Raw Food Blog

When it first became robustly apparent that there is a direct link between food and our health, innumerable books appeared bearing titles such as Healthy Cooking for Two, Healthy Homestyle Cooking, The Best-Kept Secrets of Healthy Cooking, Healthy Calendar Diabetic Cooking, Healthy Cooking For Healthy Heart, Ayurvedic Cooking for Self-Healing, The Beat High Blood Pressure Cookbook, The Cooking Light Way to Lose Weight.

When we use our imagination to develop new ideas, those ideas are heavily structured in predictable ways, aligning with existing concepts, categories and stereotypes. Do you see how typical instances of a food concept (cooking) springs to mind first, and we naturally tend to seize on them as starting points in developing new ideas. These authors couldn’t get beyond the concept of “cooking.” Certainly, some ways of preparing food are less harmful than others. So these books are helpful in that respect. This is a glaring example of structured imagination.

Cooking our food is a dogma, a value seemingly hardwired into our thinking. Then someone comes along and associates cooking with killing. Nothing weaker would work to shake off the stereotype.

Metaphorical, out-of-the-box thinking creates connections of genius quality. Such geniuses as Leonardo Da Vinci, Luther, Mendel, Edison, Van Gogh, Einstein, Wittgenstein and others challenged dominant paradigms. Whoever noticed a connection between cooking and killing was a genius. When you learn to consciously think metaphorically, your thinking is shifted—not gradually, but sharply. And you see something new, something that was in front of you all along, but which you missed until now.

When at last the paradigm shifted, a lot of books began including raw food recipes and strategies. All of those stood within the same paradigm. Just three years ago, everything shifted again with the genius that introduced the Green Smoothie—Victoria Boutenko’s green smoothie revolution, mixing greens and fruits together to get more greens in.

Yes, I’d heard some people mixed fruits and greens way before Boutenko’s book Green for Life. But it is not enough simply to have a brilliant idea. For that idea to gain weight, meaning, and value, its supremacy must be recognized. And someone has to have the courage to come forward and spell it out. That’s Boutenko’s genius.

While working on Quantum Eating, I felt overwhelmed by a deep appreciation that I was a mathematician and physicist first. My hard-science knowledge helped set my imagination in motion using metaphors linking quantum physics and nutrition.

I practice what once was fashionable to call “tough love.” I cannot be everything for everyone…I am looking for results, and I am going to shake some trees, question some “fundamental truths,” and, yes, make you a tad uncomfortable.

How comforting is the idea that some supplements will defeat aging and keep you youthful, or that some specially prepared meal is going to give you longevity? Now here I come with statements like: We are shortening our lives by taking certain supplements or Eating cooked food and filling yourself with eight glasses of water is like trying to re-hydrate a dried prune. I looked into why anti-aging supplements and nutritional science are failing miserably in the face of aging. Only when I realized that “every metabolic reaction in the human body is aging” did everything fall into place. Only then, given a paradigm shift and the thinking which flowed from it was I able to come up with Quantum Eating.

Going raw requires a strong mind—a touch of genius if you will. That may explain why so few people, relatively speaking, are changing. A willingness to venture out, to be awkward, to wander through the unfamiliar, is also what sometimes separates the adventurous from the easily offended, the new thinker from the conventional thinker.