Hi Everyone!! Welcome back to yet another weekly Partner blog post from me- Rachael Brown, your host at Plant Sumo, lol.
Now with the changes that have happened this week (The Plant Sumo website growing and setting up a blog section), I am now the Plant Sumo head of content!! Yay!!
Meaning I get two official titles- Incredible right. Considering this, I have had quite the busy week, getting ready for university on top of my responsibilities at Plant sumo and pearl lemon, here are my highlights:
Podcast with Torre Washington
I had a podcast with Torre Washington! Was a lot of PR back and forth to get him on, but he was amazing to interview. Really chilled out, funny guy.
He’s an IFBB pro bodybuilder, and his perspective on eschewing labels like ‘diet’ and ‘veganism’ is something I have considered before, but not from his particular perspective of taking each day as its own and doing all you can to reduce your impact on the environment.
I felt like maybe he was a bit tired at the beginning, but he warmed up to me towards the end which was nice. It was fascinating to learn also about Rastafarian culture and the whole ethos of eating and living from the earth, it’s such an extreme divergence from the materialistic culture that is so prominent throughout the world it shows how it is fully possible to live without the things we have been conditioned to see as ‘essential’.
Kinda fluffed up the ‘plant sumo’ question, but again I am just a Norfolk tractor kid, not a nutritionist or expert on veganism as I say myself in the podcast.
Podcast with Kojo (QuickSessions)
My favourite podcast so far!! Salim knows Kojo personally and was kind enough to get me in contact with him. Guy has a huge Instagram platform and is low key a celebrity, so I was pretty nervous interviewing him. But he was genuinely so lovely and funny that the whole thing flowed incredibly well.
His attitude to fitness- being non-judgemental, inclusive, not measuring success by superficial standards like the aesthetics of your body is a heartwarming and positive ethos I think more people should promote on their platform.
As someone who has personally struggled with fitness, wellness and keeping myself healthy, removing the kind of judgementalism (which is a word Deepak, just not one used traditionally in conversation!!) that haunts the ‘health’ industry would be a massive step forward to actually confronting so many of the issues the UK has about fitness, including our rampant obesity crisis.
Unfortunately due to miscommunication between us on how to use skype he doesn’t appear in most of the podcast ( a fact that doesn’t matter when its on other platforms, but still).
Wrote Four Plant Sumo Blog posts
After discussing our newfound Plant Sumo blogging strategy, Deepak outlined to me the areas of London (primarily on the circle and northern lines) he wanted me to write ‘top ten food places’ blog posts on.
The first places I picked were Shephard’s Bush and Fulham, so I set to work googling and researching into the kind of local restaurants and eateries in the area.
I pondered over what cuisines to focus on- Italian is kind of everywhere, and Fulham and Shephard’s Bush have pretty diverse communities with a lot of brits with south Asian and African heritage, along with immigrants specifically from those parts of the world.
So for Fulham, I decided to write a piece on the top Indian restaurants in the area, and for Shephard’s Bush, I wrote a post on the top African restaurants in the area.
I actually got the opportunity while visiting a former Pearl Lemon coworker to visit one of the restaurants in Shephard’s Bush I wrote about! The Ethiopian restaurant called The Red Sea. It was absolutely delicious!!
The taste of the injera was not what I was expecting but I thoroughly enjoyed it, I had it with lamb kifto and the meat was cooked to perfection and bursting with spice and flavour. The restaurant owner was also a really kind and friendly bloke, who when he noticed I was full and still had a lot of it leftover asked me if I wanted to takeaway the rest.