Zzzzzz. . .

It shouldn't surprise me anymore, but the effects of chamomile tea on me are pronounced.

I was just stopping by 'wichcraft (which was a 'wichstake) to do some writing. I asked for a decaf tea, and being an idiot chain store, all they had was chamomile. Sure, I thought, I'm awake, how sleepy could it possibly make me? The answer, of course, if -as always -very.

I can't tell you how many times this has happened. Sometime, when I'm settling in for the night, the effects aren't as noticeable. But when I'm out and about, it's just a total buzzkill.

One time I was doing a mountain check out at a new FB in California. I was flying with an instructor who was making sure i could land properly at altitude before they would rent me a plane. In my pocket was a chamomile essential oil from Enfleurage. Well, the altitude expanded the syrupy stuff, and it began leaking out of the bottle. In fact it leaked out all over my pocket, dying my jeans with inky German chamomile. The oil leaked into my skin, and within a few minutes, I could barely keep my eyes open.

Fortunately I had come Theoboma Cacao spagyric in my other pocket, from my peeps in Oregon which I used to counterman the effects of the cham. Well, it worked well enough to get me through my checkride, but, again, and amazingly, I was shocked at how strong the herb was.

I was in Flower Power the other day, and there were a couple of boys in there asking about sustained energy herbs and trying to find a pot substitute by using Skullcap and Valerian. They asked advice on the energy thing, and I recommended maca powder, and Aemen recommended Sberian Ginseng. Both are strong male aphrodesiacs, even in moderate dosages.

Since they were new to herbs, I told them that it is best to take higher doses to start just so you can be sure you're feeling the effects. Modern folk are so conditioned to discredit herbalism as quackery that it sometimes takes a lot to convince us that these are powerful medications. Dr;. Schulze is a proponent of "dramatic results" from his products (and he delivers). He doesn't want you guessing if the thing is working or not, or being polite and spiritual and pretending something is having an effect because you feel some vague sensation that you may or may not have felt yesterday. No. These things work, and he's not afraid to say so.

And I agree.

For what it's worth, the herbs you buy in the health food store generally do not work. Herbs that work have strong medicinal effects, as we said, so people could potentially get hurt by them if they are using them without supervision. So the herbs at the store are incredibly dumbed down, poorly sourced, and have almost no effect. Schulze gets the highest quality herbs anywhere (and Flower Power's aren't bad either), and they are strong.

So my suggestion to these guys was start off above dose and then come down. There is immense subtlety to herbs as well as overt strength. And as you get to know them, you can begin to appreciate the gentler, energetic effect. I'm all for that. But when you're starting as a numb, tuned-out American, it's worth pushing the envelope because that's what you're used to from chemical medications.


Anyway. As usual, I should heed my own advice. Chamomile tea is strong stuff- especially loose leaf, as this stuff was. Next time I'll know.

Got Sole

Me: I have never been this happy in my life.

You: Seriously?

Me: Seriously.


On Wednesday I got the call from Barbara Schaum, the sandal maker on E 4th St., that my sandals were ready. On Friday I dropped by to pick them up. Today I took them for their maiden voyage to Fairway, and I could not be happier. Looking at them on my floor I was happy. Strapping them on I was happier. And by the time I stepped out onto the pavement, I was positively ecstatic.

No, I'm not Carrie Bradshaw- here's the back story:

Call it some time last year, I was getting into Donna Perrone's podcast with Mike Perrine, and it seemed like every other episode they had Fred Bisci on talking about colonics and walking in the sunshine at the beach. Well, the colonics were old hat to me, but the idea that cleansing could be achieved by walking on the beach was something I found interesting. For me, walking on the beach had always been exhausting. After a half an hour at most, i was done.

But Bisci's suggestion was that you needed to walk on the beach barefoot, and I had always walked around in sneakers or some sort. And then it all became clear. The cleansing was the motion of the Sun's energy through your body then out your feet into the earth. This was deeply cleansing on an energetic and physical level. For me, though, wearing rubber soles, that energy flow was blocked. Blocked. And what happens when a detox is initiated (by the Sun in this case) and then is blocked? You get tired, sluggish, and exhausted- exactly what happened to me on the beach in my Nikes.

What I realized later on was that this was not just the case for me on the beach. it happened almost anytime I was walking around in the outdoors under the Sun. And when I used to work on my farm in Covelo, I would get so exhausted that i could barely go on.

Well, later in the year, when I flew out to Raw Spirit Fest in Sedona, I noticed the same sluggishness setting in as the desert sun started to hit its late morning strength. Remembering Bisci's strategy, I took off my rubber flip flops, and within minutes I was fine. It was really that simple. I walked around barefoot the entire day and, though I got quite the sunburn, my energy level remained high.

I would experiment on again off again with removing my shoes and each time I would put them back on, the fatigue would set in, and each time I removed them, I would feel fine. It was a miracle.

(I can only imagine as someone who grew up severely sun-deprived in New York City, I must have quite the backlog of sun cleansing to do- kind of like someone who grew up constipated has a lot of bowel cleansing to do. So this realization was more like a revelation.)


Fast forward to this summer. There's sun everywhere, and I'm getting exhausted. I decide that at some point I am going to want to do some more gardening work, so I had better find a way to deal with this. Gardening barefoot might be possible, but it would hardly be ideal, especially for spading. What I would need to do would be to discover a rubberless sole for my shoes.

Well I searched and searched. Eco stores, shoe stores, flip flop stores. . .you name it, but rubber everywhere. Then, finally I remembered my old friend Barbara Schaum who hand makes the most elegant leather sandals in the city. I stopped by a few weeks ago and said, "Barbara, what do you make your soles out of?" She replied, "Rubber, tin, or just leather."

And that was that. I ordered a pair that day.


And just like that, my problem was solved. Today, walking around the city, I felt as if I was completely barefoot. Somehow the energy could stream right through those leather soles into the concrete (or around it, I suppose). I felt liberated. Barbara had hit the spot.

So I'm singing it to the rooftops. Get yourself some leather soles and watch the healing happen. I have not been this happy in years.

D


PS- I won't lie here, Barbara's sandals don't come cheap. You may get out of there for $200 if you find something off the shelf, but you'll likely pay almost double that. But for me it was worth every last cent.

Detoxamin Update

So I'm as enamored of this product as I was the last time I wrote about it. As far as its use goes, I have a new suggestion that might prove useful to you.

Since last posting, I have bumped up my dosage to the new 1500mg sups, and they are indeed quite strong. So much so that I often would have a hard time getting through the next day. The last time I took one, I was determined to have a full day when I woke up, so I made the determination to drink 2 full liters of water as I was laying down to sleep and inserting the suppository.

Well this seems to have done the trick. I felt none of the exhaustion I normally feel when I drink only about 1/2 a liter or less with the dosing. I imagine I might be able to go down to just over a liter, but the two liters gave my system what it needed to flush the metals out without too much fuss.

Detoxamin does recommend drinking extra water when taking their product. I think timing the water to around the time one takes the suppository is helpful. After all, I can drink 2 liters of the green juice in the morning but will have peed most of it out by bedtime. So this precaution should be heeded, I believe, to keep the experience as exhaustion-free as possible.

D-Blog

Sac

So it's official. The Sacramento Co-Op is my favorite place on earth. I've been to Co-Op's all over the country - Santa Monica, San Francisco, Asheville, Arcata, Eureka, Brooklyn, Ashland, you name it, but Sacramento stands out from the rest. Chalk it up to vibe and atmosphere and its unassuming locale, but I am never happier than cruising the aisles and sipping on my Green Hornet (Cucumber, Celery, Wheat Grass, and Garlic) at the Sacramento Co-Op. If you have the chance to stop by, it is well worth the trip.

More Cutting

Well, this was predictable. When this sort of thing comes along, it is a great motivator for people's non technological side (i.e., human side) to wake up and say, hold on a minute- what the fuck? As long as things are kind of squishy prognosis wise and procedure wise, they might not think that much about dealing with their health holistically. But when enforced gutting becomes the norm, it is more likely that people who were almost ready to take the leap to health will finally jump. That said, cultural conditioning for medical dependency and deference is deeeep, and I don't expect it to change quickly- especially with the promise that one can eat nothing but big macs forever end simply get them extracted by the doctors as if they were going in for an oil change at Jiffy Lube.

The important thing, though is for the diet people to stop preaching. The war between medicine and the diet industry is intractable, since neither camp offers a total solution. The beauty of the raw food approach is that not only is it effective in the gross metrics of losing mass, but the quality of life you enjoy when eating raw foods in unsurpassed. Just because you're skinny, you can't be healthy fast food. And with a healthy foundation, you can experience an ongoing happiness like you have never before known. This is the promise of raw foods, and it provides the ultimate "third way" that gives you your celery and lets you eat it too.

Just a reminder of how life used to be

Nice Summay

This is from Dr. Young's blog which I just discovered thanks to Denise of Organic Avenue. Thanks, Denise!

Let's try this. . .

One thing that has to be understood right away about starting a cleansing regime is that it will involve some experimentation. If you're looking for the "right" way to do something, the one "true religion" that will guide you infallibly down the road to health, you are looking for something you will never find.

The journey moving forward will be, to a greater or lesser degree, a process of trial and error. Some herbs may work for you at certain times and not work for you at others. Sometimes a colonic is what is needed, sometimes a warm bath. Yes, there are certain fairly clear constants- emptying the bowels, for instance, is generally a very good idea. Raw foods and foods that alkalize are very good ideas. But there will be times when other approaches will be necessary, and there is no pre-written guidebook to tell you what they are.*

This is where intuition becomes helpful, but even intuition can be off sometimes. There is still the requirement that you measure your results against your desired experience - allowing for the fact that discomfort often comes before comfort.

Now this approach may not be that appetizing for some people. Indeed, at some point in our lives, all of us want the "truth" whose authority is unassailable and whose directives we can follow without fear. But those of us who have earnestly sought this sort of "truth" must finally admit the closer to it we get, the farther away it seems.

This is because the Universe does not like being pinned down. It likes the chase, it likes the process. "Truth" is a static concept, and while it can certainly be helpful to have a safe port in a storm, eventually the ship will have to set off and find the sea again.

And I would say the following, somewhat ominously perhaps, for those who might reject the idea or risk involved with the experimental approach to health. You will be being experimented on one way or another, whether you like it or not. The medical model, which offers the natural alternative to cleansing, is in a constant state of scientific experiments (despite its pretensions to absolute truth). Just count how many times you've heard a scientist say, "We now know. . ." which means that for a while they didn't know, but were drawing conclusions anyway- conclusions which were applied to your health.

Science is in a constant state of flux and experimentation. New medicines, procedures, and equipment are invented every day, and then they are tested on human subjects in hospitals. Yes, there are preliminary tests on animals and so forth (also of dubious moral rectitude), but they will always fail to cover every base, so long as the scientists' interests are in bringing those products to market. If they really tested every medication so that it was 100% safe for every person for every length of time in combination with every other medication - including ones not discovered yet - there would be no product on the market and no money to fund more research - to say nothing of money to distribute to shareholders.

So yes, doctors are experimenting on you. That's what medicine is, and you can see that when you look at how medicine was. If you were really being given the "absolute truth," then medicine would be unchanging, dietary recommendations would be unchanging, recommended procedures would be unchanging. But they're not. They're in a constant state of experimentation because science is in a constant state of partial knowledge.

And so are you- when you take your cleansing into your own hands. And this is the point. If you are going to be experimented on, wouldn't you rather it be by your own hand than by somebody else's? For some, the answer may be no- they trust the expertise of those trained in experimentation. Fair enough. But for many of us, giving our lives and well-being over to others does not put our minds at ease. We like to be in control of our fate rather than be a data point in a statistical assessment.

My personal feeling is that more important than expertise is what the politicians call "interest." In whose interest are we acting? When you are administering to your own health, you know whose interests you are acting in- your own. You take into account your budget, your time, your level of current health, your desired state of health, and you custom tailor your experiments to suit.

When you deliver yourself into the interests of a doctor, you have to be prepared to accept their interests as primary and yours as subordinate. That means that paying the nurses, repaying the med school loans, paying for the insurance, paying back the costs of expensive medical equipment, making sure you get to go on luxury junkets provided by medication companies, and avoiding getting sued are all on the docket for your physician before he can get to your health. To my mind, this poses an impossible conflict of interest, even for the most charitable doctor. The fear of lawsuits alone is enough to corrupt the practice of countless MDs in this country.

So whose interests are the experiments serving? Yours or somebody else's? These are important questions to contend with, because, yes, you are the subject of an experiment whether you like it or not. The choice, however, lies in where you place the authority to conduct those experiments. And that is always up to you.



PS- for the sake of art, I have not given a surfeit of concrete examples in the above- specific medications, machineries, and such. The current headlines are full of the most infamous, though there are many, many more, and history is littered with the rest. If you are interested in hard "data," it is not difficult to come by. Unfortunately, most of it is pursued by 'medical conspiracy theorists,' and so there is a paranoid underpinning to the presentation that can be off-putting. Perhaps consulting with an attorney who specializes in medical law suits could be more helpful, or simply learning about the history of medicine with all of its silliness and insanity and then realizing that in 40 years, 2009 will be medical history and will appear just as silly.


*To the extent that there may be a pre-written guidebook, it would simply be your biological/ancestral history written in reverse. And even this is not exactly the order of healing. But either way, only your body knows its entire history- no one else.

The Point

Actually, the purpose of that last post was not just to tell an amusing anecdote.

I wanted to take an opportunity to make a connection between what I am describing here for raw foodists and an important concept for astrology.

In the previous post, "Unnatural," we ended in describing the levels of love on experiences along the journey to health.

It can start out with s kind of cold, ruthless "thou shalt" kind of love that kicks us forward. This is "Yahweh" love, and it is merciless but effective. It gives us a vision of absolute perfection which makes our present state seem utterly unworthy and shameful. It is the effort to live up to this state of perfection that causes us to take the unbearable (and unrealistic) hard road of cleansing without colonics or herbs.

In astrology, this kind of unrealistic, otherworldly perfectionism is associated with the sign Aquarius and its ruling planet Uranus. It is the second to last sign in the Zodiac and represents the first real evolution out of the earthly realm that we see in the soul's journey through the signs.

But it is not the end of the line.

The final sign of the Zodiac is Pisces, and for all of Pisces's difficulties, it is the sign of unconditional love and redemption. While this is often mixed with all manner of other, less desirable traits, the willingness to love even the imperfect sinner represents a magnificence of soul that no other sign can match.

Pisces is also concerned with purity and can make us feel inadequate by our constant need for material things. But in this aspect, it is the impetus towards spiritual practice and purification.

Truly, the kind of love I describe below, in which that which is needed is always given despite the apparent worthiness or unworthiness (naturalness, unnaturalness) of the recipient is something that might only exist "off the chart," that is, at the level of reality that generated the (zodiac) chart, not from within the chart. But to whatever extent this is "true," it is the sign of Pisces that "points" off the chart, to transcend reality and merge again with the cosmos as a beloved child of God.

My affection for raw foods and cleansing is that it provides a concrete means to experience this in an ongoing way. While there are certainly highs and lows along the journey, this state of fusion remains basically near at hand for anyone who has really begun to cleanse their tissue. It is the fulfillment of the call "home," to the peace of the beyond- and with raw foods, we can have it during our lifetimes.

Not a bad deal.

Felix Culpa

When I was first putting together a "web presence" for myself, I had decided to have a practice that combined my passion with raw foods with my passion for archetypal astrology. In keeping with the spirit of cheesy raw food sounding names, I couldn't help but secure the domain name astrawlogy.com. Brilliant, I thought. Like something you'd order at Juliano's.

Well, today I was fiddling with my web addresses and came back to the old site. Only I realized that I had misspelled the site when I submitted it, and the site I own is actually astrawloGOY.com. Go figure.

Obviously for me this is no good, but if there are any raw foodist, astrologer, gentiles out there who are interested in the site name, I might be able to work something out at a reasonable rate. Just shoot me an email at raw@innerplanetastrology.com.

Unnatural

Years ago when I was temperedly enamored of Timothy Leary, I read a beautiful passage in one if his books that went something like this.

LSD was first synthesized in the 30's but had no real effect on those who took it. Then when Hoffman synthesized it later, it had the effects that have revolutionized the modern world today and for which it remains famous- and Leary infamous. What happened during those intervening years?

Leary puts forth that the single biggest development during said time period was the development of the Nuclear Bomb, and who could disagree? It was Leary's thought that the universe had conspired to counterbalance the universally destructive capabilities of the bomb with the universally loving capabilities of an LSD-dosed hippie. In other words, one unnatural phenomenon was balanced out by another.

There are countless psychoactive plants and fungi in nature- all in common use for millennia. But it was this artificial chemical that took off in the west and became the poster child for turning on. It was kind of the perfect expression of this need for the modern American mind at the time- because it was completely artificial.

Now there are many a would-be psychonaut that dismiss D-Lysergic Acid for this very reason. They want the plants, the shrooms, the toads- anything that didn't come from a factory (or some guy's bathtub), and that's certainly something I can understand- particularly if these people are genuinely spiritually attuned and know they are negatively affected by the impersonality of acid.

But for most Americans of that generation who were just turning on- Americans having been raised on pesticides, vaccinations, antibiotics and who entered this world through the hospital birth factory, all for the first time in the history of our species - those Americans could not be said to be spiritually attuned the way a modern, water-birthed, Humbolt baby could.

But the universe provides the appropriate method for the appropriate person at the appropriate time.

I like that.

Sometimes you need something artificial to get to some place natural if the place you're coming from is artificial. Gil describes this as "good heroine," which they give to junkies to keep them from killing themselves when they quit and the body goes into detox overdrive. You give them the drug to get them off the drug, because you're following the path to how they got there to get them out.

The American bias towards instant fixes can be especially heartless in the denying of "good heroine" to junkies. More people suffer and die than is necessary because of their unwillingness to "look in the rear view mirror" to see how they got where they are. We do not like the past in this country, and we pay the price for it.


The same cultural bias is at work among raw foodists I have met as well. And much unnecessary suffering is endured in our community as well. All with the best of intentions but without regard for history.


Over the years I've heard many a raw foodist make the following complaint about colonics- that they're unnatural. To this I would say- absolutely.

But the same truths apply. Putting Doritos into your body isn't natural. Why shouldn't it require something unnatural to take them out? If we grew up eating mangoes and peaches our whole lives, we would likely have no need for colonics. Maybe the Humbolt water babies could be candidates for this approach. Maybe.

But for most of the people reading this blog, that purity was not their introitus to life. This blog is for Generation BK.

With raw foodism, as with all spiritual practices, we must remind ourselves that purity is the goal - it is not the starting point. When we choose to believe we are already perfect when we start, we pull ourselves out of time, and there ceases to be a journey. Despite the discomfort many of us feel with our present state - mentally, emotionally, physically - we must embrace where we are and how we got here before we can move forward into where we want to be.

And from a mythic point of view, the discomfort of our present state should be meditated upon and appreciated, because without it, we would likely not engage the journey at all, and therefore never reap its rewards.

Once again, this bias is largely cultural. America is the one country on earth that defines itself by its future, not by its past. For many of us whose ancestors arrived here as immigrants, life had been nothing but pain and misery - or worse - and so belief in the "clean slate" became a welcome relief when they reached these shores.

But really, the clean slate is only a temporary resting point. The past must be reconciled eventually, and we are blessed, in this county, to have a safe place from which to investigate that past.

But the cultural mythos of the fresh start and never looking back has its costs when it comes to change. It remains an open sore in our race relations and has underpinned a half century of naive foreign interventionalism, this ignoring of history.

When we do cleansing, we reawaken that history. When we do colonics, we let it go. Much of that history that has stuck to our guts is an unnatural history. In America, sadly, almost all of it is. To call upon an unnatural means of removing the history - for good - is to respect the universe which has lovingly given us the technology to heal ourselves - despite our current imperfection and impurity. A better definition of unconditional love I can not imagine.

It is, in the end, a sense of the great deity that goes beyond judgment, righteousness, and purity to the unyielding love of a creator for its creations. And for raw foodists, this is the ultimate redemption, to experience a world where unconditional love is the fundament on which we can root our individual lives.

For the record. . .

It's been 7 days of fasting with colonics running almost every day. On day 6, there was still a large mass of solid waste coming out in the tube. Anyone who says you're empty after a day or two is welcome to come by and smell my toilet.

Granted, I've been unusually indulgent with my non-raw consumption in recent weeks. That was part of the reason for the fast, just to give the ol' mainline pipe some rest. Still, even I am a bit surprised at the unending reserve of poop lodged in there. And I am certain there is more to come.

This fast I went easy on the Ejuva pills. Took a few, but it was a little more intensity than I needed for this sort of "resting" fast. Still I have been taking bentonite/psyllium occasionally and cider vinegar regularly. Plus lots and lots of juice.

Speaking of which, I did just have a glass of fresh apple juice that tasted a little off. Hopefully I'll make it through, though.

Detoxamin has also been with me almost nightly for this cleanse, and I find that it does go through a little easier when you're fasting.

And on the topic of Detoxamin, I continue to be thrilled with the result. I'm about 5-6 weeks in and am still feeling improvements with each dose. Marvelous. The protocol itself is 6 months, so I'll be keeping you posted as corners are turned.

For now, I'm going to hit the table once more and see what solids remain tucked behind rogue air pockets. Will be sure to let you know. . .

PS

For those of you who can't be bothered with the above, Mountain Valley Spring Water still delivers distilled water (or mineral water) in 5-gallon glass jugs or glass liter bottles to your doorstep. You can get a ceramic dispenser from eBay and do it that way. Weigh the costs, weigh the hassle, and decide fro yourself.

It's nice to have a few cases of bottled H2) sitting around the house for travel, etc., so a combination approach can work as well.

Solution - abridged

Try using filtered water in your water distiller. It will take away the chlorine and the excess sediment that make water distillers sub-optimal.

Distilled water is the best water to drink from a cleansing point of view since it actually pulls sediment out of the body. It is recommended by Schulze, Walker, Young, and others who are deep in the cleansing movement. Walker even goes so far as to say that all non-distilled water is harmful since it leaves "mineral" sediment in the body.

D-Blog

Solution

So I'm still in the early stages of this experiment, but since there aren't too many stages, I think it's pretty safe to call the thing.

For years I have been searching for the perfect water. For *years*. I've had friends, clients, and even strangers ask me what I do for water, and I never have a clear, succinct answer.

Tap water, obviously, was out. Bottled water was often, but not always, better. First of all the plastic could leach. Second, you never really know what's in there, especially with the Dasani/Aquafina crowd.

Next, there's filtered water, but this isn't always a guarantee either. Does it really get all the stuff out? And what about after the filter gets old and the water tarts getting contaminated? Are there differences in quality between the brita and the home depot versions? Who knows.

There's also some kind of pagoda-looking filter that uses some kind of crystal with a bottle of drops you're supposed to add to the water as it drips into the dispenser. This water tastes cool, but it's quite the drag to make and takes forever.

Organic Avenue sells an amazing, 5-7 filter under-the-sink water purifier that would be any raw foodist's wet dream. It runs close to a grand, and so I've always held off, but I've always been tempted.

Then there are the Jupiter Ionizer/Alkalinizer machines. These come from Japan and Korea and purportedly are able to adjust the pH of your water up or down depending on the desired application. First, of course, the water is run through a small carbon filter in the unit. These guys sound amazing, but even the most wide-eyed fool among us would be skeptical. How does it make water alkaline just by rearranging the Molecules? Sounds too weird to be true. Hiromi Shinya, the inventor of the colonoscopy, has apparently goten great results from this which can be seen on youtube.

The machine itself is pretty heavy on the eyes. It looks like a japanese arcade squeezed into a little R2-D2 body with a metallic arm extending off the side of it. It sits counter top and has a feature that plays an electronic version of the Blue Danube Waltz that mercifully can be turned off. I have only used one of these guys once, and I remain a skeptic. When I feel like splurging and experimenting more I'm sure I'll buy one, but so far I've come close but have never made the leap.

And lastly, there's distilled water.

By most accounts, distilled water is the best. Dr. Schulze, Norman Walker, and Robert Young are all in agreement on this. The reason is that distilled water is "empty" and therefore will naturally attract all sorts of sediment from the body and expel it through the urine. Walker even goes so far as to say that non-distilled water is harmful, as it leaves sediment behind in your body causing you stiffness and clogging your tubes.

Distilled water from a bottle is impossible. The very "sucking" quality of the water works on the plastic bottles in the store and thus gives the water a noxious plastic taste that no raw foodist could tolerate.

But I was still determined to give distilled water a go. I found this bit about stiffness interesting, since over the 5 years I've spent drinking 2-4 liters of water a day, I have actually noticed that I've grown a little bit stiffer. So I was curious to see what would happen by switching to distilled.

In fact, at one point I already had. I already owned a distiller, having been privy to some of this data before, but I let it go back under the counter after the hassle became too great and the water didn't taste too good. One problem with the distiller is that the chlorine in the water distills along with the water itself, so the distilled water actually tastes strongly of chlorine. The distiller comes with a mini-carbon filter which is supposed to 'finish' the water on the way into the pitcher, but this never really worked for me. Second, the sediment left behind in the kettle was a hassle to clean. Over the course of my use of this device, these two problems combined to make it more trouble than it was worth. Thus the tucking away.

But when I read the Walker piece I determined to find a way, and I did. The idea actually came to me during my first go with the distiller, but I simply thought of it as too decadent. But now, it seemed to be worth the effort.

I took my normal carbon filtered water and put it in the distiller. This solved both of the problems at once. Less sediment and no chlorine. Perfect.

So far I'm pretty happy with this solution. I'll keep you posted as I continue to experiment.


Philosophically speaking, though, one has to wonder if we were ever "meant" to drink distilled water in the first place. It's hard to imagine. I had one old vegan friend who refused to drink water at all, saying she got all her liquid from the fruit she ate. This was an interesting approach, but I think it's hard to say that would work for all animals all the time.

At any rate, the philosophical should not trump the practical, and so I aim to continue with my approach to see if and when I feel any difference.

You, gentle reader, will be the first to know.

From TR

I can't believe I never heard this one before, but it totally works.


What's the difference between "food" and a "food product?"

A food product has ingredients.


Couldn't have put it better myself.

Culture of Life - The Link

This post is from my cultural blog, though I have repeated it in my political blog. It is more political and cultural than raw, but there's some important perspective on raw from the political point of view, so I've added this link. If the intersection of culture, politics, and raw is your thing, then please check it out.
D-Blog

Lord, make me raw - but not yet!

Whereas most people would dispute the value in this sort of proctastinative thinking, with raw foods, it's actually quite valuable.

There are exceptions - there are many exceptions - but in general, for the average pasty-skinned Westerner, going to raw foods right away is something I don't recommend.

What's this you say? You don't recommend raw foods on a raw foods blog? Well, not really. The statement I usually use runs like this- Raw food should be the used to sustain the health of an already cleansed body. Switching to a fully raw diet should be the crowning achievement of your cleansing work, not the initiating agent.

Again, this does not always have to be the case. Particularly with darker skinned people, whose genes are less "corrupt" by lack of sunlight and dairy/flesh based diets, the transition from SAD to raw can often happen quickly and more or less painlessly. Anthony, Drumhil, and Storm are all good examples. I know of a tri-athlete in Idaho, a white guy, who was also able to make the switch overnight - and keep it.

But most well intentioned, miracle-seeking honkies don't. They punish themselves into making the gigantic switch to raw overnight, and the longest I've seen anyone sustain it has been 6 months. Then the oreos come out.

Raw foods and the level of biology we meet when we cleanse are ignorant and unimpressed by the American work ethic. The magnificent optimism people have in this country about what can be achieved and how long it will take is utterly lost on the natural world. The body has its own rhythm, and we are at our best when we dance to that rhythm - rather than trying to switching the phonograph to 78 (for those of you who understand what that means).

The good news is that that rhythm changes. The body's time sense is heavily related to its spacial sense, and the more plaque build-up there is in the intestines, the faster time appears to move. So as you cleanse out your guts, time slows down, and you actually have more of it to do all the cleansing you want to do. But if you use the pre-cleansed perception of time as a marker for your "progress," you will run yourself ragged trying to do too much, too quickly, and with too few resources.

So that brings me back to colon cleansing- and all cleansing really. I could draw the analogy to a car mechanic whose hands can be covered with the thickest of black goop by the end of the day. When he goes to wash up, he doesn't go for the Crabtree & Evelyn goldenseal-enhanced, Vitamin E infused, moisturizing creme and body gel. He goes for the industrial strength soap to get the grime off. Then, when he goes home to dinner, he might use some regular hand soap to wash off whatever remaining grease is left on his hands. And maybe, before he slips into bed with his wife, he'll take out the deluxe moisturizing "product" with the elder flower and grapefruit seed extract infusion.

For most modern people, using raw food to cleanse is like using the moisturizing creme right out of the shop. You waste a lot of good creme that way, and you get incredibly frustrated in the process. Remember, most of us have never "washed our hands" our entire lives. It's not just at the end of the day, it's at the end of the decade - or decades that we're deciding to lather up. Clarion's just not going to cut it.

What you need is to cleanse- to get your body back to a balanced state where raw foods can take care of your daily cleansing and sustenance rather than forcing it to do all the heavy lifting that other items might do better.

For me, the foundation has always been alkalinity. And for that, we're talking green juice. Copious amounts of green juice. The double of wheat grass every other day and the fresh apple juice with spinach in it will not cut it for most people. We're talking full-scale reversal of body chemistry, so juicing aroun the edges simply will not be enough.

My favorite green juice is innerlight. I've tried a bunch, and they all have their advantages and disadvantages, but for pure alkalinity (as well as bang for your buck) innerlight remains the best. (By the way, innerlight the company us rather unremarkable, if not downright detestable. But their supergreens formula was extremely well crafted and remains of excellent quality.)

Dr. Schulze, in one of his videos, makes the point that one of the reasons we take doctors so seriously is that they treat disease with focus and intensity. They don't face liver cancer with lighting a candle and painting a picture about your feelings. They bring in lots of people, lots of equipment, lots of drugs, and lots of knives. They make you believe that they are really working on it, and they bring an enormous amount of energy (and cost) to bear on the situation. This can be extremely convincing, but it's also, in a way, commensurate to the level of concern expressed by the patient about dying.

Your cleansing should work the same way.

Yes, if you are able to chill out a lot about your disease, you might get away with the candle. And chilling out about disease can be one of the healthiest things that you can do. It allows you, at the very least, to make decisions from a centered, reflective place rather than out of panic (We need to remove your colon tomorrow or you'll die!).

But even so, the potential harm done by toxins and disease is substantial, and it is nourishing to know that you can meet them half way with your own intensity, using herbs and foods to balance your system and achieve true health.

Diseases are really just disruption, and the intensity they bring is really a reflection of how out of balance we've become. If we've gotten so far out of whack that we have cancer, it will require an equal and opposite amount of energy to bring us back to center. That's more or less how it works with cleansing.


So after the green juice comes the colon cleansing. After the colon comes (for me) the kidneys, then the liver, then any heavy metal and parasite flushes you want to do. Once you've covered all the bases, you can rotate around to your liking, just keeping the green juice going as a sort of 'heart beat' always grounding you back to you body.

By this time, raw food should be a natural. You will start to feel more ill when you eat cooked and less ill when you eat raw. The cleansing will slow down when you eat cooked and speed up when you eat raw. Your perception of time will speed up when you eat cooked and slow down with raw. The raw food will provide an upwards spiral of health that you will simply enjoy. It won't be a struggle, and it won't require any force. You will have peeled off the toxins in layers, using the appropriate tools at the appropriate time. Easy.

So go ahead and start that raw food diet - later.

Correction

Ooohhhh. . . so I have a correction to make- I think.

I mentioned below that I had started using Detoxamin again but that I was going slowly into it using only tiny bits of the suppository at a time.

Well on one of my off-days, I had the insight that maybe this stuff worked the same way as the greens do (or other miraculous substances). When things get rough, instead of doing less - so more.

So I tried it. I went right up to hald a suppository, and I still felt the metals move, but with much less discomfort.

Unbelievable. I'm thrilled - and so sorry to have led you astray - even if it was just for a day.

I'll keep you posted to see if the progress continues. I imagine it will. I'll switch to a whole suppository in a couple of days, and we'll see, but right now things are looking promising.

Stay tuned. . .

Plug

I should have known by the name.

Woodstock Farms. Sounds nice, right? But those old time hippies were super unhealthy- all soy and crap. Bad news.

So the raw, organic almond butter I bought from them tasted awful. Not rancid, but. . .well, cooked. Can't quite explain it.

I've been going through almond better like nobody's business lately, and it's been MaraNatha all the way. But Fairway was out this week, so I got the Woodstock stuff. Not nearly as good.

Here's by guess. The main difference between the two was not just taste but consistency. The Woodstock stuff was creamy- almost like pea"nut" butter. The MaraNatha was slightly more textured - not quite "chunky" but textured.

When you blend those nuts in large quantities, like they do in the processor plants, the motors generate high temperatures that actually cook the nuts somewhat (a lot?). [So that adding to the now mandatory pasteurization of almonds makes raw almond butter effectively an historical artifact]. My guess, then, is that in grinding the almonds that much more, the Woodstock folks cook their almonds to the point where they start to taste, well, dead.

Sad, but likely true.

You can still buy Artisana almond butter, usually in the refrigerated section. It's almost twice as much as the MaraNatha which is, itself, not cheap. I haven't noticed too different a taste or energy between the two- if anything I like the MaraNatha better. But the Artisana guys, I believe, go out of their way to slow grind the nuts to keep temperatures down. Same with Rejuvenate.

So there's my plug for almond butter. MaraNatha, Artisana, Rejuvenate, or just make your own. But for me, the Woodstock stuff is out. Sorry guys.

Heavy Metals!

Yep.

These are the kicker.

I've done a lot of cleansing, and some of it has been truly gnarly- I can think of some liver flushes especially and some of the early colon stuff- oh boy. But when it comes to deep poisons, there's really nothing quite so damaging to the organism as heavy metals.

You probably know I'm don't like stats too much, especially when it comes to health and nutrition. But this one illustrates the idea pretty well. It takes something like 15,000 times the number of antioxidants to neutralize a heavy metal than it does for a normal toxin. I'm doing this from memory, so it could be less than that - or more than that - but the point is that heavy metals are a huge insult to the body, and it's best to get them out.

My first experience with a real heavy metal cleanse was with a product I continue to recommend - Detoxamin. It's a method of chelation that uses a suppository filled with EDTA, the chelating agent. It pulls heavy metals from all over your body, and you release them through the urine. Easy.

The sups used to be 750mg, but you can now get them in 1000mg. That's a lot. The first time I used detoxamin, it was just after I started drinking my greens- maybe a month into it. I was feeling amazing, and I wanted to get on with some more detox, so I finally bought some detoxamin and was psyched to use it.

The recommendation was to take one suppository at night and then see how you do in the morning. Well that next morning I didn't think I'd live to see the night. I had never felt so awful in my life. Toxic- like bad, even dangerous. I remember drinking my greens that day and my tongue tasted like metal. It was horrifying.

I didn't go back for years.

There are other chelation methods that work. Most common is the IV method, but it is not nearly as strong as the detoxamin, and it requires sitting in a clinic for an hour or so a couple of times a week for months- or longer. Not for me. There is also a product called BioChelat which you can take orally. This works pretty well, and I have used it with success for a few weeks at a time. Less clinical is Cilantro which you can get concentrated at Dagger's (eating it fresh would require pounds to get any results). There is also a product called Herbal Chelater from the crazy guy in Brooklyn who sells Jim's Colon Pills - NMS Publishing I think? This product is at least very fragrant and peasant to take. Can't say how effective it is, though.

Also, if you're drinking your greens and doing colon cleansing (Anderson, Ejuva) you're probably pulling decent amounts of metals out of you anyway. So this is all good.

But over the past year or so, I have decided to go back to the detoxamin to see what I've been missing in my cleansing. Nothing has made me feel worse than this stuff, and so I know it's doing its thing better than the things I can't feel at all.

The strength, however, is still overwhelming. I've taken, in recent years, to dividing the suppositories into bits- sometimes as many as 7, 8, or 9 for one suppository. This teeny amount (what you could scrape under a lady's fingernail) is enough for the first few days. In fact, even this teeny amount can lay me out flat for half a day or more.

Drinking extra water is a must. You can actually feel the stuff collecting in your bladder and releasing as you pee.

As with most detoxes, it helps not to hold it in any longer than necessary. My experience is that if the metals sit too long in the bladder, it feels as if they somehow get reabsorbed hand have to go through your system again to be expelled. Much nicer to get them out all at once.

The last time I did this protocol, I found that after 9 or 10 days, I could start using half suppositories and then full. I don't know if this was an indication that I had gotten most of the stuff out or that my body was getting used to it - or perhaps had started resisting the drag on the system(?). In any event, the effects became less dramatic.

Currently I'm on day 3 of my re-exposure to detoxamin. It has been grueling, but, as always, once the storm passes, I am a better person for it.

Like I said, doing heavy metal detoxes is trippy. The quality of the detox experience is really like nothing else. But it's nice to feel it happening, to know this stuff is moving out of you.

If you've had dental work (a topic for another post) or have had any exposure to heavy metals - which basically means exposure to life - it is a worthwhile project, especially if you are grappling with some crippling ailment that nothing else will fix.

Be careful, be safe, be gradual, and enjoy the ride.

Magnificent

I remember this from last year. Here's the link to the article.

Review: Caravan of Dreams loses its Soul

That may be a bit harsh, but I'm a die-hard nostalgic.

I appreciate that things can, do, and should change, but I reserve the right to bitch and moan about it after the fact until I get used to the newer version.

But I fear this adjustment may never truly happen with the 'updated' caravan. For in the case of this Vegan Temple, we are witnessing not progress but extinction. I fear that with this last turnover in wait staff at Caravan of Dreams, the last New York hippie may have wended her way out of our town forever.

When I was a young vegan (28), there was no place on earth I was happier or more at home than at Caravan of Dreams on East 6th st. The wide selection of hearty vegan dishes, the thoughtful raw concoctions, and the endless choice of 0 proof liquid lunches for those balancing fasting with the demands of a social life. It was paradise. And topping it all off were the half dozen, stoned-out, dreadlock wearing hippies, yes, hippies, taking your order and delivering your food- or often as not, someone else's food.

The service was notoriously bad. On an empty late afternoon Thursday, it could still take easily 40 minutes for your food to arrive. And by the time it did you were so hungry that you wouldn't bother to complain that they had brought you something you hadn't ordered, or forgotten to leave out the seitan, or (my favorite) brought the appetizer, side salad, entree, drink, and dessert all out at the same moment without regard to table size or capacity.

Ah, the good old days. There was a lackadaisical quality to the whole affair that turned eating into a pot-enhanced meditation. You could get a contact high, simply from asking for the specials. Upon entering the hallowed bistro, you would leave all rules of New York Minutitis at the door and settle in to be comfy, stuffed, and pleasantly irritated at the lack of concern for order or short-term memory. There was simply no place like it on the entire island.

But now, woe, now the tide has turned. There is not a hippie in sight, not even a rasta juice guy. The wait staff, bar staff, and host staff have been replaced almost entirely by well-meaning, eager Latinos - whose capable service I appreciate in almost any other context. But what they are missing, these newly minted (or perhaps not quite minted) Americans is a certain nonchalance - a love of disinterest that was the hallmark of their caravan forbears.

I know it may sound ridiculous to be longing for the days of bad service. And I assure you that there is no sublimated racism against brown people, or what have you. What is missing from the staff is the shared love of - and need for - vegan food that was the family bond that held customer and server together as one through thick and thin and you forgot the hot sauce. That was what made Caravan Caravan. It was the sense of home cookin' amongst like minded slackers. To override that natural vegetarian instinct and force excellence, efficiency, and plain old restaurant service was to rip something sacred out of the spirit of a place.

Part of what makes global capitalism so abhorrent to so many (hippies in particular) is the wholesale replacability of one person with the next. Learn a new skill set, and a trucker can become a closet design consultant at the Container Store. The sense that people are born to unique destinies is completely disregarded in the person-as-lego model of corporate infrastructure. One sees the degradation in all corners of life- with Chinese opening discount sushi places, Mexicans working as sushi chefs *almost* blending in with the Japanese master he shares the bar with, Dominicans making "Malone's Pizza" and so forth.

Don't get me wrong- the melting pot that is New York city is a miracle of good fortune for all of us- my semitic self included. But something is always lost, and that something - especially when it comes to cultural cuisine - is not, as the corporate monoliths would have it, insignificant.

And in the end, it really comes down to love. If you love the food, if you love the culture, then you belong in the restaurant serving the food and delighting in the pleasure it gives your customers. If you don't, then you are taking something away from the experience of your customers. My favorite soba place north of 14th st. (and I am looking for a better one if you have suggestions) is all Japanese run except for one chubby, Indo-Pak looking guy who speaks fluent Japanese, cracks goofy jokes, and is simply in love with his job. He sticks out like a sore thumb, but he is a welcome addition to the restaurant staff, which is, it must be admitted, a sort of family. My favorite Italian place on 2nd Avenue is co-owned by a fellow of similar-looking descent- certainly not Italian. And yet he is part of the family of the restaurant, and is, as well, in love with the food and the restaurant. Dining there is always a pleasure.

What's sad about caravan is that they used to have this. Hippies were to vegan cuisine what Ashkenazi's were to deli, what Hungarian's were to goulash, and what Korean's are to overpriced bottled water (ok, overpriced everything). It's in their blood, it's in their hearts, and it is infectious to those of us lucky enough to share in their culture and experience. The random lot of folks now working at Caravan are working there because it is a decent and humane job, but that would appear to be the primary reason. Which means they could work anywhere. They are interchangeable, in the corporate sense.

That saddens me. That is why I mourn a passing, not just a transition into something new. Perhaps the call of the bottom line made such a shift imperative, I don't know. Maybe they calculated the wasted tables devoted to sitting around waiting for food while there were hungry customers on the sidewalk. Perhaps. But some of us were counting on Caravan to keep it real for the vegans in a city gone to fluff and pan-asian. Now there's nothing left.

If you spot a dreadlocked, hemp-bedecked stoner walking down East 6th st., take a picture. It will be the last of a dying breed. Perhaps they're all out by the Brooklyn museum. Or perhaps they gave up and moved back to Berkeley. I know not. But the yuppies have won one more battle for the soul of New York with the changing of the guard at this sacred venue. I fear we may not be long for this world. . .

omg

Staff of Life - Santa Cruz
Raw Spinach Hummus. Like nothing else.

Nut Plugs

Oy. I mean oy.

I have said many times that the raw food diet is not an end in itself and that most people should *not* pursue the raw food diet right away. My take on raw is that it is the diet one uses to maintain an already cleansed body. One can use raw foods to cleanse, but it is not the fastest nor the most effective way to cleanse the body- particularly for the post-industrial citizen.

Why do I look at raw foods this way? Because for health the most important thing is not what yu put into the body but what you release from the body. This is essential. Disease and sickness are the byproduct of blockage - and at this level, psychological, emotional, and physical blockages are all the same. For every negative thought or emotion held long-term in the psyche, there is a corresponding "piece" of physical blockage in the system. The body can process trauma and upset over time, and when it does not, it is because the emotional contraction surrounding the trauma is "cemented" in by matter- mucous, stones, plaque, etc.

This is why Rick Anderson admonishes - never eat when you are upset. Because the food will find its way to the contracted place in your body-mind and "lock" it in. When you fast during periods of anger, your body can flush away the toxic emotions once the situation passes. When you eat while angry, you will have to work that much harder to get the emotional contraction out with the physical 'plug' that corresponds to it- particularly if you eat cooked or mucous-forming foods.

So this brings us to the mother of all blockages and the biggest hidden danger to raw foodists - the nut plug.

Raw food reataurants are famous for their 'breads,' 'crackers,' 'chips,' 'burgers,' and 'patties.' In fact it could well be said that if there was one indigenous raw food dish it would be the dehydrated - whatever.

But I am not a fan.

When you ingest a dehydrated food, it is barely digestible in that state. It may be chock full of nuts, seeds, carrot pulp, and all sorts of goodies, but they are missing all of their water. To digest them, your body has to get that water from somewhere. So where does your body get it? Well, from your body.

Especially if you are following the other great dietary admonition - don't drink when you eat - you are effectively running your own body through the dehydrator. Not good for anyone.

I have become incredibly dry after just a few crackers and often find it taking many extra glasses of water to rebalance. But that is not the worst effect. No. The worst effect is not dehydration, but its sister ailment - constipation.

Remembeing that the purpose of raw is not just to take in more nutrients, but to thoroughly remove all waste, we see that constipation is the original sin. It is the anti-raw. it is the undoer of any benefit you receive from your raw foods and it should be fought with every weapon in or arsenal.

I have tried them all- laxatives, enemas, massage, fasting. . . but the only one that really works for me when it comes to the nut plug is a colonic. It would appear that soaking the nut plug in order to loosen its grip on your intestines can not be done through oral hydration. For this, you have to go direct to the source- back door hydration. You need to soak the plug directly in order to soften it enough to release. Perhaps if you do a very slow, 20 minute enema it might do the trick. I don't do so well with those. After about 20 minutes or so, the colonic will have the same effect.

The difficulty is this: once you loosen the debris from your intestines, it is still pretty thick. Nearly half of the time I have done this, the dislodged flax-mess *re*-lodges itself in the colonic speculum. This almost always ends up as a mess. When the waste stops flowing through the colonic tube you can find yourself in unbearable pain. The only two solutions I know are to continue the colonic while positioned vertically on your knees (tricky), or to suspend the colonic, remove the speculum, and bee-line to the toilet basin where the flaxy projectiles can fly out - usually with magnificent force.

The first of these choices doesn't always work and can certainly be awkward when working with a hydrotherapist in the room (I do colonics solo at home so I can monkey around as I like). The second can leave a trail of hemp seed onion bread streaming down the carpet to the bathroom. Neither is ideal.

But in a war, there will be casualties, and my friends the war against constipation is the only war that will lead to true peace - believe me on this. You need to get the shit out - mess or not. It is a war worth winning.

When you return to your speculum you will usually see it totally clogged with shit. It is appalling how sticky that stuff really is.

Flax is incredible for its binding power- that's why it's so useful in raw "cooking." Play with moistened flax seeds some time, and you'll have fun for hours. But imagine this binding power dried out in your delicate intestinal tissue. It really is a kind of cement. Very dangerous.

So don't muck around with nut plugs, kids. If you have one, get it out. If you find yourself in a raw restaurant, order the salad. Keep your intestines clear- they are the royal road to peace, health, and enlightenment.

Goop

When I was a kid, a young revolutionary, my favorite movie was Brazil, the fantastmagorical Orwellian work by Terry Gilliam.

There are so many spectacular scenes in this movie that it is impossible to pick a favorite. But one that sticks out in my memory is the dinner between the main character, his mother, and the girl she is trying to set him up with.

The setting is a sort of futuristic French restaurant with a tuxedoed waiter with slicked back hair and an obnoxious French accent. When he serves each course, he places a covered dish on the table. Announcing the course, the waiter wisks away the cover dramatically, "Chicken Cordon Bleu!" On the plate is a photograph of chicken cordon bleu with three ice cream scoop sized 'plops' of goop. He repeats the display with each subseuent coursw, unveiling diffenet colored goop-plops accompanied by images of what is meant to be there.

The satire is sublime. It lampoons (as does the whole film) the farce of modern artificiality and deceit. Fake everything was the world of Brazil and presumably the world of our future should we surrender our human impulses towards love, caring, and relationship. Those goopy plops and their indicative photographs are the epitome of modernist artificiality and contrivance.

Now, 20 years later, I sit in a restaurant in California. Before me is a plate with one large scoop of brown goop in the middle of it. There are dry, triangular crackers srurrounding the goopish centerpiece, and the waiter delivering it announces, "Nachos."

I have to laugh.

The irony is that I am not sitting in a futuristic French bistro but in a raw food restaurant. This was not chemicalish, petrol-based, genetically-engineered food product but the most primitive of meals one can acquire outside of a supermarket. And yet I required a photograph to remind me exactly what it was I was eating.

Of course I have seen this before. Over my years as a raw foodist and raw food restauanteur I have seen countless servings of goop- "mock tuna fish salad," "refried beans," "salmon pate" and any number of various "croquettes," "burgers," and "patties" - hardened goop.

Of goop, in general, I am not a fan. I love the wild, but in cuisine I require structure. Better to have the rough and bumpy structrure of nature itself (an avocado, for example) than the nature-impersonating amorphism of raw food goop.

Many of my friends have agreed - particularly those that are curious about raw are but half-hearted at best. "Every dish I make from those "uncook" books looks the same. I can't tell the mock chicken salad from the mock spinach pie. Everything just looks like goop."

Over the years I can say this situation has gotten gradually better. Starting, of course, with Pure Food and Wine, aesthetic presentation in raw foods became a real art form. Sarma & Matt raised the bar several notches above where it was- in fact to this day, no one even comes close.

Part of Sarma's success is not just her flavor but her structure. Each piece of food has a beginning and an end- there is nothing amorphous, disorganized, on the plate. Her food has form.

Following this model, there has been steady and noticable improvement at Quintessence, Cru, Alive, and others. The "structured" (as opposed to goop-like) presentation of raw foods has become demonstrbly possible and therefore culturally necessary.

What does that do for raw food as a cuisine? It helps cure the rawstauranteur from that most insidious force- boredom. Variety and possibility are what make foodies tick. They want to try "that" spice, "that" pepper, and "that" heirloom variety of "that" vegetable. And then they move on. With raw food, the ingredient list tends to be limited- the usual suspects are almost always 90% of your ingreients list - sing along, 'agave, soaked nuts, avocado, sea salt, cacao nibs, goji berries, dates, and seeds'). While there is infiniete variety in edible foods, the culinary preparation seems to revolve around the same usual suspects plus whatever David Wolfe has sent down the pike from his last trip to Ecuador.

Think of when you used to order regular food. Amorphous food generally took on associations of army-gruel or ultra-blue collar frito pie and casserole. They were goop foods. As a SADder, though, you had options- well-sliced pizza, gingerbread cookies, a french fry. The visual variety to these (slightly) higher end foods gave the sense of cullinary diversity through visual rather than olfactory structure. So it felt as if your choices were more numerous.

I'm not sure how this works in mathematics, but there are an infinite number of possibilities in raw cuisine. Yet even in this infinity, there will always be "more" options for cooked food, since you can take any raw dish and then cook it and you will have twice as many options eating cooked than raw. So there are two infinities here, but the cooked infinity is "bigger." I'll have to get Matt or Colleen to explain.

Visually, the same is true, although from the looks of things, it is hard to prove that there are "infinite" forms for raw food. The preponderance of goop-foods weighs down our visual palate like a cashew and crimini mushroom mock-albatross.

So here's to structure. Hippie style tends to downgrade the masculinity of straight lines and hems in favor of flowing, unstructured layers. Big boxes to rounded adobes. So be it. But let us not give over our entire aesthetic to the hippies. Alex Grey and his fellow visionary artists have fused structure and chaos magnificently. And Sarma & co. have synthesized the wildness of raw foods with the refinement of the city she lives in. Kudos to them all.


But perhaps this whole story is moot. After all, for most serious raw foodists, this sort of "gourmet" restaurant food is not part of our regular routine. I am happiest when I'm eating salad greens, fresh fruit, and a tomato. I don't even need a plate, much less a fork. That's the kind of primitivity that raw food aspires towards. The "concoctions" as Gill calls them are transitional or fanciful- fun for a birthday but not for everyday sustenance.

My favorite daily raw place is Bonobo's on 23rd St. I could eat there every day, order more or less the same thing, and be happy as a clam. They even have their own spread of pates- to satisfy my goop nostalgia, should it ever return.

Beginnings

It's been a while since I've gone full-on raw. I've been back on for the better part of a week now, and, as with each time I hop off the wagon and climb back on again - I am thanking my stars for raw foods and wondering why I didn't go back sooner.

It's a bit like what incarnating and disincarnating must be like - it's as if you were living in a construct, a "real world" delusion, and then all of the sudden you're back home. Clarity. Serenity. And blessed regularity!

With all the blogging I've been doing, it's funny that I haven't devoted any cyber space to raw foods. While I was doing my transition over the pat 5 years, I neglected to put pen to pad, as it were, about the myriad discoveries, illuminations, and teachings I've received along the way.

Well none of those lessons have gone away, and now that I am in scribe mode I would like to share some of them with you.

So far there is no particular order other than what my memory shows me and what my current experiences remind me. That should be well enough. Through reading, you should be able to surmise my 'general theory of raw,' which, from what I have read, is actually somewhat unique. (but we're all unique, aren't we?).

My path may have been more vigorous than most, more vigorous than most, and more focused than most. This owes largely to the severity of my preceding condition and my significant (enough) resource base that made normal daily activity unnecessary. In other words, I could go deep and not have to worry too much about getting on in the world, holding down a job, or raising kids. Furthermore, I was in a place of such desperation that when I saw an answer I believed to be real and reliable, I focused all of my energy there until I reached my goal.

My approach was primarily heuristic. That is, I was open to experiment, and to see what worked and what didn't through feedback received from my own laboratory - my body.

So dig in, enjoy, and please share your thoughts.

D