With an abundance of raw food restaurants, festivals, retreats, and meet-up groups springing up across the world, it’s become apparent that people are waking up to the lifestyle’s ability to clean up both their inner physical world, as well as the environment of their outer world. Having already briefly discussed individual health benefits in part one, let’s now concentrate on its environmental benefits.
First off, it’s a vegetarian lifestyle- thereby eliminating the incredible amount of pollution and waste created by meat and diary industries. Secondly, if you’re someone who brings their bags to the market and utilizes a compost bin, you can almost completely halt your production of food related trash (packaging), which comprises a large percentage of modern landfills. In the words of David Wolfe, “if we pollute the planet with food packaging after we eat, then we truly are not living in harmony with the Earth.”
We are also not at peace with the Earth when we destroy 85% of the food’s life-giving nutrients upon cooking. By wasting these nutrients, David Wolfe points out that we are in effect also wasting “85% of the time, labor, resources and energy that went into creating the foods.” Think, for instance, of the incredible amounts of energy (and pollution) involved in shipping ingredients from farmlands to multiple processing, production, and storage facilities; manipulating the food’s structure by way of huge machines that melt, stir, cook, tenderize, pasteurize, and freeze so many pre-packaged food items. You can eliminate all these energy-sucking steps by choosing raw foods that come straight from the farmer (and possibly your co-op or grocery store), to you.
Finally, the living foods lifestyle prohibits the use of grains (as cooking is required and acidic conditions follow) that have long been linked to soil erosion and mineral degradation due to their yearly requirement of being plowed. The lifestyle instead promotes the consumption of fruits and nuts from trees whose deep-penetrating roots draw up minerals from below and replenish the soil when their plant matter returns to the ground.
From the mouth of Susan Schenck, “Eating raw foods saves the world.”
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I would love to change over to a raw diet, unfortunately I would have to relearn how to cook, clean, shop, and eat. *sigh* I hope I can have enough money to hire a raw foods chef someday.