Raw

Raw is the easiest and most difficult diet. Balancing acid/alkaline, fiber and oil...really you're using your body to burn nutrients rather than letting others burn/cook for you. All foods are drugs; plants have pronounced effects (like melons, celery, and grapefruit to name a few). Sometimes I eat meat just to avoid the pharmacology of plants. But even meat has hormones and emotions. It is impossible to get tired of eating raw food because it is inherently healthy. Cooking food is an attempt to trick our bodies to keep eating food that isn't good for us. That's why we get tired of various cooked food, and try to cook in a new way that we aren't tired of yet...

There is a lot that goes into the construction of the quotation marks around "raw food". Lots of thought. Maybe that's why I like it? But also simplicity. I explain it now to neophytes as just trying to get the freshest food I can -- there are no lines in the sand.

The single best resource for thinking more about the issues this raises is this summary: http://www.rawtimes.com/anopsy1.html
and this long essay: http://www.geocities.com/HotSprings/7627/ggindex.html (click Anoposology, an essay that concerns you). Both by Guy-Claude Burger. I have printed this essay several times and given it to several friends. It is a good book to keep and pass on. One key idea is that this is an experiential diet; you learn what your body has to teach you, not what the categorizers and dietetitions think.

If you like a plurality of viewpoints, and especially for thinking about the ethnological and anthropological, try this "paleodiet" clearing house. There is good research here. http://www.paleodiet.com/ The first essay by ben balzer is a 15-minute readable introduction you can tell your friends about.

On the Current State of What Paleontology Knows -- Not Much.

They don't even know what the land looked like. They know next to nothing about the major rituals or holidays, let alone what beliefs may have motivated them. They don't even know what their society did. We do know they built roads. But was the land farmed? Did they plant trees? They don't know when they lived in particular places, how much rain they had to work with, what the landscape was like. How the land changed as they abandonded it (or did it change first and they had to abandon it afterward). Cause and effect?

Seminar:
Alluvial geoarchaeology of fire history and culturally modified environments along the Eastern Mogollon Rim, Arizona. Chris Roos
Affiliation: Anthropology, University of Arizona

Consciousness and YES/NO Psych Questionnaires

The questions were of the form "does x feel happy/sad/pride" where x were specific examples of mammals, insects, plants, machines, and natural objects. For example, "do ants feel sad?" and my task for one hour was to answer "yes" or "no" as quickly as possible; there were literally thousands of examples, presented every 2 seconds nonstop for 45 minutes. This was supposed to tell them about my "attributions of consciousness". What?

[Idea: Why didn't they test just ten examples from each of the categories?? 1) That wouldn't take an hour, and an hour is the canonical amount of time students are willing to . 2) To increase statistical power. Another, more efficient, question structure could be based on adaptive learning, where the computer generates each question based on the previous answers, so that it moves from general to specific, eventually oscillating around my indecision point (assuming a scale of consciousness graded from most similar to humans to least...this is assuming that people aren't more likely to say that a motorcycle can feel happy than a worm)]

IS this what science has come to? Who cares? These guys get public funding for this? What's worst is how insulting this is to me; that my nuanced feelings, opinions, hopes and fears about the realm of consciousness could be reduced to yes or no. No possibility for discussion / completely dehumanized: do they really think they're plumbing the depths of my soul in this artificial setting? Or, by "controlling all extraneous variables" will they only find only what they're looking for? I'll never believe another psych study based on bored college students pressing yes or no as rapidly as possible. College students are some of the most dumb and desperate people in society. Most of those guys were frat boy dropouts, hung over and world-weary; the quiet desperation of years of unreflective failure necessary to motivate young men to throw away their hours of youth for pocket change.

My strategy was twofold: first, panic and prepare to leave, but then rationalize myself into staying. I already sit inside staring at a screen all day anyway. Just relax, learn to accept things as they are. You are in a comfortable chair in a room of meticulously immaculate and barren cubicles. Is this hell? Purgatory? The ultimate aspiration of hegemonic standardization, the real essence of school and work and society? You've already started, already committed. Don't change horses in midstream. Impossible to rebel anyway; resistance is futile. If you leave now, shouldn't logically you also leave your job, turn off and drop out of civilization entirely? No, remain calm. I took my shoes off, relaxed my face into its most natural wide-relaxed expression, and drifted off while letting my fingers do the walking over the amazingly banal cavalcade of animals, plants, and machines. Such cacophony in the world, and to think that this is only a fraction of the things we have put words to: boulder, giraffe, falcon, daffodil, desert, taxi cab.

In the end I took my $10 but couldn't look the experimenter in the eye. And maybe I'm just paranoid, but I couldn't help thinking that that was the point of the study, that the real test was what it always is: will you take the money and shut up, or cause a riot? I've always been a reasonable fellow. But I don't believe anyone in that room was conscious.