There are reasons and triggers for something to happen, and in this post, just for fun, I want to describe an event, a sentiment that triggered me to go raw, since I already talked about the reasons and the lengthy part of the path towards such lifestyle in the other text.
I typically don’t make any resolutions associated with calendar dates or systemic holidays, but this day happened to align well with Christmas and New Years days. I was a Research Assistant (RA) throughout my Ph.D. years, and unlike the rest of the students, RA’s would return to work at the same time as all the university employees, long before the academic semesters start. Before students returned to campus, the cafeteria and eateries worked in a weird regime: some were closed altogether and some only offered food to order, such that people could come and wait for their order to be prepared. Only the Asian food bar offered no-dairy and no-bread options, so I went there to get tofu with rice and vegetables - one of the frequent meals I would opt for when I ate on campus. On a typical day, when there were many people on campus, the food options would be already placed in the heated trays for being served immediately, but this time I got to watch how my meal was being prepared (except for rice, of course)…
A guy who was working at the Asian food bar was treating meal preparation with some artistic vigor, so I appreciated that, yet the methods stroke me! Two large vessels were filled with shiny and yellowish canola oil that was brought to boil before I came, so the oil had likely been used multiple times before. Vegetables and tofu were then placed in mesh buckets and dipped in that boiling oil. I saw how surface of tofu was turning from white, plump, and tender to blistered, crusty, and golden. It looked like a death was spreading on the surface, encapsulating and enveloping the matter… After several minutes of bathing tofu and vegetables in tanks with boiling oil, my meal was finished and given to me garnished with sweet and flavorful sauce. Conventionally, such meal would be thought of as fresh and wholesome, but the realization and observation of how the tissues of the products I was about to eat were transforming and what processes happened to them seriously averted me. I could not any longer feel the pleasure from eating a crispy crust, and instead I was thinking about the long-boiling oil (fill a pan with some oil and boil it - it just looks so repulsive, I cannot explain why!), thermally transformed into carcinogenic and inflammatory substance, and about acrylamide and advanced glycation end products. If I did not watch the oil bath, I would not be exposed to the scene of barbarian torture of living substance that happens every time we cook food, even though what I observed was rather an extreme way of cooking that was not just breaking substances down, but transforming them into the matter with the opposite qualities and health effects. However, sometimes one needs to be shocked by something that they can be sensitive about to extrapolate that experience onto the improper things that are habitually in their comfort zone (for example, if you have a cow that you raised or who was by your side while you were a child and then you see her being murdered, you will likely be more empathetic to the other animals that you have never seen, but who are also murdered). My little focused observation changed my mind and perception from “this is a delicious crust and I know I will feel heavy afterwards, but it is tasty, so I will eat it” to “this is a dead, burnt matter and it will make me feel heavy afterwards, so I will not eat it”.
On that day, sometime early in January of 2021, I sealed the inner deal to be raw plant-based.
Raw Form of Life.
Comments