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.

Raw Food and Raw Education -- Common Cause

Quote:

Formal education resembles agriculture. Agriculture greatly reduced the diversity of the human diet. Before agriculture, a person might have eaten 80 different foods each week; after agriculture began, far fewer. Agriculture caused a big decline in health because its fundamental assumption – it is okay to eat a small number of foods – is false or at least very hard to reconcile with nutritional requirements. Likewise, formal education (classrooms, lectures, textbooks, etc.) surely reduced the diversity of what was learned, how it was taught, and how learning was measured.

From Diversity in Learning
Seth Roberts in Ideas That Matter Quarterly, a publication honoring the civic and theoretical work of Jane Jacobs.

Raw Diet = Self Knowledge

People say if you knew how animals are slaughtered you wouldn't eat meat. But if you knew how margarine or soy milk were made you probably wouldn't eat those either.

Eating raw is about knowledge (self/other). Amazing how even the most basic things are a mystery -- like kinds of bananas, the origin of seedless grapes, or whether raw nuts are actually raw. What is raw? If a nut has to be flash-roasted to remove the shell, dried at 180 degrees, boiled in lye, and then washed in salt water and dried again, is it still raw? Simplify, simplify.

The difference between wild and feedlot animals is apparent in their ratios of fatty acids -- which are directly assimilated into your own cell membranes and axon sheaths. You have the same fatty acids as the food you eat. Free range cows have as much omega-3 as fish, more than twice as much as feedlot. And the difference between wild animals and feedlot is even more profound.

Being aware of your own body (the wonder!): maybe its not as simple as a fat/calorie 2nd order differential equation, that if you eat more than you excrete or burn as fuel you'll gain weight. Maybe there are more subtle mechanisms at work; maybe the human body is more complex than just needing fat, carbohydrate, protein, and a few vitamins. By eating raw, I believe that I've substituted the external art of cooking for the internal art of knowing my instincts.

What would caveman eat?