 the show for people who care about their health and the health of our planet on the ThinkTech Live Streaming Network series. I'm your host Dr. Grace O'Neill. Joining me today are Lorraine Sakaguchi and Carol Janisek from the Vegan Society of Hawaii, better known as the Vegetarian Society of Hawaii. Today we're going to talk about what's new with the SH. So Carol, can you tell us what inspired you guys to change the name from the vegetarian to the Vegan Society of Hawaii? Well, we've always really advocated for a vegan diet and our group is open to everybody and we want everyone to feel welcome. But when the group started years ago in the early 1990s, they used the Vegetarian Society of Hawaii because nobody even knew the word vegan. All these years have transpired now and it just felt like the right time to change the name to express who we actually, what we're actually doing and who we actually are. But again, we're still open to anybody who's interested, even if they're not ready to follow being a vegan, having a vegan diet and vegetarians who are lacto-oval vegetarians or eat fish, we're welcome them as well. We want everybody to feel that they can come here and learn and enjoy and socialize. So, Lorraine, can you tell us about what the SH has been up to since the pandemic? Okay, so we were originally going to wait the few months we thought it would take to be able to resume our in-person events and that didn't happen as everyone in the world knows. So, we started to do Zoom talks by some really wonderful people and, for example, recently we, so what that speech shows is our television program. We have a weekly television program called Vegan that shows on Olelo Channel 54 and sometimes in other community TV stations as well. And we put all of our speakers on that, so that people who missed the original event will get to see it and we have a lot more people doing that, so we're really thrilled being able to address a much wider audience. So, that is Dr. Kim Williams. He was the top and is the top cardiologist in the country. He was the president of the American College of Cardiology and we were so thrilled to have him just a couple of weeks ago give a talk for us via Zoom on nutrition and mortality in the dual pandemic and you'll get to see that in a couple of weeks on television. This is Dr. Colin Zoo who just did a cooking demo over in Waimuku on Maui last night and today right now he's over at Govindas. We're doing an in-person dine-out with him. That's a vegan lunch and tomorrow over at Down to Earth in Kailua. We're hosting a wonderful session where he's doing a talk and cooking demo for us and giving out lots of free vegan samples of his food. So, if you're able to see this program before that date tomorrow on Saturday, 4 p.m. September 3, please come and join us. It's gonna be exciting. Delicious, Lorraine. Yeah. I could go, yeah. Tell us about the next speaker Carol, the speaker for next month. Oh, Dr. Campbell, he's so well known. He was the author of the China Study and he's just a superstar in the vegan community and the health community. I'm very excited that he's coming. This is going to be a Zoom lecture but we're so privileged to have him. It's going to be a really special event. I think maybe Lorraine might want to add something. She might have some other details actually. Lorraine, do you want to add anything about Dr. Campbell? Well, only that we're very privileged. I think everything Carol said was correct and we're very privileged to have him because we have on our board as our person who gets speakers to come and talk for us, Dr. Ruth Hydrick, who's really famous for her race for life book and for being a star on the Forks over Knives documentary. We're so lucky and privileged to be able to work with her and she's a friend of Pika and Campbell. It was so easy. It was wonderful to be able to have her be able to get them to talk for us. So, can we look at the pictures of prior events now? Sure. So, tell us about this Carol. What was this? Oh, that was Dr. Gregor's lecture. He gave such a fantastic lecture. He is the person who started the site on nutritionfacts.org, which has all these short little videos of every topic that you can think of health related topics. He's known worldwide. Anyway, he came out in person to speak to us and the room was just packed and he's quite funny as well as being so brilliant and we had a great time. I know he went to, he went to, he went to Kauai, didn't he? Or Maui, actually. Maui, yeah. Maui. They had a huge crowd as well. The room was just packed. It was kind of a little thrill to have him there, actually. That's all I can say. He's got, he's the author of a bunch of different books, How Now To Die. When people hear that, they say, what do you mean we're all going to die, but it's really about how now to die of diabetes, of heart disease. So, if you haven't seen those books, it's really worth checking them out. He's got also the How Now To Diet books and cookbooks. Really good stuff. What was this, Lorraine? This was over at Foster Botanical Garden on Oahu and one of our board members, Jeff Pang, set it up. Jeff Pang has also been the head of a couple of our groups that emphasize, for example, grow your own food. So, it's all about learning how to garden and do sustainable, edible gardening as well. And another one where we did a vegan potluck. This is the vegan potluck group, and I think our grow your own food group together. We met for the last pre-COVID, Mid-Summer Night Gleam, get together at Foster Botanical Garden for this wonderful, huge, picnic vegan potluck. It was amazing. What was this? This was over at the University of White Campus. It's the week that the kids, the students move into their dorms and they set up a lot of tables for the kinds of things, activities that the kids might be interested in. And this was to sign them up for learning about vegan society of Hawaii events, which was at that time still called the Vegetarian Society of Hawaii. So there are some of our volunteers along with some of the students. How about this, Carol? That's a picture of you. So, because Aloha Animal Sanctuary was going to be doing a lecture and they invited a group of people from the Vegetarian Society to come and have a tour of the sanctuary. It was so fun. The animals there are very friendly. It's not a petting zoo by any means, but the goats and all the animals, they seem to wander up and they want attention, especially the goats. They're so cute. And we had a good time. The sanctuary is really a beautiful place. They really thought it out, put a lot of love and care into it to make sure that they're taking proper care of the animals and made me really appreciate it even more. I had done some volunteer work over there working on planting trees and laying moths and things, but this time I felt even a little closer to it. So it was a nice experience. We should note that that event happened just a few weeks ago. This is one of our more recent events. How about this? That is what used to be our annual event and we hope to resume it after COVID. Every year we've had a very large Thanksgiving vegan feast where we have a lot of people come together. I'm not sure whether we're going to be able to do it again this year, but hopefully certainly next year. We had hundreds of people coming in the past. How about this? What is this, Loree? That's our vegan Society for White newsletter. This shows what it looks like, the front page, and it's a colorful newsletter. If you get it online, it's also an interactive one. We featured a lot of local authors as well as some main ones. I don't know anything else to say about it. Maybe Grace can make it. It's very hard on that. Loree works very hard on that newsletter. That's what I wanted to add. Who does that? It's very worth reading. There's a recipe usually in it. There's a lot of recent vegan events in the newsletter as well that people would be interested in. I wanted to ask you guys, Carol, if you can tell us about joining the Vegan Society of Hawaii, what are the benefits, for instance, to joining? Biggest benefits are that you are joining a group of people that have like-minded ideas and a group that you can socialize with, but you're also supporting a group that is doing good things in the community. It's inexpensive, but it's really a worthwhile thing. We also have a lot of different restaurants and groups that provide discounts. If you go down to earth, you can get discounts on deli items that you purchase, the prepackaged meals or something you order from the deli cookies, things like that. If you go to lots of the restaurants that we have in the area, they'll give you between a five or 10% discount on your meals or other special offers. It's really nice and you know that you're supporting something really special. So Lorraine, what restaurants can you say off the top of your head that you can get discounts from? Well, let's see. Loving Hut, Simple Joy, Peace Cafe, We'll Make a Market, Olena Cafe, Govindas, Vegetarian Buffet, and many more. Ripple of Smiles and Banan. Oh, the Ripple of Smiles, right, Banan. Oh, I forgot about Banan. That's right, Peace Cafe. Isn't there a Peace Cafe? Mention that. Peace Cafe, Govindas, Himalayan Kitchen, I think is one. Himalayan Kitchen. Is that still open? I don't know if it's still open, is it? Sorry, I'm not in time with me. Down to earth, Deli, you can go and eat there and we always get a five percent off for all the food you eat there. Isn't there some stuff on Maui and the other islands as well? Yes, we have a number of different restaurants on Maui, Kauai, and even the Big Island. I don't know if these are open, but it says Maui Burgers, Maui Roots, Pork and Salad, Earth Aloha Eats. On Kauai, there's a whole bunch over there as well. Oh, then there are some discounts that you get no matter where you live, even if you belong to VSH and you live on the mainland or even internationally, there's some internet discounts you can get or you can even tour the world and veg voyages and get a discount as well because you belong to the vegan society of Hawaii. So it's pretty useful. I did that one. Oh really? Where did you go? I went to the veg voyages. I haven't heard of veg voyages. I mean, I saw that on there, but I didn't know where you could go. What kind of options did I have? I went to India and we had a three-week tour on India and it was pretty great. It's definitely something to look into if you're interested in doing that kind of travel. I'm not sure where else they go. I really only researched that because I was planning to go to India anyway. But you know all the food is vegan on the veg voyages? Is it all vegan or all the food is vegetarian? That's the plan. So I'd say when you're traveling in a foreign country you still need to be very careful. But that is the intention and that's, I know that they work hard to do that, but I can't promise that everything was. I'm certainly hoping that it was, but I don't want to say absolutely you're going to have that. So you just have to be very careful and try to be aware as well. But it was very helpful because they took me to places. Well, there was a small group and we went to places that we'd never have been able to go on our own. Pretty cool. So it was a special trip. Oh, I'd like to mention that a lot of people, we're very grateful to the people who want to become members for whatever reason because they support us. We're an all-volunteer group and we've been around since 1990 doing this as an all-volunteer group and we're basically an outreach educational, thank you, group that we try to promote human health, animal rights and protection of the environment. But we don't sit around talking to ourselves. We really welcome people who are not even vegetarians, still meat eaters, still, you know, and we really are thrilled to have them with us because they're showing an interest in what we do and want to support us and we're very grateful for that. So one of the ways we thank everybody who is a member is to be, you know, you get, once you get your membership card, there's so many discounts you can get at a whole lot of people that are, if they're not vegan or vegetarian, they're veg-friendly businesses and we thank them very much for their participation and support. So what can people do if they're interested in getting involved in VSH? How do they get more involved? They can call our VSH phone number that's listed at our website or just go to our website and they can email us at info.vsh.org and let us know they're interested. There's also a little box to check off if you become a member that says that you're interested in volunteering. We're always thrilled to hear from anyone. So Carol, what does VSH need help with currently? Oh gosh, when I think we need people that do everything from video editing to swimming around and fixing up things online for us, like maybe our book list. I'm actually trying to do that now but I'm working rather slowly. When we start up meetings again, someone that will help us set up or break down or sweep the floor and there's so many different types of things that we would love to have volunteers come and help us with. Does that help? Yes, that does help. People are probably wondering how to get involved and then Lorraine wanted to mention something that Carol made for people who, there's a lot of disaster kind of stuff that they sell at Costco and it's not very plant-based diet friendly, but Carol actually put together a dining disaster. Dining during a disaster. I created this brochure. The reason I did this is I've been very involved with the CERT group that's the community emergency response team and they have all these flyers of food packages that you would make for yourself to be prepared when the hurricane is coming or something like that and most of them are involved junk food and a lot of things like spam and other heavy foods that aren't necessarily healthy. So I put together a list of different items. It's actually, I mean, this is just completely full of different things that you can pack. I know nobody's going to be able to see this very well, but can they get it somewhere if they can't see it? I mean, is it online? That's a good idea. We should post this online. We'll have it on BSH.org. We'll have it on BSH.org. Okay, cool. And so we actually, because I created this, we were invited to go to an emergency preparedness fair at, it was at the Windward Mall in Kaneohe and passed these out. And so it was fun. I created a small version of a go box for meals to show people and we passed out samples that Down to Earth provided for us. I was able to talk to people and tell them little tricks that they could use. Like for instance, dehydrated foods versus, well, anyway, I was able to explain a lot of things and there was a lot of interest. So it was kind of nice. And even people from the CERT community, the community of emergency response team were kind of excited about my brochure, the people that saw it. So I'm going to update this for better graphics later, but this is the complete form and I'm excited to present it. So I want to talk about the website of it, the vsh.org website, right? Can you tell us what it has on it, like resources for people who are interested in going plant-based, the rain? Yes. What it has on the website is a library of our videos of the speakers we've had. So there's a huge amount of information available there. There are recipes also on this website, printed recipes. We have our list of, we have a famous dining guide, which was around way before Happy Cow, places where you could dine and get some plant-based food on Oahu, Maui, Big Island, Kauai, and so on. Complete with maps. So you can go and figure out where you are and where to go. We also have our past newsletters. We have videos that a lot of people don't know about from our Kauai group. Our Kauai group has a wonderful videographer named Robert Zelkovsky. And so we have some great talks there too, if you'd like to see them. We have just a huge amount of wonderful talent among our volunteers, and I hope you enjoy the website. Well, thank you so much, guys. We're out of time and we're going to have to wrap it up. I'm Dr. Gracie O'Neill. This is Healthy Planet on the ThinkTech Live Streaming Network series. We've been talking with the Vegan Society of Hawaii. Thanks to Michael, our broadcast engineer, and the rest of the crew at ThinkTech for hosting our show. And thanks to you, our listeners for listening. I'll see you on September 16th for more of Healthy Planet on ThinkTech, a show for people who care about their health and the health of our planet. My special guest will be Level V, 808. If you have ideas for the show or questions about my future guests, please contact me at HealthyPlanetThinkTech at gmail.com. Check out my website at GracieHawaii.com or Instagram at GracefulLiving365 for more information on my projects including future show guests. I'm Dr. Gracie O'Neill. Aloha, everyone.