Hi all,
A large thank you to Dean Esmay for making this list happen. I very much
appreciate the opportunity to participate.
With this post I mark my failure to lurk this list without posting. I am a
8+ year happily-omnivorous raw fooder (>99.9% raw) who started out as a
strict "instincto". Instinctos are the raw food fringe which most closely
matches a pre-fire paleolithic ideal. Briefly, an instincto eats one raw
food at a time according to sensory pleasure. S/he chooses the best
smelling (with perhaps a little taste-test as well) food from a variety of
raw items and consumes that food alone until a "taste-change" or "stop"
presents itself. The stop can be a change in mouth-feel, rising acidity,
blandness, burning, etc. It can also be a sense of repletion.
In any case, the beginning instincto is instructed to "eat their fill" of
the most attractive raw food available. These foods include animal foods
(fish, roe, shellfish, crustaceans, meat, organ meat, marrow, eggs,
insects, etc.) and plantfoods (fruits, veggies, nuts, honey, pollens,
etc.). Grains and legumes "can" be eaten if attractive in their raw state,
though they rarely are unless sprouted and even then are not very tasty in
su=ignificant amounts. Great care is taken to obtain the most
"instincto-quality" foods which means organic or wild vs.
chemically-farmed. Dairy is avoided and even sprouted wheat is avoided.
There are problems with nearly every instincto idea and practice but the
biggest ones include overeating modern too-sweet fruits, obtaining
high-quality animal foods, fanaticism, and, of course, the social
limitations.
Dean Esmay writes:
>I had my preconceptions rocked this week. Which is always a healthy thing,
>but I'm still reeling from it.
Oh, Dean, if you could only see the majority of raw fooders (most who have
vegan aspirations) try to deal with the arguments for paleo-diets while
maintaining their ethical superiority stances regarding animal foods.
_Their_ pre-conceptions are rocked as well. Many even continue to argue the
nutritional and anthropological(!) superiority of an all-plant diet. You
have indeed stumbled into strange, but interesting waters...but so have
many vegetarians when they come across the paleo-diet ideations ;)
>Yet it would seem that the
>fact that grains and beans are inedible without things like cooking pots
>and mortar and pestle ought to make us look with suspicion to those foods,
>since that all by itself would tend to indicate that humans would never
>have eaten them in any appreciable quantity until around the time of
>agriculture.
>
>Enter the members of the raw food community who I recently encountered
>online. These people eat absolutely everything raw, on the belief that the
>molecular changes wrought by cooking foods are unnatural, addicting, and
>carcinogenic.
Very few of them eat absolutely everything raw. After you hang around them
for a time you realize that most are quite taken with the simplicity of
rawism, but are constantly dealing with "cooked food addictions",
backsliding, and finding the "right" supplements. The track record of most
raw regimes (including instincto) is quite dismal.
>I am mildly skeptical of this belief system, although there
>is some rational argument for it; humans ARE the only animals who cook food
>and most of the evidence I've seen suggests that we haven't been doing it
>for very long.
I, too, am mildly skeptical. Yet it does seem to be something of a
scientific black-hole as regards the utility of cooking. I have spent many
years trying to research what anthropology as to say about when humans
began widespread cooking and there are very few references to be found that
are more edifying than intriguing. Further, the difference between raw and
cooked foods in digestion and metabolism appear to be little studied. How
science can overlook something so fundamental and obvious may be an example
of cultural blinders resulting from the "obvious a priori" that cooked food
is natural for humans.
>But what really rocked me is that these people (and I've seen messages from
>more than one of them) eat whole cereal grains and beans raw. They most
>commonly will use overnight soaking methods, either in pots or jars or even
>just wrapping the stuff in moist rags. However they will also apparently
>eat them even without this, eating them completely raw without even any
>soaking. Their claim is that if you haven't been eating this way all your
>life it might take a week or two for your digestive tract to adjust, but
>that they otherwise have no trouble at all living this way.
You may grow weary of raw foodist's "claims" overtime as I have. But note
that instinctos _rarely_ find sprouted grains or legumes attractive for more
than a mouthful or two. It may be that vegan-rawists are simply extremely
mis-nourished on only raw plant foods. Their tendency to rely on sprouts
(and green-powder-type supplements) to try to maintain some homeostasis may
be a frustrating stop-gap effort to maintain their vegan ideations with a
second-class protein such as sprouts. Further, sprouts are usually spiced
or mixed in some way to mask the taste-change which would prevent their
consumption in large amounts otherwise.
>At first I was tempted to dismiss this as a bizarre cultish sort of thing.
From what I have seen you would be more right than wrong. Ward Nicholson's
3-part interview in Chet Day's HEALTH & BEYOND is probably the best ever
written on the subject (http://chetday.com/). The third part (not on the
webpage, but available as hardcopy) deals with these cultish and fanatical
aspects in a very straightforward manner.
I am ambivalent about bringing up the topic on this list since there are
plenty of rawists on it: I don't want to debate raw food ideology! But
neither do I want to witness a misrepresentation of all rawists as happy
healthy sprout-eaters. IMO, the fields of Darwinian medicine, evolutionary
psychology, paleo-diet, and instincto are on a collision course and may
meet as a minor revolution down the road. Much of the rest of rawist
ideology (fruitarianism, "Natural Hygiene", sproutarian, etc.) seems
unwilling or unable to modify its tenets according to new information,
anthropological or otherwise. In sum, I don't want some zealotrous
raw-vegans to alienate the paleo-diet community as they have many folks in
the raw foods (and caloric-restriction) arenas.
>But if these people apparear to be happy eating this way. The very fact
>that it's POSSIBLE for them to do this should, at minimum, throw back open
>to question whether or not humans have been eating cereal grains since
>before the advent of agriculture after all.
How happy (or healthy) these people are is a matter for serious
exploration. There is probably a reasonable argument for the paleolithic
consumption of grains/legumes as a "drought-food" or "survival-food" but I
seriously question why a human would bother unless animal foods were in
_very_ short supply. The extinctions of many (but clearly not all) large
game animals which coincides with the last glacial retreat may have played
a part in such a scenario, but that begs the question of whether such
grains are optimal for human health. Cooked grains are clearly more
denatured than raw grains, but...there is an interesting instincto "claim"
regarding bread: apparently when long-time instinctos have experimented
with bread-eating they find that, relative to the much-maligned "Wonder
bread", whole-grain breads are much _harder_ to digest and more likely to
cause nervous tension after consumption. Wonder bread is problematic but
_less_ so. The implication is that if bread is problematic, whole-grain
bread is even more problematic than Wonder bread, since whole grains have
even greater molecular complexity than polished grains. Both may be best
left unconsumed.
>Although it's hard to imagine
>them making up the majority of the diet, if people can comfortably eat wild
>grains without technology then there's not much reason to think they
>wouldn't, is there?
Not unless there were no animal foods to be had. Modern rawists _decide_ to
avoid animal foods for a variety of "reasons". It is hard to imagine
paleolithic folks prostelystising the evils of animal food consumption, but
perhaps an abundance of wild stands of grain, combined with a dearth of
animal foods, and perhaps some population pressure(?) played a part in the
rise of agriculture.
Below is some text from "Instinctive Nutrition" by Severen Schaeffer
(Celestial Arts, 1986) regarding the onset/origin of cooking. I think it
applies analogously to the idea of grain consumption as well. (Instinctos,
fruitarians, and every other rawist in between, seem to agree that cooked
grains, esp bread, are perhaps the most addictive class of denatured foods.
This passage also serves as an example of the tenuous type of ideation that
keeps a raw fooder "motivated" when they need to see cooking as evil...
---------
"Once humans discovered how fire could be used for cooking, they were on a
one-way trip to metabolic chaos and organic disharmony. They had tied a
knot they couldn't undo, that we, their descendants, have rendered
practically inextricable.
"In order to understand this, let is imagine a tribe of Homo Erectus
somewhere in the forest, say around 400,000 B.C. They are gathered near a
fire, eating yams and other foods collected earlier in the day. The ones
who are eating yams are those whose bodies need the nutrients yams contain:
this is what makes them smell and taste good. Those who do not need yams
are not attracted to them.
"Whatever they're eating, they're eating it raw, the way it came off the
tree or out of the ground. It has never occurred to them to mix, grind,
pound, heat, or do anything else to an attractive piece of food other than
to eat it.
"One member of the group, call him Onemug [a German pun for Einstein], has
eaten less than a fourth of a yam when the taste becomes unattractive.
Carelessly he throws it down, and it rolls to the edge of the fire,
unnoticed. And there it begins to bake. And it begins to smell. And the
smell is stronger than ever a yam smelled before. The smell reaches
Onemug's nose, and it is good. So Onemug follows his nose, and takes up the
baked yam and begins to eat it. He can do so now because the taste has
become good again. So Onemug eats the rest of the yam. The yams molecular
structure, modified by heat, no longer causes its taste to change from good
to bad.
"A day or so later, Onemug is hungry, but all the tribe has found to eat
that day is yams. Thanks to cooking, Onemug had been able to eat more yam
than he actually needed, so his organism was still overloaded with it. As a
result, naturally, he finds the raw yam unattractive. But Onemug is a
genius: he remembers that the hot yam from the fire was good: he associates:
fire + good = good. On an impulse, he pushes a yam into the fire. And sure
enough, after a while an attractive smell comes to his nose. And he is able
to eat the yam with a degree of pleasure until he is full.
"Of course, the other members of the tribe smelled the cooked yam too, and
begin to follow suit. So all of them begin to eat yams, not until the body
has had its fill of the nutrients yams contain, but until the belly has
no room for more. And naturally, the next day, because they don't need
them, none of them is attracted to raw yams any longer.
"This brings upon the tribe an unexpected change in the way it lives. Up to
now, yams in their natural state were delicious. Now, however, they have to
be cooked or they can't be eaten. Instinct has to be tricked or it will
stop the organism from overloading itself with substances it doesn't need.
"Thus is birth given to the artifice of cooking. It is not an 'art' in the
sense of haute cuisine but it must inevitably become one. For by disrupting
the dynamic structure of food, cooking kills its taste: each mouthful
tastes just like the last. Since it will no longer trigger an alliesthetic
response, it will not become unpalatable. But it _will_ be boring, because
the taste of cooked food does not vary.
"Over the centuries, ways will be found to 'enliven' it, to make it
interesting and pleasurable to eat. Food in its original state will of
itself be more pleasurable than any artifice can make it, but only if the
body needs it. However, once the organism has become saturated with
remnants of denatured foods (which it can neither use nor eliminate because
biochemically it 'doesn't know how'), then the senses of smell and taste
themselves become denatured and dulled. Thus must leaves, herbs, spices,
ferments, oils, extracts, mixing, baking, roasting, basting and boiling,
etc. be called upon to provide flavor where none remains. The relationship
between the dynamic molecular effects of these procedures on the food, and
the effects of the food on the human organism, have only recently become a
subject for scientific enquiry--which has generally assumed along with
everyone else, that cooking is perfectly 'natural' for humans."
-----------------
Whatcha think, paleo-listers?
Cheers,
Kirt
Kirt Nieft / Melisa Secola
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