Remember, I'm doing all of this for charity. You guys raised $750 for a great cause and going raw vegan for a week was what I said i would do. Please consider making a donation to Project Birthday in the name of my gastronomic misery this week,.
First off, I have to say that if I had to go full vegan without the raw part it wouldn't be a problem. For a week, a month, the rest of my life if all the other animals disappeared I wouldn't have a problem. There are plenty of things to eat and tons of delicious preparations available even when you cut out every animal product known to man. In fact, there's a pack of vegan sausages in my refrigerator that I'm deliciously eyeing for breakfast on Monday morning. I will be able to eat meat again by then, but I think they are stupendously delicious and I don't really care what they are made from.
I have been doing a ton of reading about raw veganism in the past week and have realized that in a way, the entire thing is based off of a very narrow and grossly inaccurate interpretation of evolutionary theory. When it comes to food, I'm a firm believer that you will be much healthier if you eat what your ancestors ate. Pre 1950-ish, people ate whatever grew around them. If your mix of genes allowed you to prosper on your local diet, you lived longer and most likely reproduced more. If your mix of genes didn't work well with the food around you, you probably died younger and may not have reproduced at all. Over any amount of time in this situation, it stands to reason that the local population would be genetically selected to do well on the local grub.
They tried this with the Hawaiian diet. When placed on a diet of traditional Hawaiian foods, Hawaiians lost weight and greatly improved their health. Similar people that tried the diet but were not from the same geographic area didn't do nearly as well.
If you're looking for a diet, I would start with this approach first. Although the more mixed ancestor group you are, the harder it is to isolate which diet you should be following. Girlfriend Actual lost three dress sizes on the Mediterranean diet, eating the same stuff that the Italian side of her family had consumed for centuries. She hasn't tried a Scottish diet yet, and I'm not sure there is one, unless you are to eat nothing but oats, haggis, and the severed limbs of Englishmen.
A great many raw vegan websites and books try to use this approach to justify why raw veganism is healthier for you. They claim it's how humanity has been eating for thousands of years and what our bodies really want. But this isn't necessarily true.
- Humans have been cooking food for a long, long time
- Humans have been eating meat for a long, long time
- Humans have been hybridizing crops for a long, long time. Modern corn is a man-made creation. Nature did NOT give that to us
- You would have to claim that no evolution (food wise) happened since the modern human popped up on Earth. To think that natural selection based on local diet didn't occur during at least the last 4000-5000 years is ludicrous and marginally ignorant
In addition to all that, it seems many raw vegans (and the majority of raw vegan bloggers that I've found) aren't even really raw vegans. Most of them hover around 75-80% raw vegan (by calorie) and reserve 20% for cooked vegan food. In addition, it seems most raw vegans have to go regular vegan or vegetarian during pregnancy to ensure that they have the right mix of vitamins for their baby. Now, call me an ass, but pregnancy and childbirth are sort of your biological imperative. Shouldn't The World's Best Diet(tm) accommodate pregnancy? You would think.
Of course, I tried to find answers to these and many other questions on the many raw vegan forums that are all over the internet. However, that wasn't even possible because every raw vegan forum I went to was full of people arguing whether this product or that product was raw vegan. How much was it heated? The water was heated before being added to the fruit, does that count? Do I need to get a blender with a blade that doesn't heat up while on puree mode? Fermentation of this sort of tempeh will go over 118 degrees... what about that?
And then there was this hilarious discussion on whether freeze drying constituted "cooking".
On and on it went. I wanted to ask how many of them use salt. While traditionally made sea salt is sun evaporated, rock salt is routinely blasted from the earth using explosives (I'm not kidding). Pretty sure that temperature gets above 118.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think a raw vegan diet is a bad idea. I just don't think it's the best idea for most people. Your body is not meant to have a diet this restricted. Vegetarianism and regular veganism are both things I'll probably try for a while in the future, and for a lot longer than a week. Perhaps I'll even try raw foodism without the vegan restriction.
Don't want to eat other animals? I'm sort of with you. Want to swear off processed food? Great idea. But heat? Heat?
My raw vegan friends out there, you guys really do have my utmost respect for sticking with this lifestyle and remaining healthy. You guys probably put a lot more work into it than I am.
Nevertheless, you guys paid for it so I'm sticking with it. So, what have I been eating?
These are some wonderful dehydrated shiitake mushrooms. Best snack ever! (not counting beef jerky)
Raw cashews.
About those cashews... Back when I was a kid, my mother told me never to buy whole cashews. She said that there was no such thing as whole cashews, that the halves naturally split during processing. Whole cashews, my mother said, were just cashew halves that were put into a special gluing machine that sorted like halves and pasted them together. The "glue" was some sort of cashew butter so that the producer didn't have to declare another ingredient on the label.
I always thought this story was sort of crazy until on one trip to Thailand we visited a factory and lo and behold, there was the cashew sorter gluer machine. Now, I know people in the nut industry (really) who tell me whole cashews really do exist and that what I saw was some scammy nut wholesaler trying to sell his cashew halves at whole cashew prices. Apparently cashew growing and processing techniques have improved of late and the plants now yield a much higher percentage of whole cashews.
But every time I see a cashew like this, I wonder.
Another raw coconut macaroon, this time with raw cacao added. These things are spectacular. I would eat them regardless of my self imposed dietary restrictions. Note the "yummy tax" bite inflicted by Girlfriend Actual.
Raw broccoli and Vegenaise. Ok, folks, Vegenaise is a revelation. I'm serious. Vegenaise is the third best mayo I've ever had (behind Trader Joe's and the obvious best mayo in the world, Duke's). And it's this good while remaining vegan. I could eat the entire jar with a spoon. If you love mayo you have to try this stuff.
Actual made me sliced english cucumbers with salt, pepper, and chili flake. Amazing. And no, they weren't yellow, I was messing with the white balance on my camera and failed like a total photon00b :(
I'm feeling ok for now. My energy level has been sort of low but it has improved steadily as my body gets used to a completely different set of foods. I'm sure it will keep getting better as the week goes on.
Lastly, I had to replace the snow leopard default wallpaper on my Mac. The leopard looks way too hungry and has a smidge of blood around its mouth. Every time I saw the picture I thought about steak.
It's been replaced with a much cooler picture :)
