Let’s disinvite shame
This week somebody told me that for her, the cycle of eating raw and then going back to eating cooked was associated with feelings of shame. I can really relate to that, because I have been there too, but I don’t think it’s a healthy place to be psychologically, and I don’t really think it helps anyone to transition successfully to raw, or to achieve a stable high raw proportion they are happy with.
It may sound paradoxical, but I think I was much happier and much more at ease with my diet before I discovered raw. My diet wasn’t the best and it wasn’t the worst, but I was reasonably at peace with it in a way that I never have been since, even though nutritionally it is much better.
One aspect of this is becoming more aware of our addictions in relation to food, while another is acquiring higher aspirations for our health and general wellbeing. Both of these are positive and even necessary parts of the process, but the part that I don’t think is helpful is shame.
Where does this come from? Why do so many of us carry feelings of guilt and shame in relation to our consumption of cooked foods? It is a difficult dichotomy. On the one hand we want to say that raw food is good (better, best… yes, it is!), but on the other, I’m not sure that demonising cooked food or the people that eat it is a hugely helpful thing to do, especially when that person is (sometimes) ourselves. After all, human beings have been eating cooked food for a long time and we have mostly survived, and most of us still need to navigate our way through a cooked food world on most of our days.
I would really like to invite you to disinvite shame. Let’s set a positive intention in the direction of raw, celebrate our successes, support each other to establish raw as increasingly more of our default position, and really really stop giving ourselves and each other a hard time about those times when other priorities come to the fore. One of the hardest things to do is to stay raw alone. Let’s increasingly create the social conditions for us to stay raw together. That means actively building community, friendship, a support network, and a food infrastructure that makes the raw choice the easy choice. Let’s look forward to the day when healthy people make raw food for sick people in hospitals, when real green smoothies are on every hospital breakfast menu, when children are fed dragonfruit nice-cream in schools, when elderly people are fed carob and fresh berry smoothies by their carers, and when there is a raw food restaurant on every street corner. Let’s remember that none of us is an island. What we do for one week of the year in the summer is create that utopia in the form of a fruit festival, but most of us have to go home to our real lives and the real world at the end of it. If we can, during that time, cultivate enough of a visionary spirit - enough leadership capacity - to carry us through until the next year, then we might survive the onslaught of reality. The deep, nurturing relationships we form at these events are invaluable. Every single person who comes is a true pioneer. Let’s treasure each other as we move forwards together, and let’s disinvite shame.