winter greens

Tonight my Japanese teacher canceled our lesson together right when I was about to call her to say that that I didn't want to bike to her house in the freezing rain. This left me open to make a nice dinner for myself and spend some time juicing some veggies that I had in my kitchen. Since I go to the grocery store every day there's never a short supply of food in my apartment and tonight, following Matt Monarch's advice, I decided to juice and head of spinach and a bag of carrots. Back when I lived with Jon in Pittsburgh, I would often wake up to find our kitchen in disarray as he had made a similar mixture before heading off to work. The only sense that I could make of it was that Jon was a messy roommate and had little consideration for the shared rooms in our apartment. However, as I observed his strange messes more, I became interested in trying these weird concoctions little by little to see why someone would go though so much trouble just to make a glass of vegetable juice. Little did I know at the time (and without any prodding by Jon), I was going headfirst into the world of raw food meals, garbage bags full of pulp, and frequent but expensive trips to the health food store.

As I learned more about and experimented with eating mostly non-processed, uncooked foods, I saw that creating meals for myself could be a really interesting and practical form of creativity that I had never given much consideration to before. But I didn't go into it with that mindset, really, I was primarily amazed by how much cleaner my whole body felt after drinking some carrot juice or eating a giant salad. It snowballed from there and, after some months of preparation for it, I was eating a strictly raw food diet (see this post from June '07). Jon and that summer's third musketeer, Mr. Anthony Ritchey, joined in as the three of us set out to eat raw together. Living with someone who is also on a raw diet makes it a LOT easier because not only do you have another person to share meals and preparation with, but you've also got an ear to vent the frustrations (and exhilarations) of all the work that's required to creatively eat only vegetables, fruits, nuts, and seeds. Though keeping strictly raw is pretty tough (I did it for about a month), you learn to consume things by substitution- a method that requires some forethought and experimentation. As a simple example, natural sweeteners like raw honey in place of any other sugars, nutritional yeast instead of cheese, and avacadoes or raw cashews as natural sources of fats are all things that have stuck with me to this day as I prepare meals for myself. I think that it's no coincidence that many raw foodists seem so crazy/spacey...at least for me, I felt a lot different mentally and physically when I was eating like this (which is far from the case now).




And now, remembering back to that summer right before I moved to Japan and Jon moved to Korea primarily makes me thing of dancing on Thurday nights, knowing how much I would miss my friends and Pittsburgh, and constantly thinking about what my next meal would be.