Manuela Scalini, born and raised in Brazil, is an international professionally trained plant based and raw food chef. She has traveled the world teaching plant based workshops, catering wellness and yoga retreats and consulting for restaurants in SE Asia, Caribbean, USA and Latin America. Manuela is currently based in Barbados, running Planted, a plant based and raw food delivery business and hosting plant based cooking classes, both online and in person.She is currently co-developing a real food app to launch in early 2022.
A Certified Chef from Living Light Culinary Arts Institute in California, and Certified Yoga Instructor from Radiantly Alive in Bali, Manuela intwines her mixed cosmopolitan Brazilian heritage into her culinary delights, merging traditional plant medicine and modern food preparation methods. She adopts a “Food as Medicine” approach, with a firm belief that each client will benefit from a personalized diet and lifestyle plan, as opposed to one formula fits all. Based on 12 years of study, she creates a fusion of raw food, ayurveda, functional nutrition, medicinal herbs and ancestral superfoods techniques in her culinary creations and classes. Her focus is on the simplicity and practicality of local and seasonal real food, so that it is feasible to include it in a balanced way in everyone’s daily life, thus creating a long-term transformation. Nowadays, people are too focused on diet labels and calorie counts, which in turn has been disconnecting us more and more from the basic art of nourishment that comes from the land, from the art of sitting down and having a meal, from the local community that grows and harvests in resourceful ways and from the earth’s natural cycle. “Plant based food can be inclusive, not exclusive. We can all benefit if we add more plants to our diet ” It doesn’t have to be radical.
Manuela began her plant food journey 12 years ago when she was searching for an alternative way to heal inflammation in her body after a snowboarding accident. She joined a 21 day raw food detox and never looked back. Her body instantly began to heal and function in its most optimum level, and she significantly noticed a huge shift in her vitality, clarity and mood. What was at first just a diet, became a lifestyle. She left her successful career in the visual effects film industry in San Francisco, California, and began sharing her knowledge to help others in their journey to a healthier lifestyle. “Nothing affects us more than what and how we eat and our emotions…food is energy….when we clean up our bodies by eating real food, we clean up our lives…we remove all the processed filters that are keeping us from feeling 100% alive and connected to ourselves, those around us, and our planet”. It is not only good for the body, but vital for the our planet’s health.