To me, the raw food diet — the one where people make the life-altering decision to go “100 percent raw” — is a scary, fascinating thing. And depending on what comes out of the Vitamix, the industrial blender every raw foodist must own, the food itself is either transcendently delicious or horrifically stomach-flipping.
When my brother up in Seattle told me over the phone one night ten years ago that he had decided to do it, it sounded crazy.
This was long before the movement had gained any sort of traction, and I didn’t know anyone who only ate raw food. When he started describing his new limitations, it started to sink in just how extreme it was: no more bread, for example (“eating bread is just like snorting cocaine,” he told me. “It’s that bad for you”). Wait a minute, cookies are bread. This blew my mind. How can you not eat cookies? He went on: no more ice cream, popcorn, pizza, soy milk, cereal, salmon or rice. No more... hot food. I wondered: Who wants to come home half-frozen from the snowy mountains to eat a nice...gazpacho?
My friend Marci listened as I told her, and she had a concern that I hadn’t thought of. “Who is he gonna date? I don’t know about you, but I want to be able to have a nice romantic dinner at a restaurant with someone.” And restaurants can be tough! There’s salads on most menus but restaurants don’t use quality raw olive oil in their dressings, and so that leaves you with balsamic vinegar, and no toasted walnuts or garbanzos or corn or beets or cheese or croutons or anchovies. That’s a salad a Spartan would love, right there. Yes, we’ve walked out of more than one because there was nothing there he could eat.
I can make several first-person observations about raw food and specifically Aric’s long journey, many of them incredibly positive. For one, upon squinting at his blood test run-up, his doctor told him that he will never die. So there’s that. His other systems are green for go, too. As a frequent detoxifier and cleanser and believer in colon hydrotherapy and liver and gall bladder flushes, etc. he has the bladder of a newborn on steroids. He placed ridiculously high in a seven-mile run that he did not train for. He’s deceptively strong for a tiny guy — like an ant.
He’s also made some of the best food I’ve ever eaten. In San Francisco I have plenty of access to five-star restaurants and none of them can touch a salad that Aric makes, sometimes from arugula ripped fifteen minutes earlier from his front yard — for raw fooders, salad becomes an art form. Befriend one who’s been doing it for a while and thank me later. And he makes “ice cream” from frozen bananas and raw cocoa beans that would rock your world.
The “genuine” stuff, Tillamook Mudslide ice cream, though, is the craving that’s tumbled him off his ascetic dietary meditation more than once. It’s happened to Aric multiple times, and maybe for good reason. As a family, we’ve worried about him: the quality of his skin, the hollow of his face, the narrowing of his frame. I like to say, “Eat some avocados, man.” That’s my little code for, “You need some meat on those bones, brother.” On one visit I showed him pictures I had taken of him during one of his cleansing fasts and he was shocked at how “bad” he looked. He admitted it, but it surprised him.
He’s now happily married to a wonderful raw food-eating woman. And the world in other ways has caught up a bit, too. There are now raw chocolate chip cookies for him to buy, and live pizza crusts that he can order up from the local food co-op.
I think for him, eating raw is somewhat spiritual. That, and trying to make himself immune to the pollution in the environment and in our mainstream food system.
They say “moderation in all things,” but if he can manage to not get struck by lightning on his way to the food co-op he might just live forever. He says for him, though, that it’s not about the length but quality of life — about bypassing the chronic diseases and medication organizers of middle and advanced age.
“Live foodists talk about how they want to die healthy,” he says. “To just not wake up one day, of old age.” Maybe, until we clean the food system, he’s on to something.
— Todd Spencer