Welcome to Food for Thought. My name is Colleen Patrick Kudreau from Compassionate Cook. I founded Compassionate Cooks to empower people to make informed food choices and to debunk myths about vegetarianism and animal rights.

You can learn more about who we are and what we do by visiting our website Compassionate cooks.com. I hope everyone out there is doing really well. It's so nice to

hear from so many of you. I need an assistant just to keep up with your emails. I'm not

kidding and that's on top of just to keep up with your emails. I'm not kidding.

And that's on top of teaching cooking classes and preparing for talks and writing my column for

Veg News magazine, writing my articles for Satya magazine, my editorials for KQED radio, writing the newsletter, writing this

podcast, recording, editing, and uploading this podcast, keeping the website

updated, doing private consultations, writing a cookbook, testing recipes,

fulfilling DVD and recipe orders, and attending to my cats when they insist that I pay attention to them instead of all of this.

So if they can forgive me, I hope you can forgive me for not replying to your emails right away.

This is why I haven't had a chance.

But I plan on replying if you've written to me so

consider that a promise. Speaking of emails today's podcast is sponsored by a

lovely woman named Dina and I say lovely not because I've ever met

Dina or and not because she's sponsoring today's podcast but because of an email she sent me and

by the way I have a pretty strong sense of intuition and I can detect

a lot about you even through email so beware and one thing I can definitely detect about

Dina is that she's lovely now So now that I've thoroughly embarrassed you,

Dina, thank you very much for your sweet email

and your sponsorship,

Dina thanked me for doing this podcast

and said every time she hears it she always feels very grateful and

...