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.