Another report from the annals of rawhood[1]…..
Day 4
After
another lovely breakfast of raw oatmeal and nut milk (déjà vu…all over again),
I realize I need help. I make an appointment to meet a friend for lunch at the
only raw restaurant in town. I look at the menu and I literally salivating over
my keyboard. Lasagna, sandwiches, Thai pasta & yogurt!!! I’m not really
caring about how they create the food because at this point anything that does
not involve me grinding, soaking or starving is good.
I
head over to the restaurant and it’s packed. Mainly with emaciated fashion
types with their “it” bags and the their gay BFF (I have nothing against gay
BFF’s…I have one myself). The occasional guy is the man that got dragged in by
their husbands.
My
friend orders an avocado sandwich with “raw bread” and I get the lasagna
(because they were all out of the Thai curry pasta). I opt out of the juice
selection because I don’t want any delay between anything resembling real food
and me. Our food arrives and my friend’s sandwich is interesting. The “raw
bread” seems to be a cracker like bread made with ground seeds and nuts, which
were then spread on a sheet to dehydrate to resemble “bread.” The rest was an
avocado, some veggies and a raw chili “mayonnaise.” My lasagna consisted of
thin sheets of zucchini layered with a tomato puree, walnuts, parsley pesto,
cashew cream and spinach.
I
don’t know if I was delirious from hunger, but they were pretty good. Even that
“raw” bread thing was all right. But I noticed the food was extremely heavy.
The bread was pretty leaden. The weight of the cashew cream alone, which was
basically a whipped cashew butter, alone was akin to a brick. All those nuts
and seeds made it the food equivalent of a raw football player – packed.
According
to rawists, the food has to be nutritionally and calorically dense due to the
nature of the diet. Raw food diets often don’t contain enough calories or
nutrients to keep one’s weight stable. Several studies examining the nutritional
and caloric content of raw diets are seriously lacking in calories (the
fashionistas at the raw café were skinny probably for other reasons) and are
often underweight and undernourished. The Giessen Raw Food Study[2]
examined 527 raw food practioners and found that 29.5% of males participants
and 24.9% of female participants were underweight. Most of the women stopped
menstruating. And all had bone density issues. The vegan rawists were the most
susceptible to nutritional deficiencies, and because they all eat raw food,
they were all susceptible to food pathogens (as in E. coli, Salmonella, etc.).
The conclusion of the scientists was pretty harsh: “a strict raw food diet
cannot guarantee an adequate energy supply.”
It
explained why I was freaking hungry all the time. But the solution? Was to eat
more food, but what?
Day 5
Determined
to shovel in more calories into my system, I made a pilgrimage to the health
food store looking for the all the stuff that rawists use to make their
mock-fill-in-cooked-dish-here. I hit alternative food nirvana. Raw food, vegan
food, vegetarian food, health supplements (my favorite vegetarian rennet)
galore. I thought I would die of healthiness just from the wafting aroma of
spirulina.
Seeing
that I really didn’t have a good idea about what food would be needed for a raw
diet, I asked the very eager saleslady about my predicament. She piled a basket
full of chia seeds, raw bars, raw cocoa nibs, seaweed powder, quinoa flakes,
raw crackers and 5 different types of vitamin and mineral supplements. When I
asked her what I was supposed to do with this surfeit of rawness, she said
calmly, “Oh, don’t have all the raw cookbooks?” She picked out three (one in
Danish, one in English and a third that I rejected because I don’t read Finnish).
Two
hundred dollars lighter and armed to the teeth with raw foods, I was determined
to make something that was akin to my tasty lunch the day before. As usual, I
was too late. The cake I wanted to make needed me to pre-soak nuts and quinoa
flakes for 6 hours. I was going to pass out if I waited 6 hours for food. I
decided upon the zucchini “pasta.”
No soaking required, just a mandoline, fresh coconut milk (which I didn’t have,
but I didn’t care), some limes, curry powder, lemongrass, ginger and garlic. I
shredded my zucchini into long strips and tossed it with the magic mixture and
sprinkled some chia seeds on top. Not bad, but it tasted raw…very, very raw. The
garlic completely overpowered the mixture because it was…raw! And I was really
missing an umami element…as in fish sauce and there really needed some sugar to
balance out the spices.
I
ate it anyway and I was grateful that I was capable of making a raw dish that
tasted somewhat OK. The problem was that this was basically the only raw dish I
was capable of making in less than an hour. Unless I was going to remember the
night before to soak everything, I was going to be eating this again the next
couple of days….
Day 6
Luckily
I remembered to soak some quinoa flakes and some cashews the night before. I
was basically trying to find a substitute for sushi, if not to get some
seriously needed iodine in my system. But before I could even go there, I, on
orders of the raw police at the health food store, needed to have a drink…not
of the good kind. Because I didn’t have a juicer and basically refused to be quilted
into buying one by the health food pusher, I just stirred apple juice, with
some yeast powder and 2 teaspoons of spirulina into a glass. It looked pretty
gross. Green and brown lumps of undissolved powder bubbled on top. Unable to
drink this mess, I shoved a banana and some frozen berries into the mix and
chucked it all into the blender. The powdery blobs disappeared, but it was a
pretty unappealing shade of green. It tasted fine when I got over the green. My
daughter said, “Mommy, why are you drinking that?” Before I could answer, my
husband said, “Because sometimes,
your mommy is a little silly.”
How
do you explain fad diets to a 6 year old? I, like, many parents, am very
concerned about the eating habits for my child. But in an age when girls as
young as 3 are worried about their weight, telling your child that you are on
some kind of “diet” is not exactly encouraging healthy body images. On the
other hand, when one in three Americans are overweight, I should be concerned
with what my child eats. Luckily, my daughter never followed up on the
question, but left me wondering how all these fad diets are screwing with our
own understanding of health….but not before my husband said, “When is this diet
going to end? You’re tired, cranky and your food looks weird. You know, this is
grounds for divorce.”
This
diet is really starting to look like a raw deal.
