I watched a most interesting video from the library last night, a PBS three-part special called The Meaning of Food. Not a lot the average person doesn't know -- of course we all associate food with childhood, celebrations, etc.
But having committed to a serious switcheroo in lifestyle, the meanings of food have become altered for me. Just because we experience a direct memory of the past when we taste something, or share something, why do we have to keep eating the food part if it is not promoting health? Why can't people be satisfied with the memory itself?
Here's my answer: one segment dealt with a lady who had compiled a list of recipes from women a concentration camp in the Holocaust. She herself was one of the only survivors, and she got the actual written materials from a lady who did not make it. She tells of how after lights-out, the women, in dire hunger and need to escape reality, would recite their best recipes. Can you hear them, in their rows of wooden bunks, arguing in Polish about how much sugar to add to the cookies? Can you see them, skin and bones wrapped in rags, in filth, fighting to keep some civilized life force going when their exhausted bodies should have been asleep -- sharing food ideas because they could not break bread together? Was one of them your grandmother, perhaps? Or your best friend's grandmother?
Somehow the recipes, like paper children, got written down and passed to this elder who adopted them and created a book from them.

Now one does not have to be as sensitive as James Van Praagh to realize that to cook these recipes is to recreate a bit of those murdered mothers and sisters and aunties and friends. What more direct connection could there be than to emulate her, put her work into your mouth, take that memory into your body and make yourself of it? Does it matter at that point if it has gluten that will cause you to get diarrhea, or refined sugar that will cause a mood crash in three hours?
No, I understand this meaning of food. I would spend a day's cash to taste my grandmother's Swedish limpa bread, which of course nobody else can do the same way.
But to limit such special foods to only a few times a year, to keep them for serious celebrations and ceremonies -- that seems to be the problem. We want our home-inducing comfort foods all the time, and the truth is that most traditional foods are not that good for humans any more, if they ever were. We do not have the land mass and water to sustain huge herds of animals to provide butter for everyone who grew up eating kagels, and flesh for tamales, and we are running out of ability to rock with the pollution it generates. And why would it be okay to perpetuate suffering of the animals in the name of remembering suffering? Is food really that important to humans?
Sometimes, yes.
So what does it MEAN to be a raw foodist, in the context of family and culture? I will not attempt to answer that in one sitting; this is part of the ongoing discussion in this movement, or it should be. I am just noticing that I will never have Mimi's light rye again, and I am fine with that; should I go to a Swedish festival and a piece of limpa falls into my lap, I will enjoy it. But let's not, as a species, get so attached to our imposed meanings that we confuse the menu of emotions with the actual meal itself. My important memories are in my heart, not in my stomach.