Raw

I've mentioned that my husband and I are near vegetarians, not because we have moral issues with eating meat, but just because we prefer veggies. So I've taken to browsing the vegetarian cookbook section at Borders whenever we go there to read together. Stephan loves variety and adventure, so I'm always on the lookout for something new.

So in my browsings I'd started seeing an increasing number of unusual cookbooks popping up. In fact, they weren't cookbooks at all - they were full of recipes on how to prepare raw food.

My first thought was "oh, a bunch of salads!" (which we love). So I'd bring these books back to the table and look through them. It wasn't just salads folks - how does spicy thai peanut topping over young coconut noodles sound?


Sounded awesome to a veggie-lover like me. I presented the idea of having an experiemental "raw week" to Stephan and he said sure.

Well, we didn't even last a full day. We realized that we like our food to be warm in the winter, and that we just love cooking - we love being in the kitchen together preparing food with one another. We love food from all over the world, and most cultural traditions involve cooking the meal. So an all-raw lifestlye just wouldn't cut it for us. We also decided that this wouldn't be the best way to raise kids, and that we're too active for this kind of diet to sustain us. We aren't educated enough to get all the nutrients - let alone calories - we need from raw food.

But did any good come of it? Well, we're eating fruit for breakfast now instead of bagels every day. I discovered that the best snack in the world is an avacado. Yep, just an avacado with a sprinkle of salt. And we walked away from it with some really cool "salad" ideas =)

But there's more. I have a friend who's almost as much of a hippie as I am (she's prettier than me and has better fashion sense, so that puts the hurt on her hippie points =). She's tried a raw diet before (for a whole month!) and we were able to talk about it. It was one of the best conversations I've had in a while. We were both able to share our experiences, and I saw how my choice of diet could potentially become a threat to God in my life. I don't mean to say that God is threatened by my diet - but God's rightful place as Lord over my life is threatened. And the threat doesn't really come from the diet - it comes from me. I could see how desire to control my life was expressed through my diet. I could see how a fear of having a short, unhealthy life was expressed through my diet. I could also see how much time it took out of my day to learn how to be healthy eating this way, and saw how dangerous that in itself was. If my priority was on my food, it wasn't on the Lord. I could see very quickly how this could have potentially robbed God and my husband of the time God commanded me to give them. Would the increased time in preparation have lasted? Maybe not, but would it have been worth it? Not when I feel just as great eating minestrone soup or vegetable pizza!

It was a good reality check to see where my focus was. It was encouraging to me to be able to lay down this experiement immediately when I saw threats to and competition with my relationship with God and my husband looming in the distance. But it's always a helpful question: what has captivated my attention? Just because I wasn't consumed by a new way of eating and was able to lay it down quickly doesn't mean I'm immune to the sin of idolotry - it means I serve a merciful God who supplies grace. I need to be on guard constantly, and take up that grace daily.

So, what's captivated your attention?