[FO OD] P L A N T - B A S E D
The Healthy Hour By Angie Ruiz Photos by Azul Sordo
Mind Your Garden
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Agriculturalists Ursula and Steven Nuñez founded one of Fort Worth’s first urban farms after Ursula’s father suffered from heart disease and had to go in for quadruple bypass surgery. A lifechanging surgery that would save her father’s life – and hers too. Mind Your Garden is their contribution and mission to obliterate food deserts. “The doctors told me that I would be next if I didn’t change the course of my life,” Ursula says. Only 15 years prior, her grandmother, too, had a quadruple bypass surgery. “We started thinking, ‘What foods did my grandmother and father both consume that got them to this point?’ It’s the foods they taught us to eat,” she says.
As we helped my father recover from his quadruple bypass surgery, we started wondering, What got him here?” - U R S U L A N U Ñ E Z , M i n d Yo u r G a r d e n
The Nuñezes spent 38 years of their lives consuming the ever-delicious fajitas, tacos de birria, salt-rimmed margaritas and beer by the cases. These foods and beverages, although delicious and on many menus across the world, come at an unhealthy cost. When their health was served as the main dish, the Nuñezes knew they had to make a change. And while some diseases are genetic, Steven says bad habits are, too. “We needed to completely break the cycle and decided, in order to do that, we needed to go plant-based,” Ursula says.
