About

Feeding People with Love came to me one night in my kitchen in New York. I was alone; outside, there was a cold wind blowing, promising more snow.  I wasn’t going anywhere and I needed to eat after a day at work, but didn’t feel like fixing myself a proper meal. For one thing, that small cottage near a lake in the Catskill Mountains had the worst-designed kitchen in creation; nothing to inspire and motivate real food production.

I stood listlessly by the stove and thought, Why bother cooking just for yourself, anyway? And the answer came from my heart so loud and strong: Indu Kline! You know perfectly well why it’s important to eat real food and nourish yourself properly!

And all my years of traveling and studying and seeking, my food journeys, my life from childhood in an English village, traveling through Europe and the Middle East to an ashram in India during the 70s and then to marriage and motherhood and work in North America, flooded my thoughts with ideas and inspirations, turning me around in a second. I made a simple meal for myself with fresh ingredients and made notes of the ideas that came up. I still have that page from the fridge-door notepad that I covered with topics.

That night I formed a resolve that I would cook real food and I would share it with others.  Putting aside dissatisfaction and even the sheer impracticality of thinking I could host anything like a dinner party in that space, I created the intention of attracting guests and sharing my food with them.

The next morning a dear friend knocked at my door. Within minutes, we were sitting at the little kitchen table, bathed in sunshine from the back door, eating the good food I had made last night, enjoying each others company – while she shared her very particular reason for the unexpected visit. “I thought of you, and I had to come over to tell you to get out of your own way.”

Two nights later, I stepped in and offered my tiny living room to host a meeting of my women’s group. It was guest night, so there were more women, and everyone had to bring a bucket to fill with warm soapy water, and food to share. We sat bathing our feet, relaxing and laughing and sharing a fantastic feast!

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Part of my job at the hospital was to coordinate cooking classes. And I saw how crazy everyone was being made by the massive amounts of conflicting information telling us what to eat: Eat these foods or nutritional supplements at to stay healthy. Stay away from these foods to avoid dread diseases. I knew this was a sadly misguided and inadequate guidance system that was failing everyone.

I had studied in India with a spiritual master of yoga, living in community and experiencing firsthand a different perspective on all this.  According to Ayurveda, the ancient health and healing system of India, health is part of a body mind spirit continuum that depends on knowledge of the seasons, respect and discipline. You stay healthy by eating fresh, seasonal – therefore, local – foods that are prepared with love and respect (conscious awareness) and shared with gratitude and appreciation (conscious awareness).  That food was the best I have ever eaten, and there I learned to connect diet and season and state of mind and community for enjoying my food; and made the connections of timing and quantity and state of mind again for enjoying good digestion, and, therefore,  great energy and health.

That night in the kitchen, it all came together for me and I began to gather materials to write about food through the lenses of consciousness and community, with traditional stories of sharing and gathering, and an exploration of what it means to be nourished.

Feeding People with Love became my working title and soon after this I began to work and travel with Ayurvedic doctors from India, learning a lot about food from them, and finally moving to California after reading Chez Panisse Fruit and Chez Panisse Vegetables in a Florida bookstore one rainy afternoon and hauling these treasures from place to place for the rest of our month-long working tour.

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My journey came full circle with a culinary apprenticeship in a Berkeley CSK (community-supported kitchen) Three Stone Hearth. What I learned there advanced not only my practical skills and understanding of the benefits of cooperative systems, but my appreciation for the connection with the land, with the farmers, the animals, and the soil. I understood finally that What I eat is, indeed, significant: The choices I make regarding not just processed packaged “non-food edible-like substances”  as Michael Pollan would put it, versus fresh produce, but also where the food was sourced, the conditions of factory-farmed or even industrial organic versus pastured animals – all of this has a huge impact on the quality of the food itself, and on my health and the health of the home planet, on the environment, the condition of our soils, the future of food and food justice – for people as well as animals.  And I remembered my childhood, surrounded by the farmer’s fields, watching the calves being born, drinking the creamy fresh milk that appeared on the doorstep every morning, collecting brown eggs from the hen house and green beans and berries from the patch my father tended at the bottom of the garden.

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I attended Awakening the Dreamer:Changing the Dream, a symposium, created by the Pachamama Alliance to educate about the Rainforest and what is happening on the planet. Moved by that, I trained as a Master Composter with StopWaste.org, incorporating this knowledge into my cooking classes. I became Oakland Chapter Leader for the Weston A. Price Foundation, promoting nutrient-dense foods, access to raw milk, and diversified family farms.  I worked in the Slow Food campaign to support Real Food in Schools and recently trained as a facilitator for Awakening the Dreamer and linked my work to their initiative FourYearGo.org that will launch in April to unite and stimulate individuals and organizations working to “Change the Dream” with the global vision of an ecologically sustainable, spiritually fulfilling and socially just human presence on this planet.