to veg or not to veg?
just met yet another raw vegan food chef, this time at a berlin party (dance, acrobatics, massages, annd.... alcohol free, you believe that?:). those folks are usually... interesting, this one probably the coolest and his green tea chocolate was memorable. ok so, cooking raw and vegan pushes the limits of creativity, forces you to use high quality and often exotic components. so no wonder it is original and if well done, very tasty (at least to my palate). leipzig has a vegan non-raw restaurant, also quite interesting, but then sometimes too dry and tofuesque (i am now pretty convinced that i should not eat too tofu regularly, and neither should most people especially men, but that's another topic). anyway the curious thing was that he was also an ayurvedic massage therapist, and from what he did on me a good one at that (yeah it was cool party). he was also not as sectarian and extremists as some of his colleagues although he did sound like this was the best thing to do for humankind. i am not convinced to say the least. ok it's delicious, so what? happy organic meat also is, it doesn't mean it should be my only food. first about the vegan part; for animals like us to live, something else has to die, period. whether it's a plant or an animal or a bacteria, i eat therefore i kill, and vice versa. of course killing and eating a bunny or a dog, doesn't feel the same as eating a sprouting bean or yogurt. but that's just our human mental/emotional bias. some life is dying to sustain some other life. if the dying life has a nervous system that has similar ways a fo suffering as we do, we are more sensitive to it, hence vegetarianism. conceptually pointless, but in practice of course i wouldn't eat human or even primate meat. as for bunny cooked for hours in their own blood (sounds better in french: civet de lapin) i shall not renouce to it in this life. so leave away whatever grosses you out, but thou shalt not mistreat the life to be eaten. don' t feed animal protein to cattle, don't saturate your fields with pesticides, kill the nimals as quickly and minimizing the pain, even if it' s not minimizing the cost.. be smart and balanced in your treatment of nature and of yourself. right yourself too. vegan people has another thing in common they have very little fat, and deep set eyes. parly because they eat little fat but also due to some possible vitamin or amino acid deficiency, although most take supplements, especially b12 . now, isn't that already a bad sign? a sign that such a diet is further removed from nature than a balanced diet?
and without eating meat fish or eggs, lack of vitamin D must be rampant among vegans around here especially with the little sun we get in the winter in this part of europe and since they have so little fat to store it. of course they won't notice right away.. but there are now clearly several cancers and auto-immune diseases associated with long-term vitamin D deficiency, so...
then, about raw. i didn't ask him about that but to my limited knowledge ayurvedic cuisine is mostly cooked and it's not unusual for ayurvedic doctors recommending eggs, dairy or even meat to some patients who deprived themselves of those.
one fascinating thing though, is that more and more evidence points to the fact that human evolution from pre-human ancestors was prompted by fire use and meat eating. we may artificially be able to renounce to those thanks to our mastery of energy and food engineering, but please don't make it sounds like it's more natural or better for nature.
yes, the key is to be more gentle with nature: but i don' t believe raw vegan, or vegan are better for the environment than a balanced diet including some animal products and meat without excess (no, most people actually don't need as much meat as they think they do). more important i think is to eat LOCAL (organic salmon from Chile while living in Europe doesn't make a fart of sense), SEASONAL (usually goes with local, you don't need to eat that many oranges and bananas, luxuries to be appreciated as such) and NAKED (limit generating trash: big organic supermarkets in germany compensate the absence of preservatives by over-wrapping their organic food,... yuck!). To me that's more important than saving bunnies lives, even if that's less visible; sure we live in artificially heated environments, but the climate in most european and ~subtropical regions are not meant for year-long vegans (if there is such a region) unless they rely on non-local non-seasonal and a lot of non-naked foodstuff.
long live food diversity,... including the luxury of raw vegan delicacies
