What if I only ate raw vegetables?
Two years of eating nothing but raw vegetables, nuts, and seaweeds, and algae.
Why?
For the last 2 years, my partner and I have drastically changed our diet with health, challenge, and diversity in mind. After struggling to find the right food, we read many papers, books, and ran experiments on ourselves to discover what would work best for us. So why have we done such a thing? Because we have to begin to build a new relationship with food. The current offering, or at least the most accessible, is full of addictive additives that are meant to make you feel good while eating but often leads to regret. Everything you do matters, even if you are an individual, everything you do affects the rest of the world in ways that are too complex for us to understand directly but that means we should bend towards actions that help the world suffer less rather than sustain the current cheap pleasure and regret loop. So we thought, why don’t we automate the things in life you know you should be doing well and would benefit the environment? So we gave up meat, then fish, then any product with added sugars, and eventually 99% of processed foods (minus muesli and Amazing Grass Raw Reserve) in an effort to discover how far we can go as individuals to live sustainably and mindfully in the age of the Anthropocene. This experiment took us 5 years to land and we are still evolving. I will detail our current diet below.
Recipe
Last 2 years of our diet ( anthrochristianramsey.tumblr.com/search/raw )
Here is a template for our meals (TBD) which is neither permanent nor exhaustive. You can view our Tumblr, Twitter, LinkedIn (we life blog) to see how much it’s changed over the last few years.
Breakfast ( link to last year of snack pack )
- Amazing Grass Raw Reserve
- Seven Sundays Unsweetened Muesli + Whole Foods Organic Oats
Shu Cai Snack Pack ( link to last year of snack pack )
- Kombu / Kelp or Wakame
- Celery
- Celery Root
- Wheat Grass
- Cauliflower
Lunch ( link to last year of lunches )
- Kale
- Broccoli
- Tomatoes
- Radish
- Bell Pepper
- Seaweed
- Enoki Mushroom
Jianguo Snack Pack ( link to last month of snack pack )
- Macadamia
- Almonds
- Pumpkin seeds
- Sunflower seeds
- Pecans
- Walnuts
- Pine nuts
- Cashews
Dinner ( link to last year of dinners )
- Kale
- Broccoli
- Tomatoes
- Radish
- Shitakke Mushroom
Reward
- Shelled Pistachios
The basics:
Stay away from processed foods, additives, and others. Focus on a diverse diet that bends away from just being tasty and empty of nourishment.
We now use 3 dimensions to decide on items within the diet:
- Is it raw?
- Is it nutritious?
- Is it challenging?
My partner and I have worked on getting to a diverse diet that is not only raw, but nutritious, and challenging. We eat diverse amounts of raw land and sea vegetables, mushrooms, seaweeds, fruit, nuts, and algae.
Under No Illusions
We aren’t under the illusion that raw by itself is equal to healthy. We landed on raw because of all the excess additives that are lurking in almost every packaged and processed product. Raw also doesn’t mean “natural” to us or anything essentially good-natured. Raw produce may look natural to our confused mental models but in fact, since the rise of agriculture 10,000+ years ago, all raw products have changed drastically based on underlying variables such as yield, maximum shelf life, desirability, and others which have had a slightly terrifying effect on produce. In the article 9,000 years of breeding has done to corn… the author provides stunning images of the differences between the watermelon in 300 B.C. and today’s watermelon. The so-called original watermelon was extremely bitter, very tiny, and took a hammer to open. This seems to not be anything like the modern upgrade of the watermelon. Which is large, 3.3x sweeter, and many are seedless. To be clear, there isn’t a clear distinction between what a watermelon is and what it isn’t and the geneticists and botanists had to be using our best mathematics tools which are probabilistic at best, but my point is that our analogue agrilogistic algorithms have not been optimised for nutrition.
Challenge. Beyond taste.
When someone asks you how the food was the response is often about taste. It was very good usually means it tasted very good. But yet the practice of eating cannot be exhausted by taste alone. We can take in the texture, cognize about the nutrition, we can even be challenged by the bitterness in a way that leads to achievement. But yet, good taste is the top access mode. You’ll find this everywhere you go. As if food can be exhausted by its taste. Not by how it sits in the stomach or how it’s digested. We need an upgrade to our thinking or our neurobiology will continue to be manipulated based on a few bugs we picked up over time. Haohan and I use the challenge as a way to go against the top access mode “good taste”. We were eating beets which we are very proud of because of how challenging it was to eat raw beets. I had the same experience with celery root and many other root vegetables.
Automate All Meals
Haohan and I never go out to eat. We’ve made food something we’ve decided to automate. Every week Haohan orders from WholeFoods and Amazon and I do meal prep each week where I prepare our meals, snacks, and rewards. Since we never eat out, we save money and avoid acting on our desires. After a while, much of the temptation for processed food has left us. My current weakness is the Chinese date which I believe is overly optimised for sugar that I still desire and I am meditating on why I still desire it. We’ve made it very hard to purchase food outside since our orders are always the same and we have enough calories packed insight our meal packs every day. This is very important. Make all of your meals and not just one or two.
Rewards
We use special nuts as our daily reward. The reward is usually based on communication since we’ve been working on how we communicate with compassion. Our current rewards are raw pistachios which Haohan really loves and strives for as well as myself. We can win up to 20 raw shelled pistachios a day but we average around 7–10.
Negotiate
So in order to change something in our diet, we have to go through rounds of negotiation. We have committed to not changing it without negotiation and the requester has to prove that the suggested improvements push forward each of the three dimensions; nutrition, challenge, raw. The success rate is very low and takes a mixture of heart, science, and compassion for our future to change. We always reading updated research so we will always be willing to negotiate based on new data.
Next Steps
Detail our learnings from giving up meat, sushi, soy sauce, hot pot, and so on and how we automated our system via meal prep.
Links:
Linkedin — https://linkedin.com/in/christianramsey/
Christian’s Life Blog — http://anthrochristianramsey.tumblr.com
