The Transition To Raw Foods: Why It Seems Harder Than It Is

 One of the purposes of this blog is to help bridge a gap that I have perceived over the past two months, as well as my adult life. Vegetarianism, Veganism, and Raw Food-ism have all become linked with a certain type of lifestyle, a certain type of person. That person is a source of mocking in our eyes--a strange person who wears weird clothes and talks strange, refers to foods that don't sound like foods at all (mung beans! MUNG?!), and can't seem to talk about anything other than their diet or how they helped saved the planet today.

That’s not me. It’s not even someone I want to be. Yet, I want to incorporate Raw Foods and even Veganism into my diet. Can there ever be a separation between The Raw Food Vegan and raw food veganism?

The Boyfriend and I were talking the other day about what my plan is with Raw Foods, and it came up that he's been getting a certain reputation at work for being The Healthy Guy.^[1] We both found this very amusing, since he's most attached to his meat and cheese--and that's not to speak of his love affair with bread. Yet, he's been getting this reputation simply on the fact that he's mentioned his breakfast^[2], and they see his lunches (packed by me, called "bento" which I'll discuss another time). They assume that he's "that kind of person."

The reality is that though he is very conscious of the environment, as both of us are, diet is not his main concern. Sustainable living is his passion, and green technology is his chosen career. However, people have come to link certain things together as inevitable connections. And perhaps they have reason to, because people who are drawn to things like the environment tend to be people who are willing to look into different ways of living. They are more willing to wonder if there is Another Way Of Doing Things.

This brings me to my own experience with Raw Foods. I recently visited the Family in Florida. My mom has recently discovered Raw Foods for her own purposes, and has been transitioning to living food with the same passion that she pursues everything. I was a little wary until I heard her declare that she just really doesn't think she could ever go fully vegan, or even fully raw. It was the first time my mom has ever said that she wasn't going to really do something 110%. So, I wondered about this newest diet turn of hers. Was it only partially good? Or was it just that it was extreme, and she didn’t want to turn into an extremist? This from the woman who banned all grains and dairy from her life—the basic tenets of American living—how extreme could this diet possibly be?

Naturally, as I was curious about this alternative diet I just didn’t know a lot about, when I was there, I agreed to all sorts of things to explore this diet. I'd only heard of Raw Foods diets in scorn or condescension, and I know better than make a judgment of a diet when I've never heard it spoken of highly. After all, if you only hear one side of an argument, it makes it very difficult to disagree with it. Still, armed with the knowledge that even standard nutritionists admit that cooking food decreases its nutrients, and comforted by my mom’s insistence that she wasn’t just going to bombard me with raw food, I approached it with an open mind.

The main thing I found was that I hadn't really known just how much effort has been put into making raw foods more than just a bunch of uncooked raw vegetables on a plate. I know that when most people think of Raw Foods, they think of a thing of broccoli, just a head of it, that they're expected to eat. And they think, "I need to have variety. I need to be able to do more than just eat raw vegetables!"

That's where these new "cook" books come into play. I'm not the kind of person who usually enjoys it when people try to make one food resemble another--my least favorite dinner in the history of dinners my mom makes is spaghetti squash with cauliflower "mashed potatoes." But, there is an extent to which this becomes necessary in Raw Foods, so that you don't feel like you're eliminating all options from your life.

The most brilliant thing is that time and effort has been spent in recreating "ethnic" cooking--such as Mexican, French, Italian, and so on. When people think Raw Food, they eliminate all sorts of things, mistakenly, such as sauces, pates, flat breads, and soft tortillas, because they think that these can only be created by cooking. But, the fact is that you can do these things in Raw Food--you can make creamy desserts, you can make pie, you can make bread, you can make lasagna. It's just with different foods than you're used to thinking makes up these things.

I've decided to go more raw, to get away from the American way of living. Several things factored into this decision. First off, as a girl who has had to struggle with her weight, I know full well that if you eat a single slice of pizza, it doesn’t matter that it’s 600 calories, and that’s how much your meal should be. You can’t just eat one slice. You’ll be hungry. Eating a Raw Foods meal that’s 600 calories that leaves you feeling stuffed is a much better purchase of your calories. That alone would be a reason to convert. However, I have more. A second reason why I want to go increasingly raw is that I don’t really enjoy cooking. I’m good at it, but I don’t have a good time in the kitchen. The less time I spend cooking, the better. There are things with Raw Foods that require time, but the actual time that I spend cooking—standing over something actively participating in it—is significantly less. And a third reason is that I simply want to be able to eat more interesting foods. I’ve had to stay away from the heavy sauces and breads and desserts for so long now, knowing that eating too much of them will kill me in the long run, always rationing it out, that the idea that I could have more of those types of things every day is just too good to be true. It is true.

I'd already been away from American cooking for a while now, following more closely to Asian principles of cooking. But, I am not one of those people who have ever been vegetarian, let alone vegan, nor have I ever not cooked most of my food.

However, it feels to me like most people don't really start from zero when it comes to approaching Raw Foods. They come at it from already having gone healthier--maybe it's as simple as starting to go more organic, or maybe they've always been raised to be more health conscious. Or maybe it's just that they're a girl/woman who has struggled with her weight, and she's used to looking at the nutritional information for everything and keeping a running tally of her calories for the day. Whatever it is, these people don't come into Raw Food living completely unaware that the American diet is screwed up.

That's part of the problem. It's almost as if Raw Foods is some sort of high level in a video game that you can only get to having gone through the lower levels first. It's the Big Bad at the end--the Final Boss. And of course, that means it has to be the most difficult to beat.

That's making this unnecessarily complicated.

Whatever you're used to, wherever you may come from when it comes to nutrition, the important thing is to learn how to question what you've been taught. That's the first step--to use your sense of logical reasoning to untangle the arguments you've been presented. Everything that I say here should be subject to your own scrutiny. You should wonder. When you watch something on TV, or see it in a magazine, or any other source, you should ask yourself about it. Ask yourself if there might be something else they aren't saying. I know that it's easier to not have to worry constantly if they are lying to you one way or another, but the fact is that you're waging a war against misinformation for your own life.

You don't want to die from cancer; you don't want to be obese; you don't want to have a heart attack. But, the idea of having to be a "new age hippie" who only eats raw vegetables, who everyone will make fun of, is equally repulsive in a strange way.

This is my point, my own challenge: how to straddle that fence between health and the perceived idea of normal. I want to live my life without being consumed by the society of Raw Foods or Vegans or even just Health Conscious People. I don't want to fall into that black hole of "weird" or "strange" or such, not because I care what people think to label me, but because I know that there are people out there who really do fear that level of social disapproval. And I want to prove to them that they don't have to go that far. I know it'll be hard to straddle that fence. It really will be like trying to be half an atheist and half a Christian. You either believe in Raw Foods or you don't; you either are a New Age Hippie type or you're an American; you either live green or you don't. But, it doesn't have to be that way.

It's possible. And I'm going to prove it.

Footnotes

1. Boyfriend works at Nike as a Materials Researcher, trying to find a way to recycle composite material into continually making new products, so that recycling can be a real option. More on recycling in another post, possibly by the Boyfriend, who has had to research it.

2. We’ve been starting the transition to living food through morning fruit smoothies, and green soups. Today’s is a pineapple-mango-peach-romaine, which is a brilliant lime green color, and tastes Jamba Juice delicious.

Comments

[Vixenofflames]

Steve also gets flack for his meals, but more in a curious way. When we were going through a tighter money spot and he was bringing simplified foods and less "interesting" foods in his bentos, his coworkers started complaining because they wanted to see what I'd make next time XD His parents even tell his sister about the "weird foods" I make, when they're really not weird!

[Eve-Athena Pallas]

Yeah, it's strange. His coworkers have accepted that he's a guy who brings lunch to work just about every single day--more than the bento aspect with it's cute things or interesting food though, many of them are far more fixated on the fact that His Girlfriend Makes Him Lunch. Apparently, this is a great source of envy amongst his male coworkers.

[Vixenofflames]

Ahaha! Steve probably gets that too. Interestingly though, when I worked at the middle school, the wives I knew did EVERYTHING for their husbands. One woman (33 years old I think?) even had her husband call if she didn't set out a tie to match his outfit that SHE picked out (this happened at least once a week, or if she didn't have time to set an outfit out, he'd call and ask which color combos were appropriate). They all did "traditional housewife" stuff, and some complained ALLLLL the time about it, and others enjoyed it. But they all packed their husbands' lunches.

I imagine that it's surprising to find people our age doing "adult" or "domestic" things. Living lives without being married/traditional "family". Something like that.

[Eve-Athena Pallas]

It's possible that it's just the result of a different place in America. After all, Brian's still the youngest person he knows at Nike, and he works with a lot more men than women, and not a one of them who have wives or long-term girlfriends (upwards of 5 years) have wives who make anything for them. In fact, some of ones who are most envious of his packed lunches are the older men, who are in their 40s, who wish that their wives did things like that for them.

And again, location is probably a larger factor than anything. After all, my friend Staci is our age, and has been married for six months now...and she's one of the most newly married of her friend group in Kansas. Doing domestic things, or being part of a newly married family is considered very normal and ordinary for our age group.

And in places like here, it's a lot more common for people to have "girlfriends" of 5+ years, or "committed partner" of 10+ years, without being married in a formal ceremony. I'm still shockingly the most "domestic" of the female partners, though I'm quite possibly the most dedicated feminist. XD That's how I roll.