greetings,

i'm porter. musician, raw foodist...

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

attachment

i have come to realize that what is more important than being "raw" is being unattached to what you eat. eating midfulling and consciously. eating to nourish your body, not to appease your mind.

at each step of the way, it seems i give up one attachment--say, to pasta--only to pick up another one--say, to raw seed cheese & kale. i notice that the new attachment is never quite as strong though, which makes me think that i must be doing this to slowly ween myself off of attachment.

i decided to challenge myself to eat very simply this month, eating mostly "one food indulgences" (aka mono-meals) and virtually no concentrated plant fat. i am feeling only slightly better than before. i notice that i have a little more energy in physical activities. other than that, i'm feeling pretty much the same. but, mentally, i am feeling very differently.

some days eating simply seems natural and delicious. all i want by the end of the day is a big green salad with a squeeze of orange juice and some tomatoes. but some days i do the mind thing:

-"why am i depriving myself of healthy fat?"
-"what harm would one avocado do?"


and it's interesting, because it's not as if avocados are going extinct and i am sworn off them for life. i am only doing this for A MONTH! but what is at play when i cannot separate my mental conceptions of food from my body's needs*?

anyway, i realized that this whole exercise of simplification and (almost) an imposed scarcity, is forcing me to reevalute the emotional importance i place on food.

it is something that runs so deep we seldom think to question it.
-but, what would you be without the food you ate?
-how would you define yourself without the foods you "love," the foods you "hate,"?
-how would you define the cultures you've experienced without describing how they cook and prepare their foods, the flavors, the spices, the presentation?
-how would you center social activities if not around meals, restaurants, and bars?


though we are becoming increasingly conscious of (and in some cases horrified by) the materialistic and superficial nature of western culture, have we considered how the role of food in our daily lives contributes to that same culture? is food another way in which we constrain our awareness, limiting ourselves to the mere physical manifestations of reality?

it has taken the removal of something i thought i "was," to realize how little of me there is in ANYTHING i do, or eat for that matter.

it seems i am in a constant state of disorientation because of the changes in the my diet that i feel i NEED to make, because on this raw "diet" my body's needs just keep changing as my body becomes cleaner. i am forever stripping myself of certain "staples," replacing them with others, which are temporary too.

no structures are stable. this is a basic fact. and i think this raw path is preparing me for the deeper understanding of that truth.





*a note on fat needs: i know that i am getting enough dietary fat, because fat exists in almost all plant life. i couldn't believe it when i was taking daily accounts of my food intake for a couple of days, finding the fat percentage go up steadily, even though i hadn't eaten any "fat." but this is so obvious if you pay attention to nature. that is why it is possible for herbivores to be perfectly healthy and grow to huge proportions on greens alone. if you ate greens all day you would be eating PLENTY of fat. but if i ate greens all day till i met my fill i probably wouldn't have time to do anything else! let's not go there...

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thank you, your post was fascinating. (Seriously.) I'm a raw-curious vegan, and this is the kind of idea which piques my interest. I'm always wondering why people do what they do, and it's awesome to see someone find a moment of deeper meaning; truly learning from life. :-)