VEGAN ACTIVIST LISA RAYNER WALKS HER TALK

On a recent trip to Arizona, The Sweetie and I drove from Sedona to Flagstaff on a winding mountain road through a hailstorm to visit and interview Lisa Rayner.  We’d learned about Lisa’s single-minded devotion to living sustainably from the inspiring organization Gardens for Humanity, which gave Lisa a visionary award in 2009 for her teaching of sustainable gardening, cooking, and permaculture design.

After having a look at the U-Tube clips below, where you will meet Lisa and learn about her various passions, you can visit her website to learn more about this dedicated activist and order her self-published cookbooks on solar cooking, sourdough breads, and growing food in the dry soil of the Southwest at altitudes above 6,500 feet.  All of her cookbooks are strictly vegan.

In the first clip, Lisa tells us what brought her to Flagstaff and how she became interested in permaculture design.

In this clip, she tells us why she became a vegetarian and then a vegan and how she grinds her own flour and makes her own sourdough bread.

In the final clip, Lisa shows us how she cooks in her solar oven and explains how she conserves fuel by partially cooking beans in a pressure cooker and then placing the cooker in an insulated Coleman container covered in blankets to finish the beans off by contained heat.  This latter technique was widely used during World Word I and is called haybox cookery–a reference to the hay used for insulation.

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