Happy Foody

Gotta Love Renee

April 5, 2008 at 5:04 am 10 comments

One of my favorite documentaries is Go Further, featuring Woody Harreleson and his friends as they bike down the West coast spreading the word about “simple organic living”. Well, actually Woody and a few friends bike it, and the rest of them ride in a sweet bus and eat raw foods. In fact, I do believe that this movie was what got me interested in raw foods initially! If you haven’t seen it, add it to your Netflix TODAY! It’s such a wonderful, quirky look at all things environmental, as well as food related issues. I have the book too, which I love. 🙂 Check it out…

“GO FURTHER”, the new film by award-winning documentary filmmaker Ron Mann, explores the idea that the single individual is the key to large-scale transformational change.

The film follows actor Woody Harrelson as he takes a small group of friends on a bio-fuelled bus-ride down the Pacific Coast Highway. Their goal? To show the people they encounter that there are viable alternatives to our habitual, environmentally-destructive behaviors.

The travelers include a yoga-teacher, a raw food chef, a hemp-activist, a junk-food addict, and a college student who suspends her life to impulsively hop aboard. We see the hostility these pilgrims encounter, and watch as their ideas are challenged from within and without.

We meet an entrepreneur who runs a paper company that does not harm trees; an organic farmer who believes Nature is his partner; a man who teaches environmental activists to use humor as a strategic weapon. And throughout, we see Harrelson test his belief that the transformation of our planet begins with the small personal transformations that are within the grasp of each and every one of us, after which… we’ll go further.

Go Further introduced me to Renee Loux Underkoffler for the first time. She goes along for the journey…riding on the bus, and is their personal raw food chef. Yay! She is so enthusiastic and amazing…she is someone you just know you’d love being around!

She has a GREAT cookbook, Living Cuisine: The Art and Spirit of Raw Foods…it holds the recipe for the Balsamic Vinagriette that everyone loves! The Amazon reviews speak for themselves…it’s just really, really good food. The entire first half of the cookbook is informational…about living foods and also food/nutritional info. There is a little sampling of her recipes on the follow up website to Go Further (Voice Yourself)…it has several of the recipes featured in the film, such as Painted Fruit and Chocolate Mousse of the Gods. Yum!

Here is her website, Euphoric Organics, which has a lot of really useful info. And here is a little video of her making Raspberry Lavender Lemonade. She has two other books, The Balanced Plate and Easy Green Living. You just gotta love Renee!

Entry filed under: Cookbooks, Inspiration, Raw.