Raw Hummus Nori Rolls and Wheatberry Sprouts: Will Raw Rub off on my Family?

Today's lunch was freaking unbelievable. I had little hope that the home-made raw tahini would work out, not to mention the raw hummus. But they both did. The raw hummus was a combo of tahini (made out of soaked sesame seeds) and zucchini. The recipe I followed called for 1/2 a TBS of cumin and sea salt, resulting in something truly fabulous and spicy. I've eaten about 95% raw for the last 36 hours, and I feel great. In fact--I do not lie!--I literally felt a surge of energy after eating that hummus. A cumin buzz, maybe?

But as I was layering hummus on my seaweed wrap, sprinkling wheatberry sprouts and arranging lettuce leaves before wrapping them up, I felt a flash of sadness that I haven't found anything yet I could share with my family. The homemade hummus is too spicy for the little girls, and the husband probably wouldn't go for anything containing seaweed. I keep reading about the amazing health benefits of going raw, and I think about my little girl who has seasonal allergies from spring till fall. What if all the fresh food and enzymes helped her body cope better during those seasons? It's been known to happen to others who have suffered from auto-immune disorders like allergies.

I think I'll have to woo the girls. And the first line of wooing will call for somethign sweet. Already, I've got my sights set on raw cocoa powder and raw chocolate nibs. Apparently, I can "cook" up a mean mock cookie-dough recipe with some sesame seeds and chocolate. Today, for the first time, I put a salad in my daughter's lunch box at school. "I didn't ask for that!" she cried when I told her I packed it. It was true. She did not ask. But I"m goign to be persistent in presenting her with fresh, raw options. Yet, I wont' force her to consume anything. Maybe, over time, enough raw chocolate, raw agave nectar, and raw honey will draw her over to the "raw side."

Now in regard to my husband, I have little hope. But dreams do come true.

Quinoa Sprouts and Kraft Macaroni

I ate quinoa sprouts for the first time today. I know some of you have heard of quinoa, and some of you have actually eaten it, too. Sprouting quinoa involved soaking it in water for a day, and then rinsing it three times daily for two more days, until it grew sprouts. I ate them on a salad with cold pressed olive oil and salt. They were magically, surpisingly delicious.

Coinciding with my quinoa sprouting experience today was an opportunity to buy groceries for a single mom of three young boys. I had forty of someone else's dollars to spend on groceries for Vicki* and I found myself in a quandary. Most of the emergency food provisions I've heard of people getting are canned or boxed goods--things like canned peas or potato flakes, peanut butter, and tuna. Forty dollars can buy a lot of canned peas at Aldi, but canned peas are not very nutritious. Neither is Kraft macaroni and cheese or peanut butter made with corn syrup or white bread. So the dilemma I faced was this: Do I use up the precious monetary resources on fewer items that contain more nutrients, or do I use those dollars to buy the largest amount of food possible, to fill those tummies as long as possibly can be filled. It felt like a toss-up. If I went for quantity over quality, those kids wouldn't necessarily be nourished even if they had something to put in their tummies. If I went for quality, at least they'd have a couple days of eating well, of low sugar-, hormones-, antibiotic-, and preservative-levels in their food. So, I did my best to walk the line between making the most out of those forty dollars and making the most out of the nutrition for Vicki and her boys for the next few days. I bought organic milk and hormone-free cheese. Those were almost twice the price of the conventionally processed products, but also the ones that, I felt, were worth the most money. I bought conventionally grown baby carrots and lettuce, but natural peanut butter (i.e. peanuts and salt--no corn syrup or sugar). I bought organic Raisin Bran (it was on sale! again, no corn syrup), conventionally grown oranges and organic bananas (organic bananas are cheap!), and sandwich ham and turkey that is processed without nitrates or sulfites. These were the sorts of foods Vicki had told me her children longed for. While I could have bought them two weeks worth of quinoa as well as most of those other groceries, I suspected Vicki and her family would neither appreciate or know what to do with quinoa. And while I valued nourishing their bodies, I also felt it important to meet the "felt" need her kids had, for familiar food, for something recognizable.

I'm sure one could scrutinize my decisions and see inconsistencies in them. I pretty much shopped with my heart, and avoided those products I think of as normally causing the most harm to people. Did I make the right choices? Just choices? I dont' know. Will Vicki and her family go back to eating typical emergency fare in a few days? I hope not.

*not her real name

People Have Called Me a Health Nut

for as long as I can remember. It's not entirely my own doing. My mother made our own butter when I was in elementary school. After skimming cream off the raw milk she bought from a local farmer, she whipped it into stiff peaks in our blender. It would have been fine if she'd stopped right there. She didn't. How could I make this more nutritious? She must have asked herself. Then she reached for the powdered Vitamin C. What resulted in my brown bag lunch was a rice cake with a gritty Tang-like spread smeared across it.

Since then, I've gravitated toward foods outside the mainstream--like avocado mashed on dried seaweed, like fresh kale softened with lemon juice and sea salt. And I've spent a lot of time reading and studying the labels on the things I don't eat, enough so that I squirm at Thanksgiving dinner when my host pulls that antibiotic- and pesticide- infested bird out of the oven, the one that was basted with hormone-, antibiotic-, and pesticide-ridden butter. It's all I can do not to gag.

My problem is assimilation. The further from mainstream I get, the harder it is to stay social in my eating. Throw in the additional complication of having a daughter with food allergies, and the stuff that comes out of my kitchen is practically alien food. I've spent a lot of time eating according to different value systems. First, there was the anorexic system, way back in college, where I celebrated with a brisk walk if I kept my intake to under 775 calories a day. That was a diet of carrot sticks and instant oatmeal. Then, when fat-free was all the rage, I cried as I watched my husband consume Breyer's mint-chocolate chip, sure those fat globules were going straight to the walls of his arteries. Over the years I've gone through phases where I've eaten carnivorously, avoided dairy and/or wheat for allergy reasons, and eaten Twix bars for lunch, daily. Most recently, I've been eating more like a vegetarian, for the first time in ten years and, to my shock, have remembered I can survive without meat. Throughout all the experimentation, two truths are becoming gleamingly evident: The older I get, (1)the less inclined I am to follow "rules," and (2) the more conventionally produced foods--canned, processed, non-organic, chemically preserved--gross me out and leave me feelign sluggish and achy.

So, where that leaves me is with my nose in Raw Food books, contemplating the likelihood of my living happily on raw, organic cheesecakes and flaxseed crackers made in my food dehydrator (set no higher than 105 degrees, so as not to harm living enzymes). As I write, I've got quinoa and wheatberries sprouting on the counter, an experiment I leapt into before I committed to any new way of life. Can a woman live on sprouts?

I'll keep you posted.