Conscious Vegan Kitchen

Conscious Vegan Kitchen Seasonal plant-based cooking and living rooted in Greek tradition. Classes, retreats, essays, and recipes from Christina Gdisis.

Christina Gdisis is a Vegan Chef, Coach, Speaker, and Yoga Facilitator. She is a first generation Greek American, who became deeply inspired by her immigrant grandmother's expression of love through cooking. She's been vegan for nearly a decade and within that time has created this space of Compassionate Filled Life to support and inspire others as they explore vegan lifestyle. Compassionate Fille

d Life is a safe and explorative space for you to live life more authentically from the heart by diving into conscious living through plant based and vegan cooking, with inspiration from yoga, ancestral roots, and reconnecting to Mama Earth. She believes that through a conscious vegan lifestyle that we can feel harmonious in your body, shift collective energy, and ultimately we can make this world a better place. Christina offers an array of online vegan cooking classes, vegan recipes and support, in person workshops and retreats. She's excited to join hands with others in this movement of compassion. When Christina's not cooking and facilitating, she enjoys spending time outdoors, spending time with her friends and family, traveling and trying different cuisines. She has a 4 year old rescue dog named Louka, and he rules the house :-)

I stepped away from food policy and animal welfare work years ago. That kind of work can burn you out completely, and I ...
05/19/2026

I stepped away from food policy and animal welfare work years ago. That kind of work can burn you out completely, and I needed to step back.

A couple of weeks ago I found the Farm Bill. The House passed it on April 30. I spent a decade working in food policy and community advocacy in New York, on the campaign for universal free school meals, on animal protection legislation, in the neighborhoods where food access is not abstract. This bill touches all of it.

I wrote about it. Essay on my Substack - Link in bio. For Facebook: Link in the comments.

To the mothers who run through our lineages. We remember you.These women were photographed by Swiss photographer Frédéri...
05/10/2026

To the mothers who run through our lineages. We remember you.

These women were photographed by Swiss photographer Frédéric Boissonnas between 1900 and 1930 in rural Greece, in villages that looked much like the ones my own grandmothers came from. Amorgos. Epirus. Arkadia. Corfu.

Happy Mother’s Day 🙏🏼

📷 Frédéric Boissonnas, Greece 1900-1930

In 2013 I spent a semester visiting school cafeterias in New York City as a grad school intern. I was working on univers...
05/07/2026

In 2013 I spent a semester visiting school cafeterias in New York City as a grad school intern. I was working on universal school meals - the idea that no kid should be singled out at the register because their family couldn’t pay. I believed in that completely.

I also had a lot of questions about the food itself. Where it came from, what it was doing to the communities we were trying to serve, the animals, the workers. I wrote a paper about it for class and that paper changed things for me in that placement.

My Yiayia survived the Greek famine of 1941. An experience she never talked about it. Instead she just cooked every day for the rest of her life. I thought about her a lot in those cafeterias.

New York eventually got universal free meals and some of the stoves are coming back. But the federal food diagram just got replaced with something that puts meat and dairy front and center more than ever.

New essay is up and free to read. Link in bio.

Spring is in full bloom right now 🙂Leaving you some seasonal inspo for the kitchen 🫐
05/04/2026

Spring is in full bloom right now 🙂
Leaving you some seasonal inspo for the kitchen 🫐

Once a season, we get on a virtual call with something we cooked and a book we have been sitting with. It beautiful and ...
04/23/2026

Once a season, we get on a virtual call with something we cooked and a book we have been sitting with. It beautiful and real conversation, all at a shared table.

We’re currently reading Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer and gathering May 17th (felt like the perfect book to read this spring). If you’ve been looking for a reason to finally cook that recipe and talk about what you’re reading, this is it.

Comment GATHER and I’ll send you the deets .💛

Happy Earth Day. 🌱This one is personal for me. I grew up watching my mother tend a garden in our Queens backyard from mo...
04/22/2026

Happy Earth Day. 🌱

This one is personal for me. I grew up watching my mother tend a garden in our Queens backyard from morning to sundown - fig trees, grapevines, bees, marigolds everywhere. Behind her, my Yiayia and Papou, farmers from a mountain village in Central Greece who carried that same intuition with them when they came to Brooklyn.

This year I bought seeds again. Tomatoes, kale, basil, jalapeños. Nothing is in the ground yet. But the decision has been made.

Today’s essay is about what the earth carries across generations - and what it costs to keep that thread alive when you’re two generations removed from the land your people came from.

There’s also a Greek Marouli Salad recipe behind the paywall for paid subscribers - spring forward and delicious!

Link in comments 🌿

Our ancestors lived inside a kind of intelligence we are only beginning to name. They knew when to plant and when to res...
04/15/2026

Our ancestors lived inside a kind of intelligence we are only beginning to name. They knew when to plant and when to rest, which herb to look for and when, how to feed a village or without a second thought. Nobody handed them a book.

Four books are helping me trace my way back to what they already knew. New essay is live! Link in comments.

🥕🧅🫛🧄
04/14/2026

🥕🧅🫛🧄

“What It Looks Like When Nothing Has Been Lost”… this week’s essay about Bali, sacred daily life, and what it feels like...
04/03/2026

“What It Looks Like When Nothing Has Been Lost”… this week’s essay about Bali, sacred daily life, and what it feels like to stand inside a place that never had to reconstruct what we’re all searching for.

Essay in my Substack. Link in comments 🫶🏼

In Greece, on the first day of March, people tie a small red and white bracelet onto their wrist. It’s called a Martaki....
03/20/2026

In Greece, on the first day of March, people tie a small red and white bracelet onto their wrist. It’s called a Martaki. The red is for life. The white is for purity.

The tradition goes back thousands of years - to the Eleusinian Mysteries, the ancient spring ceremonies honoring Demeter and Persephone, where the return of Persephone from the underworld meant the earth could bloom again. That Demeter’s grief was winter. Her joy was spring. And the crops, the fruit trees, the whole living world depended on that reunion.

The Martaki carries all of that forward. When you spot the first swallow of spring, you untie the bracelet and leave it on a tree branch for the birds to use in their nests. In villages, it gets tied to fruit trees so the harvest will be good. A small gesture that says - I am paying attention to what the season asks of me.

And it gets passed down. Grandmothers tying them onto grandchildren’s wrists. The same red and white thread, the same intention, through Byzantine times, through everything, all the way to today.

That kind of continuity is what draws me back to Greece. The sense that some things - the way you mark a season, the way you gather, the way you feed people - don’t need to be reinvented. They just need to be kept.

September in the Mani Peninsula is going to feel exactly like that. A small group, a week built entirely around the table. Very few spots. Link in bio.

Address

Beacon, NY

Website

https://substack.com/@christinagdisis

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