About Me
Biography (just the food bits!)
Childhood – Our family, in common with many families in the Sixties, had sliced white bread, sugar on our (sugared!) cereal, and salad was regarded as a ‘boring’ meal, to be endured when visiting grandparents. Spinach was generally reviled, and sold in cans and olive oil was sold only at the chemist. My mother was a good cook, but although some dishes were home-made, the Sixties was a boom time for the new ‘convenience foods’, and desserts at home were often tinned fruit in sugar syrup or ‘Angel Delight’. Meat was considered a staple part of a meal and Sunday was usually a roast. I hated milk, and found the smell of heated milk nauseating. Eventually (because it was the Sixties and milk was promoted heavily then) I became used to drinking it ‘disguised’ with flavourings, eg Nesquik.Young Adult – From my early teens I began to refuse to eat tinned (ie cooked, processed, white sugar-added)fruit – can’t remember why; must have been instinct! At 16 I started becoming interested in vegetarianism, and, working in London, went to veggie restaurants like Cranks. Even then, eating meat made little sense to me on any grounds, although at that time I was quite happy eating it! I was becoming very interested in food, nutrition and fitness in general, became a ‘foodie’ in the early Eighties and ate…everything, attending various food courses, from macrobiotic to Cordon Bleu. After a few knocks that basically resulted in a bit of soul-searching, I reviewed my life and knew a lot of things were wrong. I turned to a vegetarian diet and ate no meat or fish for the next five years.
Parent – at 30, with a toddler, I introduced fish into the family diet. This was because, as a young mother lacking in confidence, I listened to advice that I now know to be incorrect. For the next seventeen years, my family ate vegetarian food, and fish. Obviously I could no longer claim that my non-meat-eating was morally motivated, as I was eating fish (suffocated).
Although I’ve certainly had my share of junk food, take-aways etc, I’ve always loved green vegetables and salads, and have rarely made cakes or desserts. So it would be fair to say that my diet as an adult, although it really wasn’t healthy, was perhaps less unhealthy than the average.
Then… after 22 years of not eating meat, I actually ate a little (excluding pork) for a year! I’d come across some religious teachings that appeared to give meat-eating the green light…let’s just say I was misled!
(edit July 09 - after years of clinging to the 'I was misled' rubbish above, I have come to the realisation that the real reasons for my reversion were far baser...and my use of the term 'being misled', blaming something else for the results of my own decisions, and at the same time trying to portray myself as a 'good' person just trying to 'do the right thing' is a splendid example of how we love to exonerate ourselves and place ourselves in a favourable light when we know the wrong we are doing cannot actually be excused.)
It was a combination of reading about the treatment of turkeys, watching a Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall programme in which a chicken beat its wings, struggling desperately to hold onto life as it was being strangled, and The Essene Gospel of Peace that showed me that I had taken a wrong turn. The EGOP said not only that meat turns to ‘poison’ in our bodies, but that we must not cook our food. At first, I rejected that – my ears were closed. Then, a lot of things ‘came together’ - synchronicities…? After being impressed with the mental clarity and calm of a vegan man, I looked at vegan sites, gave up all dairy for six weeks (and noticed excess mucus clearing!) and stumbled across Shazzie’s ‘raw food’ site. I read up on the science that explained what happens to our food when we cook it. All the lights went on.
At first I cut out all flesh foods, tea and coffee, and greatly reduced dairy and alcohol, eating 75% raw. Over the next few months I gradually moved nearer and nearer to 100% raw (the non-raw breakfast was the last thing to go!), eating the occasional cooked ingredient within an otherwise-raw salad socially. I now follow a 90-100% predominantly raw vegan diet.
RAW
What They Say
