gain greater exposure and resources for launching the strategy envisioned at the outset of our journey.

Working with a talented film crew (including the producer of Forks Over Knives), I learned the ins and outs of making a documentary and, together, we drove and filmed a story over about a year and half. We released the film in 2015 in theaters in over 100 communities, then secured distribution for a couple of years on Netflix, then on Amazon Prime and iTunes.

PlantPure Nation had the intended effect, creating a platform we could stand on to launch two organizations – a foods business and a nonprofit – both of which were integral to our grassroots movement strategy.  I’ll save this part of our story for the next letter. And in the meantime, if you haven’t seen PlantPure Nation, I encourage you to check it out. As I shared, you can find it on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, and few other platforms.

Nelson