It was late Monday before Julie Watkins even had a second to return phone calls. The Florida Georgia football game was coming up, and she had just filmed a segment on the local show “The Chat” where she gave tips on healthy tailgate food. She had a Tuesday vegan cooking class to prepare for and her regular weekly podcast to do. All day Saturday she had manned a vegan nacho bar at a festival in San Marco.
Oh, and there was a state-sanctioned bear hunt – the first in 21 years – happening that weekend that she disagreed with the rationale for. She was organizing protests and making media appearances and would spend all weekend at the hunter check-in stations, reporting on the numbers, sizes, and condition of the dead bears.
Julie Watkins seems to be everywhere these days, but there’s one place she’s not: beaming into your living room through your television giving the local forecast.
Watkins was a TV meteorologist for 15 years, but she quit one June day in 2014 to follow her passion for animals, health and the environment.
She quit because the media wasn’t covering the important environmental stories, like the conditions at slaughterhouses she saw in a documentary that caused her to give up meat, eggs, and dairy. She quit because the math and science she was so good at that led her into meteorology turned into tweets, hype, and fashion consultations. She quit because had to.
Watkins,40, now runs The Girls Gone Green, an advocacy group that teaches the community about vegan food and the environment. She was worried that might be a tough sell in the land of barbeque and fried chicken, but it looks like she just might have hit the timing right.
“In the last 10 years, science has really begun to back up the health and environmental benefits of using less animal products for food,” Watkins said.
Her group puts on festivals, teaches cooking classes, and does outreach. Its first festival, the North Florida Veg Fest, drew 2,000 when only 500 had been expected. This year, the all-day gathering of vendors, musicians, and family activities drew 8,000.
They’ve gained a lot of publicity with No Meat March, an international movement where people sign up publicly to eschew meat for one month. Watkins makes it easy to try with menus on her website. She also has a list by Jax neighborhood of vegan restaurants (there’s more than you’d think), and she has photos of vegan products available in the grocery store, which makes it a lot easier than trying to hunt down a brand name.
The group’s newest foray is a regional conference coming up next weekend that will feature local and international speakers. “The conference is to bring like-minded people together who are interested in sustainable, local, compassionate, and organic products,” she said. “It’s for the go-getters in our area, the future leaders.”
It will be November 14 and 15, at the Marine Science Research Institute at Jacksonville University. Tickets are available at www.thegirlsgonegreen.com.
Steady funds for the group come from hot nacho bars they run at concerts and festivals. “Vegan cheese has come a long way,” she said. “I remember not liking it a few years ago. Now most people can’t even tell, but if they ask, we tell them it’s lower in fat and higher in vitamins (than dairy cheese).” She thinks the best vegan cheeses are almond ricotta and cashew cheese, the latter of which she uses in her favorite comfort food, vegan lasagna with spinach.
Watkins says buying vegan food isn’t difficult – the products are available at many regular grocery stores. She shops mostly at Publix because it’s close to her house.
Although her diet now is fully vegan, she describes it as a process and chronicled her journey on a blog called Vegan Figure. She writes that after successfully competing in bikini competitions in her 30s, life events sidelined her a few times. There was the broken wrist and long rehab. There was the high-pressure job. There was the long-term relationship that ended.
Watkins handled these things the way a lot of people do – eating fast food on the couch, feeling guilty, and then doing it all over again the next day. It took outside help to get her moving again; once a trainer, and another time a fitness competition.
Now she stays motivated planning events for The Girls Gone Green.
So has the big change paid off? Well, “paid” is now a word that’s in her vocabulary, she said, although it took a while. But the difference in journalism and advocacy? “Amazing,” she said. “You can’t even compare the two.”
Watkins hopes to keep expanding her group’s events, to write a beginner’s vegan cookbook, and produce an impactful documentary.
“It’s all about making a difference,” she said.
For more information on the Nov. 14 conference: www.thegirlsgonegreen.com
To read her blog “Vegan Figure,” go to: www.juliewatkins.tv
For recipe ideas and vegan restaurants in your neighborhood: www.thegirlsgonegreen.com and www.nomeatmatch.com
Check out her healthy eating tips and recipes every Monday at 3 pm on “The Chat” on NBC 12, ABC 25.
To hear Watkins’ views on the recent Florida bear hunt, see her interview at: http://www.newsmaxtv.com/shows/the-hard-line/archive/vid/Mzc2hpeDozRSJywFvTQgGJl0-RvxGBxf/#ooid=Mzc2hpeDozRSJywFvTQgGJl0-RvxGBxf
