Last weekend my cousin, Monica, came down from Virginia to visit us here in Atlanta. We've been close friends all our lives, but haven't had much chance to spend time together over the last few years. She got to hang out with my girls, and I got to hang out with her super-cool cocker spaniel, Baxter. It was an all-girls weekend (except for Baxter).For the last few years, Monica and I have talked about Raw food as the basis for a healthy diet, and I've shared how it's positively affected my health. But she's a country girl, like me. We grew up eating ham, fried chicken, meatloaf, and pork chops. Even though we also spent a lot of time getting our hands dirty in backyard vegetable gardens, and picking blackberries from thorny bushes, a plant-based diet of any sort was a big stretch for her.
My older daughter and I took her to Lov'n it Live for her birthday. She really enjoyed the Nori rolls, the stuffed avocado, and the sage burger. By the end of the afternoon, she was asking a lot of questions about Raw food. She spent a lot of time browsing through books at my house, like The China Study, Eat This and Live, and Carol Alt's Eating in the Raw. I took her to Life Grocery and walked around explaining some of the Raw products and supplements.
She went home yesterday with a stack of Raw food recipes and a Raw food book she picked up at Life! Yippee! She's shopping today to stock her kitchen for a 60 day all Raw diet. It will be interesting to see how she finds it.
This experience was the reason for yesterday's post about looking at what you personally need to stay Raw and sharing it with someone else. Explaining things to someone new provided an avenue for me to better understand why we eat and live the way we do, and it grounded me more deeply in my choices. It's not about recruiting new members to a cult of 100% Raw, just sharing with people who are open to it, and letting them decide how it fits in their lives.
Now, if I can just get Monica to start blogging about her 60 days . . .
