Road Trips and Rendezvous

Sometimes I wish I could just shut myself away with my salad and my fruit. I get so tired trying to figure out this whole raw vs. society thing. For example, we do a lot of dinners with people. It’s easier when they come to our home, I just do a meal that’s half raw and half cooked and the kids and I eat the raw parts. I brief them before guests arrive so that they know what they will and will not be eating and they have been fine with that, for the most part. Going to other people’s houses is trickier. A lot of the time they decline our offers to bring something, or they ask us to bring dessert. I would just bring a raw dessert, but you have to remember I have a husband who does not eat raw and who has opinions about offering raw foods to others. I don’t want to say to people, “we don’t eat your food, so we’re going to go ahead and bring our own meal.” And I don’t want to say nothing and get there and not eat what they so lovingly prepared for us. I also can’t go about eating 2-3 cooked meals per week. In either case, the main challenge is the fact that I have only found 1 raw dish that tastes good enough that I can stand to eat it, much less offer it to other people. I mean, most of what I’ve tried would surly turn people away from raw forever, and I’m trying to plant seeds here… raw ones, that will actually grow!

Last week we went on a road trip. We drove to Salt Lake City, UT to see my brother in law off on his mission to Taiwan at the Missionary Training Center. After that we drove down to Phoenix, AZ to visit my other brother in law, picking up my mother in law in Salt Lake City and brining her down to Phoenix with us. Eating raw on a road trip is not necessarily hard, other than the fast food cravings I get as soon as we hit the road from all the years of programming from road trips being a fast food free-for-all. We packed salad and Ezekiel bread in the cooler, and filled a bin with fruit, which we kept up by the front seats. We also had all our raw nuts and seeds. Raw foods are, in my opinion, the most travel friendly foods around. If only we didn’t have to confront the social pressures. Now, I love my mother in law, some may disagree on that, but truly I do. But if I could tag her with a catch phrase it would be “let’s do lunch!” Its ALWAYS about the food with her, and she is Chinese, so its all greasy, sugary, salty meats and starches. Delicious though they may be, FAR from beneficial to the body. And she is the type to sneak junk food to my kids. I think she really believes my children are being starved to death. She is one of those people who thinks low-fat ice cream is a healthier option, and has said things like, “we really need to get some starch in us.” And in plugs the rice cooker. So, of course, she took us all out lunch for my brother-in-laws last meal with us for 2 years. We ate Thai food, the kids and I ordered veggies with tofu and rice with shrimp. Later that night we had Subway, which I admit was mostly my doing. I reserve a sub sandwich on our road trips, which I do on whole wheat with half the regular amount of tuna and double veggies. I really shouldn’t have done 2 cooked meals in 1 day though. Then the next day MIL took us all (my family, my other BIL and his girlfriend) out to lunch, which was dim sum. If you’ve ever been you know its pretty much all meat, so we ordered off the menu and got food along the same lines as the Thai restaurant. The next night she took us out to Chinese buffet, which I admit was THE BEST Chinese food, or perhaps food in general, I’ve ever had. China City buffet in Gilbert, AZ, if you’re not trying to be super healthy I highly recommend it! Anyway, so we did the same thing there as before. By this time I was soooo bloated and in a food coma after every one of these meals, and my cravings for cooked food were growing. I pretty much figured our health had gone down the hole during this trip and we would be cleansing when we got home, so as we drove home the last 2 days (just my family) we stopped at another Chinese buffet and a Quiznos. Now here I am back at home. Back eating salad, fruit, nuts and seeds and drinking A LOT of water to wash out all the yuckies from the trip. I’m still not sure what I could have done different. I did bypass the meal at In and Out Burger and stay in the hotel with the kids where we ate our usual salad. Do I just refuse to go out to eat? Do I make the kids eat salad at the hotel and then watch everyone else eat the food that they love so much at the restaurant? Do I hide raw food in a purse? These restaurants don’t have raw options. It seems my husband’s family already thinks I’m torturing my children, I’ll withhold the comments I’ve gotten, but suffice it to say they haven’t been pleasant and have cause me quite a bit of distress. If it were my own family it would likely be worse, but we don’t see them but every few years.

More and more every day I better understand the “hippie” types of people. I really don’t want to detach from the mainstream world, because I’m lonely enough as it is and I know I have a lot of inspiration and information to offer people. On the other hand, I am by no means mainstream, which is a major cause of my loneliness. I have always been different. I grew up alone. When I decided to have natural, home, water births and use attachment parenting to raise my babies, the world took a large step away. When I became a Latter-Day Saint, there came more distance. It is a rare thing that I find a member of my religion, even, who understands the way I live. When backed away from dairy, wheat, and sugar, and eventually meat and cooked food the gap grew so wide I can no longer seem to find a way to cross it. So my dilemma is do I just stop gazing across and live a life of solitude, or do I gather up my greens and leap and live a life of misunderstanding and hurt feelings, never knowing quite how to go about things and possibly never achieving my goal of being 100% raw? I’m torn. Neither option is ideal.