Grow Your Own

Dear Diary, I spent my Sunday afternoon doing yard and garden work:  raked, bagged up leaves, bought $3 gas, filled my lawnmower and started it up, cut the very tall grass, raked and cleared my 4 raised beds, shoveled a yard of compost and dirt into the new compost bin my son Chris assembled from old pallets (Anna Edey’s idea), filled the raised beds with 12 bags of organic compost and raked them smooth, planted and watered 3 six packs of kale (purple curly, Tuscan, red Russian), 1 six pack of mizuna, and 2 six packs of lettuces.  Just a beginning, but the sun is out this Monday morning, and I’ve already tasted a tiny leaf of kale.

A woman friend of mine, knowing I am raw conscious, asked me if I would share my thoughts with her about eating to cleanse and heal. I recommended two books, The Yoga of Eating by Charles Eisenstein and Live Raw by Mimi Kirk. The Yoga is a great book for those who may be tempted to follow either a formula for success or a guru because it correctly redirects the responsibility for making choices to the individual. I won’t summarize Eisenstein’s argument. He’s a sublime writer. If you are interested in this idea, please read the book for yourself. Mimi Kirk is a woman whose ageless beauty is legendary and natural. Read her book for inspiration and for wonderful and practical recipes for the raw vegan way of eating.

Cleansing and healing is something all of us can use from time to time. I know a lot of very healthy people who fast with only juices or just plain water for as long as three weeks, but I do not. I have done a week of restricted diet in which I ate only the water and meat of a young Thai coconut once a day.  However, I’m not in favor of fasting, except when suffering from some illness. That’s the only time animals fast that I am aware of. The bottom line for me is raw food is a way of eating that’s inherently cleansing and healing. No need to go to extremes. Your body will sort itself out on raw food.

The Food Revolution is upon us – organic, local; Slow Food. These are words you hear every day now. On Martha’s Vineyard, the Island Grown Initiative has raised food consciousness to the point where the Charter School, West Tisbury elementary school, and the Regional high school are doing something about the garbage that used to pass for food in school cafeterias. Better food, organically raised food. However, like Slow Food, the Island Grown Initiative is still about the standard American diet and includes animal products. Not for me, nor Mimi Kirk, but Eisenstein would say, “It’s up to you.”

To me, the evidence is compelling that animal products cause illness and death. I’m talking about heart disease and cancer. If you would like to tour the science, please buy or rent “Forks over Knives” - the movie, the website.  If Island Entertainment or your local video store doesn’t have it, Netflix does. Doctors telling you what their research and first-hand experience has taught them.  Like I said, compelling. If you want more, try The China Study, the story of twenty-some years of research into diet, disease and mortality in China that was conducted by Dr. Colin Campbell of Cornell University. And if you want still more evidence that the plant-based diet is the best way to go, try the recently published Harvard School of Public Health study of red meat consumption and mortality.

For those who won’t go there, but who are here right now, I offer this:  Eat fruits in the morning, salads at lunch, and grains, legumes and more salad at dinner. That will get you on the right path. Cleansing and healing. You might get to the point where you want to forego the grains and legumes and become fully raw vegan. That’s up to you. However, I will say this, and you can quote me:  Animal products will make you sick, shorten your life and make you vulnerable to heart disease and cancer. No question.

Two final things you may want to consider:

First, which is better organic or locally grown?

Organic food – fruits, greens and vegetables – is definitely more nutritious and less likely to harm you with pesticide residue or genetic modifications. However, organic means what? Regulations are inconsistently enforced, and we cannot always be sure that the “organic” food we are eating was raised without harmful ingredients. Locally-grown food has two significant advantages:

1) we can speak directly to the farmer and know how and where our food was raised; and

2) money we spend on locally-grown foods makes a vibrant local food economy possible and sustainable for all of us.

Second, isn’t local and organic food more expensive?

Grow Your Own – Last year, I decided to grow some of my own greens and herbs and vegetables.  I built four raised beds, filled them with topsoil and organic vegetable compost and planted a variety of greens, herbs and vegetables to see what worked and what didn’t. I have to say it changed my life, and I would recommend it to anyone who doesn’t already do that. There is no substitute for food you grow yourself.

It has been a rainy spring, but I’m a lot happier about that knowing all that rain is soaking into the food I will soon be eating, making the lettuces and kale plump and juicy, bringing the water of life to the foods that will cleanse and heal my body and my spirit.

Maybe I should plant a few carrots.