eat your fucking vegetables.

A Season for Being: Raw

Much of my work around plant-based diets is more about the logistics than actually being vegetarian. For any dietary philosophy to work, it has to make sense – both economically and ecologically;  it has to be sustainable, and it has to be flexible. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself in situations where you’ll have to make a difficult choice, or starve.

In my own life, I have food rules. Some of them are rigid; the rest allow me to work with what’s available to me. And I don’t allow myself to feel guilty about a decision I make. I try to impart this onto my clients, because transitioning to a plant-based diet is like a rite of passage: not only will your relationship with food change, but the value you place on certain aspects of your life will change as well. You will be changed when you come through the other side.

Like most things, everything has a season. We’re in summer now, the season to wear less clothes, drink more water, eat spicy foods, and eat more fruits. You probably are not interested in eating a thick soup when it’s ninety degrees out. A smoothie on the other hand, may be more like it.

Foods and tastes have their own seasons too. There’s a reason why strawberries, basil, asparagus, corn, apples, cranberries, carrots, potatoes, pumpkins and squash grow when they do. Yes, we’ve become accustomed to having all kinds of foods all year round, but eating specific to a season has its physical and psychoemotional benefits.

The same thing goes with certain types of eating. Have you noticed that you eat more in the winter and less in the summer? No? You might go through spurts during the summer months, as cookouts, street fairs, restaurant outings and other social events around food fill your calendar. But check it out for yourself by keeping a food diary for a couple of weeks during August and then again in December and compare notes (don’t record anything around a social event where there’ll be lots of food; it will throw off your observations.)

Not too long ago I received a copy of Becoming Raw, from the authors of Becoming Vegetarian and Becoming Vegan, the dietary bible of nutrition advice for aspiring vegfolk. While they are a little too reliable on soy for my tastes (no pun intended; a revised and updated version is expected in 2012 for Becoming Vegan which I hope is more reflective of the new ways of thinking about food for plant-based diets)I found both guides to be invaluable to both myself and my clients.

The topic of raw foods stirs up some issues with me. As with all dietary philosophies, the one thing I’ve argued (heatedly, at times) is that there’s no one-size-fits-all diet for everybody. Just because something works for me, doesn’t mean it will work for you. Not right now, not next year, and maybe not in ten years. Personally and professionally, I am on the fence about the long-term sustainability of raw food diets. As a longtime advocate of eating locally grown foods, I have a hard time getting on the raw foods bandwagon. I recognize that everyone is different in terms of “diet DNA” or bio-individuality as Dr. Oz and my school like to call it, respectively, and for most people, it will not make sense depending on where one lives and what one has access to. But, I can support it as a seasonal diet depending on the season and the goal.

If you’re looking to reduce your dependence on overcooked, highly processed foods, especially fried foods, than raw foods is something you might want to explore as a way to reclaim whole foods. If  you live in an area where the temperature never dips below 70 degrees and it doesn’t rain very often, I’d say go for it. But, if you live in NYC like I do, with brisk falls and sometimes very serious winters, I’d tell you without a doubt that while you may make it through your first winter, your body, in the long run, may not agree with your decision.

Reading through Becoming Raw, I was happy to see that Registered Dietitians Brenda Davis and Vesanto Melina, MS, have given raw food diets the same attention and care to planning a well-balanced raw vegan diet as they have to their other books. Not only do they take you step-by-step through the nutrients (fats, proteins, carbohydrates) and how to get them, you also get a concise history (by vegetarian historian and activist Rynn Berry[video]) on the raw food movement in the USA and recipes to help you get started.  They even give you their position on that pesky “food combining” theory.

Out of all the books out there on raw food diets, this is the only book that breaks down the nutrition backed by scientific evidence. And while I’m not one of those people who believe that every scientific study is well-intentioned, I’d have to say that if I was going to trust an “expert”, it would be the two people who have carefully researched and studied plant-based diets over the past ten years, and maintain a plant-based diet in their personal lives, it would have to be RDs Vesanto and Melina.