So how did I end the night, jousting with the windmills of cravings and physical hunger? I compromised; I made cooked food at home.
Now I had what I thought was a good idea to keep some of it raw: I made soba ramen soup, and crushed the veggies -- burdock root, Brussels sprouts, daikon radish -- in the Vitamix. I figured that the fibrous little suckers would be pulverized to the point where I could just dump them in the soup at the end and they would be so small that I wouldn't mind their sulphurous bitterness.
But they got so jammed down in the blender that I FORGOT and simply poured the hot soup into the blender to flush the veggies out! Gaaaaaah, then I had to cook them all four minutes with the noodles! In all good conscience I could not call that "50%", like the barely-steamed stuff that keeps me going. Which does not seem fair, when I consider that I resisted a huge glut on the Asian buffet in order to keep things organic, lightly cooked, and fats not heated -- yet they both get written down as, say, 25% (even the buffet has a salad bar, and I did add other raw ingredients to the soup).
And sure enough, after nothing but smoothies all day and hours of laboring work, today I am again dreaming of egg rolls and salted mushrooms with zucchini in soy sauce. It's Saturday, the night before I shop, and I don't have a lot of food to choose from for dinner; this is the perfect set-up for excusing a restaurant visit!
But then I remember an excellent documentary I watched last night about a family named the Toms in CA (My Flesh and Blood, by Jonathan Karsh, Docurama Films, 2003) where a single mom adopted nine special-needs children ... like, real special needs, many of them. She is totally awesome. But she's also providing for these plus a few of her birth children on the little Social Security some of them get, so there are no $8 smoothies in that house. One scene showed her shopping, with three overburdened carts, and the total came to $600!! That's about $200/mo per person; sure, most of them were quite young and wouldn't eat that much, but it's still less than half of what I paid for myself last month. And the groceries would probably be lucky to last a week! But sadly, all the loot was all Standard American Diet crap, cheap refined foods and subsidized animal products, the stuff of nutrition nightmares.
It was a humbling viewing. This saint has committed her life to caring for cast-off, deformed, otherly-abled little people, and she is doing so on a shoestring. But these children, most of whom seemed happy and contented in spite of their teasing-prompting accidents and diseases, are some of the ones who could most benefit from a full-fledged array of nutrients. One boy in particular had bad mood issues and ADD, which has been correlated in multiple studies (too many to footnote here, Google it if you are interested) to nutritional deficiencies and additions of things like artificial colorings. As he hit adolescence, he became increasingly out of control, to the point of the other children fearing him. Now, I do not say that raw foods would have reversed his genetic curse of cystic fibrosis, but I'd bet my dinner at the buffet that simple, whole foods with no additives could have made his mood disorders way more manageable. What's 500 X 11?? More than Social Security will pay.
Unfortunately, we'll never know if I'm right. He died as a teenager from his disease, and one more special child who was saved by an angel has gone home. And perhaps I can do my best to help people like that by not supporting the agribusiness conglomerates who supply mainstream restaurants with low-nutrition, high-carcinogenic food. At least for one more night.