A conversation with Colorado Springs' "green rock star"
Michele E. Mukatis
Cultivate Health
Owner/Consultant
719-231-6265/
cultivatehealth@gmail.comhttp://websites.integrativenutrition.com/MMukatis/Home/Index.aspxHealth
She exudes it, she talks it, she walks it, she lives it, she grows it and most importantly she teaches it!
Cultivating a multi-layered knowledge of health, food, gardens, cooking, agriculture, sustainability and related subjects, her post-college education choices truly suggest exactly what her passion is and what that knowledge can do for you in the area of health and nutrition counseling!
· Certified Holistic Health Counselor, The Institute for Integrative Nutrition/Columbia University, 2007
· Certified Health Counselor, American Association of Drugless Practitioners, 2007
· Certified Colorado Gardener, Denver Botanic Gardens, 2000 (Certificate of Merit)
· Intensives completed in French Techniques, Italian Techniques, Pastry Techniques, and various other classes, Cooking School of the Rockies, 1996-1998
Michele also holds a degree in the Dig-in-and-get-your-fingernails-dirty school. "I grew up gardening, in an agricultural family.” "Conventional" farmers in one branch of the family grew crops such as corn and soy with the whole host of pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers.
Michele and her family moved to eastern Oregon when her father was diagnosed with Multiple Chemical Sensitivities and her father needed to start doing everything in a much healthier manner. They worked a quarter-acre garden, and canned, preserved and froze much of what they grew, plus sourced animal products from the farmers in the area. Now, she calls herself a "flexitarian" because she learned to eat very balanced meals of produce and livestock grown and raised close to home.
Living in Mexico and Spain gave Michele an even different perspective on everything: food, beauty, consumption, etc., and started her really thinking on her own about reducing, reusing, recycling. The year after graduating from college, she helped her mom xeriscape her front yard, before xeriscape was a household term. Her mom is a master composter, so she learned the fine art of turning kitchen scraps into beautiful black soil. The back yard of the house she lived in was her front yard since her apartment had a back entrance, so a little coaxing transformed it into vegetable gardens. "There are so many great things you can do with edible plants. Flowers are beautiful, but why not landscape with something you can eat?"
Now, Michele brings her culinary, agricultural, and landscaping experience full circle. Since moving to Colorado Springs, where she seems to finally be settled, she has worked to promote sustainable values. Cultivate Health, the business she founded is all about working with groups like Slow Food (
http://www.slowfoodcoloradosprings.org/), Pikes Peak Urban Gardens (
http://www.ppug.org/), and all of the local farmers, ranchers, restaurants and other businesses associated with the Peak to Plains Alliance (
http://www.peaktoplains.com/), to promote community connection through food resources, agriculture and healthy landscapes.
She was recently featured in the local paper, the Gazette, for her cooking classes taught with health philosophy as a backdrop and vegetables from her own garden as well as local farmers the highlight. For Michele, recycling, reusing, and “under-consuming” in the first place, are unshakable tenets of her life. Wrapping that into her livelihood was a natural progression and the best way to be on this Earth.
What does the future look like for Michele? What should it look like to US?
Eleanor Roosevelt began the institution of a Victory Garden on the White House Grounds by declaring ("Plant more in '44!") Victory gardens, also called war gardens or food gardens for defense, were
vegetable,
fruit and
herb gardens planted at private residences in the
United States,
Canada, and
United Kingdom during
World War I and
World War II to reduce the pressure on the public food supply brought on by the war effort. In addition to indirectly aiding the war effort these gardens were also considered a civil "
morale booster" — in that gardeners could feel empowered by their contribution of labor and rewarded by the produce grown. Making victory gardens became a part of daily life in the middle of the earth, the home front.
Amid regular rationing of canned food in Britain, a poster campaign encouraged the planting of Victory Gardens by nearly 20 million Americans. These gardens produced up to 40 percent of all the vegetable produce being consumed nationally. Just look what Americans can do when they set their minds to it!
