For the twenty-seventh interview, I have the pleasure of introducing you to Lindsay Williambrown; Owner and CSO (Chief Snacking Officer) of MUNCHOS! Raw Snacks – a product line of All Well Brands in business since 2013

My Comments:

I found this company/brand in a unique way. I was looking on craigslist in the job section under the food/hospitality section and entered in the search box for vegan chef and an ad came up for someone to help make raw food snack products for this company. I decided to look up the company online and when I saw the pictures of the products, I was amazed because it look like art. The colors of the foods used looked alive, vibrant and 3-D quality that practically grabbed you attention, as if there is a caption that says “TRY ME!”. That is when I sent Lindsay the question below about the products and when have been in touch ever since by phone and email. She has found a way to create snacks using ingredients that are neglected in the raw food world, such as daikon, sunchokes, sweet potatoes, etc. Most companies are focusing on the popular kale chip, so I am happy that Lindsay has chosen to focus on other produce.

Lindsay has some very special offers to share with you below, so please check them out!

My question to Lindsay in an email when I had first found her product line was regarding whether her products are non-GMO, organic and vegan.

Her response:

I use all L.A. County farmer’s market sources except for my honey, which is through Sleeping Bear Farms (and not in many of the products). All the farmers I use are beyond gentle with their soil nutrification and do not use any chemicals and are non-GMO, but most are not certified organic. Since the ones who are tend to be bigger farms with more money and less traditinal practices sometimes, I actually find the most inspiring growing stories coming from these non-technically-organic farmers than the big guys. Happy to talk more about it.

Question #1: Tell me briefly about yourself and why you decided to get involved in the “health” industry?

“Decide” is a strong word I suppose, as I feel like I simply followed my nose into food. I had very little food as a kid and what we had was heavy home-cookin’ fare that was the standard culinary wisdom of the 1980s, and there was a lot of unrest in my house as well. Those both contribute to unwell cells, and I presented increasingly ill from a young kid through to young adulthood. When my health reached a point of me having 14 terminal or chronic illnesses that don’t have cures according to western MDs and I had a pattern of 1 hour per day of productivity, I decided I either had to decide to die or live. I had been working with food and as a chef already so I knew food made a difference in health, but I had to super-size that effect by changing my thought patterns. Without eating the right food for me, I could not have had the clarity to know I needed to do that and I couldn’t have had the discipline to teach myself new ways to think about the world.

Question #2: If you were stranded on a desert island and were allowed to take only 5 items with you (they can be food, books or specific products that are all health-related), what would they be and why?

I’m terrible with this type of question – let me see here! 1) Water. 2) An axe. I will assume this island has coconuts available, so I should take a good axe to open them with and to do other handy things. 3) Raw plant oil insect repellant (from Living Libations if I can). 4) Alaffia shea butter for sunscreen for my very Nordic skin. 5) Assorted grain seeds for planting (and chomping).

Question #3: What one message do you want to share with the people of this world that is crucial for their ultimate well-being and longevity?

I don’t believe in telling people how to live, but I do know that scientifically, kindness is the only guaranteed cure that has never failed to produce wholeness in the human body or the planetary molecular structure. Being still enough that we can be kind to all that surrounds us makes us well.

Questions #4: If someone could afford to purchase only one product at this moment to start their journey towards better health (food or health-related), what would you recommend and why?

Grain seeds. They cost $1.50-$3.00 per pound in bulk aisles and $6.00 per pound prepackaged, and yield 2 pounds of food per 1 pound of dry seeds when soaked in liquid. I am not a physician, but I know from calculating nutrition statistics that raw soaked grains contain exponentially higher levels of bioavailable protein, vitamins, minerals, trace fats, and other phytochemicals. They contain the most balanced nutrient profile on the planet, require the lowest resource utilization per pound of food, and are the most bioavailable “heavy” food for humans on the planet. When you hear about the UN studies on how we have enough food to feed the planet on 30 cents a day or whatever (I’m old so I’m sure that number has changed since I heard it), they are talking about this kind of eating.

Question #5: Tell me more about your business/company and/or products you offer to the public to help them achieve optimal health and well-being?

Munchos! Raw exists for 2 reasons. One is to fill the gaps in available snackiness for the raw vegan: snackiness that offers car food options, salty, spicy, interesting, and culturally diverse options. The other is to provide a fun-to-eat, fun-to-hold, fun-to-dip snack option for school systems at an accessible price point. By using local, biodynamic, and kindly grown produce and producing it close to the source, Munchos! Raw provides 1-2 servings of fresh, raw produce in a delicious format that every kid identifies with and loves, and that I have NEVER had an omnivore not LOVE.

The flavors of Munchos! Raw are based in my fusion whims but, that said, they are rooted deeply in my background as an anthropologist who was raised in the middle of a dozen or so refugee communities in the southern U.S. inner city. The flavors are unapologetic; some are quite spicy, some are a little spicy, and some are super chill, mild affairs. They are all influenced by a sense of high homage in my life to those cultures, cuisines, and the victories of those who came to the States via sometime horrific and deeply victorious stories.

Two highest compliments I receive from Munchos! Raw eaters are:
-When my Vietnamese taster of the Mint Daikon Chips told me they reminded her exactly of her grandmother’s green curry soup.
-Ashamed faces that admit with downward gazes “I ate one bite it was so good that I saved the rest for my kids.” That’s the point, to make these irresistible to kids. And most parents know exactly what their kids will eat. Who hordes health food in their purse to give to a kid? Who does that with other health food you know of? This is the kind of response healthy food SHOULD have, and it’s the kind of reaction I routinely get to MUNCHOS! Raw Snacks.

The honey I use is so humanely produced that the bees who produce my honey are better fed and biodynamically naturally living than if we were not eating their honey at all. They originated in Michigan, and when the beekeeper heard years ago that almond trees in CA were suffering and losing biodiversity due to a lack of bee population, he came up with a beautiful idea. He flies them to CA for the MI winter to pollinate the CA almond trees. Given the laws and patterns we know about biodiversity, I expect this to have multiple beneficial health effects for the bees and for the eater. One is that the bees have a greater nutrition profile to draw from, which nourishes them and increases the anti-allergy effects of the honey they produce. For anyone wondering about the beekeeper taking all the honey from the hive to sell to us instead of letting the bees feed on it, I can set your mind at ease. What usually happens with honey, even raw honey, is that the bees who produce it are usually starved of that honey and fed sugar bricks instead, so that the beekeeper can harvest as much of the honey as possible for sale to human eaters. This makes many of the bees (if not all of them) diabetic and overweight, and makes the honey they produce from that sugar brick bad for us as well since that honey is devoid of the natural phytochemicals that come through a well-nourished bee.

Munchos! Raw is one of 7 product lines I have developed to date. They are all entirely raw and they are vegan except for the honey that two of the lines contain. Munchos! Raw are designed as car food and kid food, and they are packaged to be exactly one meal. Since they are raw, they contain entirely bioavailable protein, which means they contain 5 times the bioavailable protein per gram as any cooked meat or other cooked food would. Many people don’t know that when we cook food, we denature its nutrient molecules, which means that when we see a nutrition fact label for cooked chicken that might say 21 grams of protein per serving, we can divide that by 5 to get the number of grams of protein that our bodies will absorb and be able to utilize. What this denaturing means is that we think we are getting a lot of protein (and we are!), but we are not being able to use it.

Question #6: What are your hopes/aspirations/dreams for the future health of the people and the planet?

What I know is that we are all expanding in kindness and consciousness and remembering more and more our oneness with one another. My job is to stay in alignment and remembrance of that, and when I do that, it ripples into every other person’s ability to do that.

Question #7: Who is your greatest hero and why?

Heroes have never been a big way I categorize people, but some of the most off-the-chart remarkable, intelligent, connected people I have had the honor of interacting with are the many leaders of the Agape International Spiritual Center. One soundbite from any one of the reverends there (Joanne Coleman, Julie Moret, Rickie Byers Beckwith, Arlene Hylton, Michael Beckwith, Ron Blair, and lots of others). When I think about the profile of a hero, I think of them for their vision, willingness to grow themselves and others, and commitment to practical but unflinching peacemaking while acknowledging current realities.

Question #8: Is there anything else you would like to share with the public?

I’ve shared a lot, so the public probably invites me to stop there :D! But I am so thankful for your support of Munchos! Raw and support at a critical juncture during our scaling journey earlier this year. It’s a blessing to be attracting such amazing quality people committed to making positive presences in the world.

Question #9: I know that there are variables as to how much food/calories each person consumes when eating raw vegan food (based on many lifestyle factors, etc), but is there a basic guideline you would recommend for everyone?

I am not a physician so what I share obviously cannot legally be interpreted as anything except an opinion, so please always consult your conscience and intuition and trusted practitioners and make your own decisions. What I have seen on the empirical side in 20 years of consulting and clearing dis-ease, though, is that 5-10% of calories in a day going to fat is plenty for almost anyone who has grown up within the U.S. food supply chain. I have not met a longterm raw vegan who has survived a diet that is very high in seed fats and greens, and I would assume that is because we gain unnecessary weight on those diets and never have enough burnable sugar for a day’s activities. Also, having more fat in the bloodstream than we can immediately use produces an insulin overage in the body because any sugar that tries to get into the bloodstream is blocked by the fat floating on top of it. Removing excess fat from the daily diet dissolves diabetic responses by the body within a very short period of time (like hours or days or a few weeks). When we remove those fats, we no longer see the blood sugar spikes that eating fruit can otherwise produce.

SPECIAL OFFER:

1) 15% off your ENTIRE Munchos! Raw order through the month of August!
2) 25-minute discovery session with Lindsay on your nourishment goals in food and life
3) 60% discount on the Body Awake! Program available through Munchos! Raw’s parent site, http://www.allwellbrands.com. This is a program that easily and with almost NO effort takes you from viewing nourishment as a Friend with Benefits that you have to manipulate or manage every day, to nourishment becoming your Hot Trustworthy Life Partner you feel TOTAL confidence with and love from. This is a great program. This 28-day program includes a week of Munchos! Raw Snacks as part of its exercises and the usual rate for it is $499. For anyone who signs up in July or August AND mentions TheRawesomeVeganGal, the rate is $299. This is a transformative experience that comes with personal 1:1 intentioning with me, a private Facebook group, only 2 required minutes per day of your attention (option to do as much more as you want!), art therapy and journaling options, and ends with the ability to intuit your own body’s wants and needs around nourishment whether they are from food or otherwise. This program brings together 20 years of eastern and western awareness and non-invasive observational healing, as well as my background as a nutritional intuitive. It is POWERFUL!

Thank you again for the opportunity to share MUNCHOS! Raw Snacks and the work that All Well Brands is bringing into the world!

For more information about this company and brand, go to: http://www.allwellbrands.com

Also, check out my comprehensive video review of some of the delicious Munchos! Raw Snacks on my youtube channel: http://www.youtube.com/TheRawsomeVeganGal