I’ve been vegetarian, I’ve been dairyfree, but I’ve never been tempted by the idea of a raw food diet. Last night’s Channel 4 documentary on the subject did little to sway my resolve.
The first thing you assess upon hearing that someone eats a fad diet is how healthy do they look. Despite the stary true-believer eyes, the people featured didn’t look particularly good. With this established, you can be as arch and critical as you like without worrying too much about whether their quality of life is significantly better.
It was their belief in their superior quality of life that the rawfoodists spent the entire programme trying to convince the world. When the presenter said: “People who eat normal diets aren’t dying, are they?” The mad, unhealthy, raw food woman replied in a deranged voice “Maybe they are!”
To be a raw foodie you need to be willing to cut yourself off from your society — you can’t go to restaurants, drink in pubs, or send your kids to school. Imagine if you were a member of an undiscovered Amazonian tribe who decided that you weren’t going to eat tapir anymore and whilst everyone cooked and danced and celebrated, you were going to stay in your hut picking termites out of your pubes. That is what the rawfoodists are like.
I do have sympathy for them, though, because like them I too am sometimes obsessed with the idea of purity. The trouble with purity is that it forces you to endure cognitive dissonance. In my own life, I often want to stop wasting time reading livejournal or facebook or twitter — and yet I greatly enjoy the social benefits that can come from engaging with people online. To avoid this cognitive dissonance, I have been making a concerted effort to be more mindful in my life — to read the usual internet rubbish but only for small set periods once a day.
Reading this article about the fate of children in the age of infinite distraction I started to notice symptoms of attention deficit in my own life. The books I read are less wordy, the films I watch are more explodey and I have a persistent impulse to find distraction on the internet. I can’t remember the last time I listened to an album from beginning to end. And so, just as last year I kept a list of all the films I saw, this year (what’s left of it) I am going to make a list of every album that I listen to. The ultimate goal is to have the fixed, laser-like conscious attention of the philosopher or, at the very least, the dog who wins crufts.
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