Student Spotlight
Vicki Chelf, candidate for B.S. in Holistic Nutrition
“May all your passions be healthy ones.”
Author of the newly released For the Love of Garlic and known in the international publishing arena as Victoria Renoux, this bi-lingual Vegetarian Times columnist is truly a citizen of the world.
Recently back home to the U.S. after a summertime junket to Rome, eco-tour guides Vicki Chelf and her husband, art historian and designer Jean Joseph Renoux are mastering the art of the working vacation! Inspired by ancient mountaintop castles near Chianti, they’re now planning a late-August, 2006 “Vegetarian Cooking in Tuscany” excursion. This educational adventure includes seminars on sustainable architecture, along with daily yoga, cooking classes, bike tours, wine-tastings and intimate dining.
Vicki has certainly earned a place at the head of the table, and at the head of the class. Each month in Vegetarian Times, her “Five Ingredients” column introduces elegantly simple ways to commune with the seasons, “eat with the harvest and discover the art of choosing an easy feast, so that cooking becomes a joyful adventure in sustenance.”
She teaches monthly classes at natural food stores such as Whole Foods in Florida, having opened her own health food store in a mountain community north of Montreal back in the 1970s. In those days selling cut flowers, local honey and fresh-baked bread lured many a new customer into the wild world of organic herbs, fruits and vegetables. Her nature store keeps growing -- today Le Pommier Fleuri (The Flowering Apple Tree) is still sowing its seeds of natural health knowledge amid Canada’s remote mountain ridges.
The first of Vicki’s six cookbooks, La Grande Cuisine Vegetariennean, was also Quebec’s first vegetarian cookbook. Her other titles include Cooking with the Right Side of the Brain, The Arrowhead Mills Cookbook, and Cooking for Life. Vicki has co-authored with Cherie Calbom, the renowned “Juice Woman” who is also currently a CCNH holistic nutrition student!
Vicki earned her first degree at the Ringling School of Art and Design. Since the 1990s this master of the working vacation has had three one-person art exhibitions in Paris and Quebec, and has exhibited in London and the U.S. Her multi-media visual gifts range from political satire to portraiture, book illustration and theatre set design work.
Proud to be associated with the Japanese/American Lowbrow Movement of cartoon-style satire and sociopolitical commentary, Vicki’s next plan will literally give voice to it -- with her own upcoming radio series, Truly Sustainable Sarasota.
One thing Vicki Chelf loves about Clayton College is its commitment to ecology. “Environmental health is essential to personal health, a fact that many human have ignored to our great peril,” she concludes. “Having just now finished CCNH’s coursework in 'Cancer Prevention and Politics' I’m especially looking forward to meeting Rudolph Ballentine at your 2006 [Annual Health Conference that occurs on] Earth Day.”
For more information: www.vickichelf.com
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