What's Up?
“Next time someone tells you Mexican food needs lard or meat to be ‘authentic,’ introduce them to the marvels of La Vida Verde."
― Gustavo Arellano, Los Angeles Times
Life & Work
Bio:
Todo Verde founder, Jocelyn Ramirez, is a plant-based chef, college professor, yoga instructor, and advocate for healthy food access in her community.
After Jocelyn’s father was diagnosed with cancer for the second time, she created a plant-based superfood smoothie diet that made him dramatically stronger and helped with a quick recovery. As she drove across the city in search of healthy food options, she was astounded by the lack of access to good food in her neighborhood.
Jocelyn founded Todo Verde in 2015 with a mission to create delicious and healthy plant-based food inspired by her Mexican and South American roots for the Eastside community.
She left her career in higher education to pursue a new path in foodways related to culture and tradition, and references traditional recipes passed down for generations within her family. As she continues to learn about the health benefits of nutrient dense food and healthy ecosystems, she offers knowledge on healthy living with the community through workshops, dialogues, and food demonstrations. Jocelyn also leads speaking engagements in relation to critical analysis of the industrial food system and traditional foodways.
Jocelyn’s background includes degrees in Fine Art, Design and Business and has also trained at the Matthew Kenney Culinary Institute. Her work has been featured in several press outlets including Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Vice, Spotify, Buzzfeed, Smithsonian, Mitu, and more. Wanting to share her expertise in delicious plant-based Mexican food, Jocelyn published her first cookbook, La Vida Verde: Plant-Based Mexican Cooking with Authentic Flavor (Page Street) in 2020. In 2017, Jocelyn co-founded Across Our Kitchen Tables, an organization focused on uplifting women of color in the food industry, that hosts skillshares and an annual symposium. She currently sits on the Culinary Advisory Board for Food Forward and the Leadership Board for the Los Angeles Food Policy Council.
Join Jocelyn for an online series of cooking classes as she shares your Todo Verde favorite recipes from her new cookbook, La Vida Verde: Plant-Based Mexican with Authentic Flavor. Some recipes include our Palmitas/Heart of Palm Ceviche, Jackfruit Carnitas, Pipian Verde, Coconut Flan, and more! Classes will be held on Saturday and Sunday mornings, so sign up below to join us for an interactive online class. All registrants will be sent the class Zoom recording and recipe, even if you can’t participate with us at the set class time.
online community connections
As we’ve seen COVID 19 quickly change our work and living environments, we feel it’s important to continue to connect with our community online as we adjust to our “new normal.” Our team is passionate about sharing healthy plant-based food with our customers and community at events, and during this time we feel it’s important to continue to share that food via recipes that you can prepare in the safety of your home. These classes are offered on a sliding scale, choose the ticket tier that best fits what you are able to contribute during this time.
We’re looking forward to seeing you all on the screen, and hope to share physical space together soon!
The Recôncavo is an almost invisible center-of-gravity. Circumscribing the Bay of All Saints, this region was landing for more enslaved human beings than any other such throughout all of human history. Not unrelated, it is also birthplace of some of the most physically & spiritually uplifting music ever made. —Sparrow
"Dear Sparrow: I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
—Susan Rogers: Personal recording engineer for Prince, inc. "Purple Rain", "Sign o' the Times", "Around the World in a Day"... Director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory
I'm Pardal here in Brazil (that's "Sparrow" in English). The deep roots of this project are in Manhattan, where Allen Klein (managed the Beatles and The Rolling Stones) called me about royalties for the estate of Sam Cooke... where Jerry Ragovoy (co-wrote Time is On My Side, sung by the Stones; Piece of My Heart, Janis Joplin of course; and Pata Pata, sung by the great Miriam Makeba) called me looking for unpaid royalties... where I did contract and licensing for Carlinhos Brown's participation on Bahia Black with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock...
...where I rescued unpaid royalties for Aretha Franklin (from Atlantic Records), Barbra Streisand (from CBS Records), Led Zeppelin, Mongo Santamaria, Gilberto Gil, Astrud Gilberto, Airto Moreira, Jim Hall, Wah Wah Watson (Melvin Ragin), Ray Barretto, Philip Glass, Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd for his interest in Bob Marley compositions, Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam and others...
...where I worked with Earl "Speedo" Carroll of the Cadillacs (who went from doo-wopping as a kid on Harlem streetcorners to top of the charts to working as a janitor at P.S. 87 in Manhattan without ever losing what it was that made him special in the first place), and with Jake and Zeke Carey of The Flamingos (I Only Have Eyes for You)... stuff like that.
Yeah this is Bob's first record contract, made with Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd of Studio One and co-signed by his aunt because he was under 21. I took it to Black Rock to argue with CBS' lawyers about the royalties they didn't want to pay. They paid.
MATRIX MUSICAL
The Matrix was built below among some of the world's most powerfully moving music, some of it made by people barely known beyond village borders. Or in the case of Sodré, his anthem A MASSA — a paean to Brazil's poor ("our pain is the pain of a timid boy, a calf stepped on...") — having blasted from every radio between the Amazon and Brazil's industrial south, before he was silenced. (that's me left, with David Dye & Kim Junod for U.S. National Public Radio) ... The Matrix started with Sodré, with João do Boi, with Roberto Mendes, with Bule Bule, with Roque Ferreira... music rooted in the sugarcane plantations of Bahia. Hence our logo (a cane cutter).