By Amy Dewhurst
One Meal a Day with
Suzy Amis Cameron
COMMUNITY // FOOD NEWS
O
scar noms are wearing eco-fashion on
the red carpet, children are policing
single-use plastics, and cattle farmers
have switched to one vegan meal a day. This
is the work of Suzy Amis Cameron, an ardent
environmentalist and first-time author.
Suzy’s path began in Oklahoma’s Arbuckle
Mountains. She reflects joyfully of her family’s
farm, “I can remember harvesting potatoes and
eating peaches off the trees!” The actress and
model’s career took her to New York City and
Los Angeles, where she was captured by cameras
and lit up screens. The natural beauty recalls the
ease and accessibility of eating organic in major
metropolitan areas, but admits it didn’t pull full
focus until entering motherhood. “It hit home
when I had my first child, and really started
thinking about everything that was not only go-
ing into his sweet little body, but everything that
surrounded him. I was looking at everything,
laundry detergent, cleaners, everything.”
Hundreds of reusable diapers, and several
years later Suzy was on the set of Titanic. She
spoke at length about environmental issues with
the film’s director, James Cameron. She recalls,
“One of the first things that we did when we
realized that we were going to spend the rest of
our liiiives together was, buy a ranch and put
in solar.” The duo each brought a child to the
relationship, and then had three together. Suzy
Cameron recalls watching the eldest struggle in
various school systems and thought, “My God, I
can’t live through the tears and the tummy aches,
and all of that again.”
She and her sister Rebecca Amis spoke of
what an ideal school system would look like, and
they came to “Inspiring and Preparing Young
People to Live Consciously with Themselves,
One Another, and the Planet." A few months
later a private school down the road closed.
“Muse magic,” they giggled, a term they would
come to utter often when the universe aligned for
them and the greater good of the planet.
Together, Suzy, Rebecca, and a group of
like-mindeds opened the nonprofit Muse School
in Calabasas. “We started with 11 kids in this
one room school house, and now we have 225
on two campuses.” The school is run on solar
power, and boasts more than 150 raised bed
gardens. “If you brought a single use cup onto
the grounds, a kid is probably going to walk
up to you and say, ‘That doesn’t belong here.’”
For nearly 13 years the cafeteria served some of
the cleanest, high-quality foods on the planet,