End of week 1

This used to be a beet

Wow, that went by. I did sorta think I would write each day but instead, wine and truth with classmates has been the name of the game. That’s cool. But now it’s the weekend and I shall try to come to grips with the swirl of thoughts that are in my head.

For starters, it’s been an intense week of pulling back the curtain, getting insights into all the many roads that led we seven (and three more by way of 105degree’ers) to this spot: to OKC – center of Oklahoma. Oklahoma, center of the USofA…..sounds sort of omphalus. Well, for us, for this month, it certainly is the center of the raw world. If you would like a great day-by-day photo tour of our work, please check out classmate Barbara’s blog here.

Rather than duplicate the effort, my thoughts have been about my relationship to food. A lot of the stories we’ve been hearing are about uncomfortable brushes with ill-health, ideological compulsions to “fly right”, understandings of the very broken nature of the food industry in this country (as I write that, I must say “food” and “industry” do make an unhappy and unholy pairing. Our deep collective feeling about that surely explains all those warmly sunlit, on-the-farm ads for I-Can’t-Believe-It’s-Not-Butter and the insistence that Coke and Happy are synonymous).

So realization #1 is this: food is a celebration for me. Food, with family and friends, is Happy. It doesn’t have to be A Celebration – no one’s birthday or Thanksgiving. Every morning when David says “Let’s go get coffee” or comes back from the farmer’s market with a stunning cinnamon roll and we sit together (even both reading our papers), it is a celebration and a gift. When I call Dave and Kit and Pendar and say “I am driving past the truck with the fresh-picked corn on it. Dinner? How many ears do you want?” it is a celebration. I finally now understand why I am one of those that cannot eat when I am unhappy.  And it is not, btw, about being hungry. I would have to honestly say that I am just about never hungry, as the word is commonly understood. That is not why I eat. I am embarrassed to admit this since there are so many millions that are not only hungry, but starving.  I realize only too keenly the riches of our life.

Realization #2: Despite the loving relationship I seem to have with food, it does not love me back equally. Damn. I have learned, à la Julia Child, to eat well and in moderation. (Well, sometimes.) But even so, through various experiments, intentional and accidental, I see a food-related raft of “problems” – the morning cough, the stuffed sinuses, headaches, that bloaty feeling, the afternoon energy dive……yup. All that – and more.

Realization #3: Having had – over the past four years – a couple of experiments with juicing and eating raw food (or, as I am coming to prefer, “raw cuisine”), I now have a basis of comparison of how that way of eating makes me feel: all ‘round better. Yes, from every cell upwards. I can even see each and every cell being rejuvenated and breathing a sigh of relief.  “Thank you, Mair”

So where does all this thinking leave me? Not sure. Where will it all lead? Aye, that’s the question.

Two Platings of Beet Ravioli