I'm starting to wonder if it's because I changed my diet for intellectual reasons and then got personal guidance from meditation - not from judgment or religiosity or any person acting as a guru - that I did so well as a vegan. I liked my body and felt really good - but never once told anyone that they "should" do what I was doing or that they were less than for not doing it. I was the only one that I knew doing what I was doing and there was no internet - so it would be outrageous hubris to think that my one experience was necessary THE truth. If someone asked me I told them what I ate, but never assuming that what I was doing was best for anyone else let alone everyone. I have always felt like I was experimenting and STILL feel like I'm experimenting.
What scares me the most about certain raw food circles like Freelee's is their desire to withhold information when something doesn't work. The censorship is what is the most dangerous. That's what I like about this place - the lack of censorship. If something works or doesn't work for an individual - no one has their finger on the delete button. I feel like most of us here realize that we are experimenting.
I'm beginning to finally accept the value of pluralism in the raw foods movements. Listen to all extremes with a discerning ear and take it all with a grain of sea salt. There is this idea that perhaps even raw vegans have some inherent value in the great magnificence of things.
People on both sides of this epic debate may not be completely forthright about all the effects of their diets. One must look on with compassion for the deceiver and realize they are acting out of some need to be right, no matter what. There is a great struggle that all of us have to undergo and no one wants to be on the losing side. Even those people who are thriving are still striving for something beyond. This striving is built into the code of life and its magesty will guild our destiny.
I stand on the side of giving this life force the best chance of thriving and forging the changes necessary to create the "most well balanced /well adapted being" possible. I believe for my personal well being that a diet of mostly animal flesh provides the best opportunity for reaching the peak of my genetic potential. Other beings may have other basic needs; as a Universalist I recognize there is no one single path to the truth.
We shouldn't be so quick to dismiss the vegan path. Contemplate vegetarianism in the context of the multiplicity of human existence. There is so much uncertainty about the future... who is to say that vegans may not someday save humanity from extinction? Imagine a possible future in which all food animals are eaten to extinction! Well, that would give the vegans an evolutionary advantage. That is if they are actually able to sustain a breeding population long enough for the epigenetic changes necessary to truly adapt. I doubt it, but stranger things have happened.
Then try to imagine if Durian and Freelee were actually able to have viable offspring and raise them to adulthood on a raw vegan diet. Perhaps they could spawn forth a generation of humans who are adapted well to living without animal foods. So when the great famine comes they would be able to survive on a diet of thirty bananas a day, while the rest of us starve.
I know it's highly unlikely, but stranger things have happened.
What is more likely is that our paleo decendents will eat the vegan decendants in order to survive a great famine.
Time will tell.
