Posted by: Sarah Elisabeth Brown on: August 9, 2009
All I want to eat is raw cashews. To me, they taste buttery like shortbread, that’s why I fill my mouth with so many of them. I cleaned out my fridge and made a lunch of blended kale, celery, tomatoes and crisp curved red bells from market. It turned out chunky and Earthy tasting. I’m usually pretty hard core and can handle a mix like that even without avocado, lemon and salt, but today I noticed I wound up abandoning the blended garden and eating banana ice cream instead. That is, frozen bananas pulverized in a high-powered blender with dates, vanilla and a pinch of cinnamon.
Any raw fooder who knows anything about what they’re doing, knows that you have to be careful of eating too much fruit and fat at the same time and that cashews aren’t really raw. I know I feel better when I get the greens in, it’s just they don’t taste like Lorna Doone cookies or vanilla ice cream.
Listen to me, as if I know what those things taste like. I haven’t eaten any thing cooked for six and a half years. I think “pasta” is made out of shredded zucchini and “cheese” is made from soaked almonds and spices in the Cuisinart. I make a fancy layered raw lasagna and everyone calls it a salad. I’m probably not the one to ask about the way things taste.
But I love food, probably too much. That’s why I’m not a skinny movie star-bodied raw food person. If you have an eating disorder on cooked food, chances are you’ll still have it on raw. I did evaporate forty pounds of ancient cooked sludge off my body in the beginning, but that was so long ago it hardly counts anymore. The whole thing really lacks all the drama and luster it had in the early days. Sure I sleep better at night, don’t have the chronic itches anymore, don’t lose the day vomiting, shitting and moaning in fierce pain once a month over menstrual cramps. I don’t puke on airplanes anymore and really I hardly ever get a cold or a flu. The main reason I stay with it, I spose, is that I haven’t had any strange paralysis take over my legs or my eyes like it did back in those days when they said I had Multiple Sclerosis.
Still, it’s just not as glamorous as it used to be. In those days the courtship with raw foods was marked by the flurry of symptoms as they flew out the door. I had loved a lot of food that never loved me back. These fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds and I, we were in love. It was healthy, it was mutual, and it was delicious. I was receiving as much as I was giving. It was like we were made for each other. But how do you keep a possibility like that alive over time? How do you maintain the hope and enthusiasm year after year?
You find yourself cheating with little things. Salad dressings, olives, corn, packaged and dehydrated foods that call themselves raw. Dried fruit. Salt. Cashews. It’s a slippery slope.
The sleeplessness creeps back in. You find yourself contracting a mild cough one season along with everybody else. You start to wonder, have you lost the precious immunity you found in the early days? You can’t remember how to eat a salad. It seems impossibly hard to chew anything. You start to feel hopeless and nihilistic, so what if we’re coming out of a nutritional holocaust? I want to eat cake like everybody else.
But you don’t.
Not really.
Kicking the craving for McDonald’s hamburgers and fluffy buttercream birthday cake was the blessing of your life. Truthfully, if you went back and ate a pizza again, would you ever be able to stop?
How I Failed at Being a Raw Foodist, is about my quirky culinary adventures below a hundred and fifteen degrees, the point at which food can technically still be called raw. It’s about the illnesses that got reversed, the characters encountered, and the new love affair with food that sprouted up along the way. This blog/book is written in the spirit that there is no success without the willingness to fail. This is an invitation to join me in stepping out of the Standard American food paradigm and learn what I learned. It may not be a perfect journey, but it’s the one I got. Shall we?
