Raw and Naked Feels So Wrong
I like it hot, and I’m not embarrassed to say so
I enjoy supporting indie filmmakers, and because my dad has made so many, as I talked about here, I often found myself at our local theater that catered to indie films. May I Be Frank was a film that changed me, albeit temporarily. It’s a documentary about how eating raw transformed one man from unhealthy and miserable to healthy, happy and well-adjusted.
Ready to go raw
I can be easily inspired and am willing to try something new and different or that I feel may be good for me. After all, the first race I ever ran was a marathon. By the time the credits ran, I was already making mental notes on all the things I needed to start on a raw food lifestyle as Frank had done to transform his life.
Soon I had a mini-library of raw cookbooks, enough to take up an entire small shelf. I’d signed up to participate in an overpriced full-day onsite class on raw food preparation and living that a woman taught at home. Before long, a variety of small appliances made their way into the house. A Vitamix, a dehydrator, and special tools to create, soak, store, or package the food.
Because the food was organic and went bad rapidly, it had to be consumed fast. My parents and kids had no interest in the foods I put so much effort into preparing. This in and of itself quickly became an issue.
Lots of bad feelings
Once I was all-in, I realized, “I have a bad feeling about this.”
1) I love hot food. I don’t know what was going through my head when I first jumped on this bandwagon of freezer-burned dung. Raw food means raw. It involves no cooking or heating whatsoever. The closest you get is room temperature. This wasn’t what I was looking for to warm me up in the dead of winter.
2) I’m impatient. Raw food preparation takes at least twice as long, sometimes days longer, to prepare than regular food. The chopping, mashing, slicing, blending, and mixing are bad enough. Many recipes also require an overnight soak to soften some type of oats or seeds or 24 hours for something in the dehydrator.
3) It’s challenging to find specific ingredients. Spirulina, anyone? All of it can be ordered online, but you can’t just run down the street to your local grocer and “grab raw Spirulina” on your way home from work.
4) The cost is mind-boggling. When eating raw, it’s essential to include a myriad of pricey items to be sure you’re covering all the food groups, particularly protein. Raw nuts and nutritional yeast, for example, aren’t cheap, and you spend most of your time at the grocery store in the section that allows you to part and parcel all those seeds, nuts, and oats. Expect snarls from the checkout counter when you head towards their lane with your twenty-three tiny bags of individually selected items.
I enjoyed a few takeaways: a chocolate pudding made with avocados and a “cheese” made out of cashews. There were a few fruity blended drinks that weren’t bad, either. But all in all, I should’ve gone with my bad feeling. My raw life journey may have lasted two months. I can’t recall exactly; I’ve tried to wipe most of it from my memory.
Key Message: My youngest captured the attention of the filmmaker and star of the documentary during the Q and A following the film. The movie’s primary focus is about one man’s life transformation from an overweight, unhealthy, miserable man to the exact opposite. My youngest is bright and had caught something else that had been briefly mentioned in the film. “Are you still in contact with your daughter?” my child had asked.
He was dumbfounded and asked how old my kid was, to which they replied, “7 and three quarters.”
He asked if it was okay if he sent me a Facebook request. All of this was in front of the entire audience. He stated he’d never heard a child speak up like that before. That ended up being the most positive thing that came out of our attendance at the film.