Hi everybody,

My name is Shanna, and I found this list quite by accident a couple of months
ago and have been following it ever since.  For those who were here before
the recent "restructuring" I'm the one who was doing the term paper on raw
milk (the term paper from hell!).  The paper turned out ok (at the expense of
gaining a few grey hairs) and I learned a great deal about the production,
sanitation, nutritional value and politics of raw milk.  I still intend to
visit the dairy that produces the raw milk for the L.A. area - I want to meet
the cows that make my moo juice!  I have emassed a tremendous amount of
information and if anybody has any questions on the subject I'd be happy to
look it up!

My great grandfather was the first in my family to eat a raw foods diet, at
the turn of the century, when such things were unheard of.  He was also a
naturalist and an herbalist and treated the backwoods people of West Virginia
with herbal medicine until the AMA threatened to throw him in jail because he
was "practicing medicine without a license."  He experimented with and
created raw food recipes until he died of food poisoning (from a toxic plant)
during one of his experiments.  My great grandmother is heading into her late
80's and still follows a strict raw food diet; she won't even heat water for
tea.  The rest of us don't eat exclusively raw foods (in fact, I'm quite a
chocoholic) but I am a vegetarian and do believe that we eat more fresh and
raw foods than the average consumer.  I thank my mother for feeding me only
raw foods for the first year of my life, and I am constantly on a quest to
re-intigrate more raw foods into my diet.  I think I'll pursue a career as a
natropathic doctor, inspired in part by my great-grandfather.

I'd never in my life met anybody (or even heard of anybody) who ate mostly or
all raw foods until finding this list.  I hadn't even met very many people
who were vegetarians, even living in L.A., until just a few years ago.
 Imagine my shock at finding this list.  I download almost everything that
comes in for future reference.  And I want to be able to show my grandkids
the pioneers of raw food diets!

ciao!
shanna