raw vegetarianism vs. cooked carnivorism

Kelly Moody
The highlight in conversation this weekend among me and my friends was based on what foods are best for our body and our environment. What fueled this conversation was the recent expedition of "dumpster diving" and "foraging" that Dr. Griffin has encouraged us to employ. So Friday afternoon after classes were over, my friend Mike and I decided to try it out. We went to about 4 different location and were very surprised with our findings. Every place we went to (Food Lions around Newport News) had food thrown away from that day in the dumpsters. We were overwhelmed with perfectly edible foods. We collected a whole trash bag full of cakes and muffins, as well as a whole trash bag of different kinds of breads. We also obtained about 6 tubs of sour cream that were not bad at all, as well as a ton of wrapped potatoes, peppers of every color, about a dozen apples and some meat that mike insisted he was cooking for dinner that night. Eating the food we obtained from our expedition was really exhilarating simply from the fact that we were making a small difference in a big food waste problem. The next day, Mike and two others went diving again to see if they could find the treasures (good vegetables, and dairy products). They came back with a WHOLE rotisserie chicken and a ton of potatoes. Needless to say about 10 of us had a feast that night.
All of this emergence into food culture got us talking about nutrition and human evolution. My friend Ted has recently adopted a raw food diet because those foods are supposed to have the most nutritional content, and have the best recycling quality. When we die or produce waste, we are putting out crazy toxic ingredients as a result of our diet like most people do now(McDonald's, high fructose corn syrup, excess of everything like salt and trans fats). We are basically polluting our environment slowing just by what we are eating. We are turning into poison machines. He also contributed the initial start of this trend to the incorporation of excessive consumption of COOKED meat in the human diet(earlier in human history). Cooked meat apparently recycles back with less nutrition and quality than the animal that was originally killed had. I am not too familiar with this process (and the implications and factors of the carbon cycle) but it does make sense. Now, we've adapted to not being able to eat a lot of raw mean without getting sick. Because we don't hunt our own food(most of us don't) the meat has to be cooked because it can only be eaten raw immediately after being killed. He claims that there is no point in eating meat at all if you have to cook it 3 days later to eat it. This reminded me of the movie Dancing with Wolves, a scene from the movie was the buffalo hunt. After they had hunted all of the buffalo they wanted and needed, the Indians in the movie took a chunk out of one buffalo right then and there and offered it to the soldier who also took the raw meet but with reluctancy.
The link from the dumpster diving to the raw food debate besides a conversation starter was that Ted was supplied with plenty of red, yellow, orange, and (unripe) green peppers as well as apples and cabbage to contribute to his raw food diet, complements of dumpster diving. He can thank wasteful human beings and the expiration date culture for that amenity.