Going Raw

My friend Jennifer McClelland introduced me to raw foods in the last 4 months of my stay in Beijing just before coming to Hawaii.  Not only was she the first raw food chef I've met personally, she's also completely revolutionized my thinking about nutrition and the benefits of a healthy lifestyle. I'm getting turned on to living food as the way to live.

A visit to the local Whole Foods Store downtown this weekend was a good start but I found the crowd to be a little overbearing. Yesterday, we went to this little store called Down To Earth just down the road. All their produce are fresh up to four days from farm to shelf and support 400 local farmers and growers. It's got pretty much everything I need to go on a raw food diet. Got my seeds and nuts for making nut milk, raspberry n' cream granola, hemp honey granola and my grains for my smoothies. Got my veggies in the local grocery store here which are the Safeway, Times or Sack n' Save chains. Total damage only came up to US$22. In Beijing, I would've had to spend at least three times more. Can't wait to make my chocolate smoothies! This time I got pumpkin, apricot,  sunflower, flax and white sesame.

In China, there's so many kinds of honey. I've learnt to read the KINDS of sources as well as read the labels for the contents because there's a lot of 'fake' honey where local farmers add sugars to the honey to cheat in cost savings. I love China but the fact is, you have to be a little more streetwise about cheating as it's a fact of life there, not a ethically moral issue. 

So it was a little funny when I was looking for the label of contents and was told that all the bottles here are stamped with the words 'Pure Honey'. Pure and simple. In Beijing, I would've had to search the entire supermarket shelf to weed out fruit honey (example loquat honey), flower honey (chrysanthemum honey, orange blossom honey), grain honey (buckwheat honey, jujube honey) etc. I got the Lehua Honey which comes from the flowers of a native hardwood tree called Ohi'a. Just for kicks, I found online that China is the world largest maker of honey - 256,000 tons followed by 100,000 tons in the US as of 2001. 

Food is expensive here

Quickly propelled into the reality of how expensive it is to live here in the US again compared to China. Got a little pampered by how far money stretches in Beijing! It’s a little unsettling. Sometimes, downright alarming. Simple groceries came up to $80 in a matter of a few hours in chinatown of all places. Bought a few things in Whole Food Market which came up to a whopping $47 (goose pate, crackers, cacao nibs, garlic, red wine, raw food energy bars and gouda cheese). Something else that really hits home is how big food is. This is really the land of bigger-is-better though not necessarily better. Tomatoes are case in point. Big and succulent looking but almost tasteless compared to their Chinese counterparts which are so juicy and sweet, you can eat them like a fruit. The only nice thing about being back in the States was seeing that organic foods here are almost half the price in Beijing and wines are cheap! Bought a delicious Cabernet Sauvignon for $2.99! We thought it was such a good buy we went back and bought a whole carton of 12 bottles for just $38!

Little Hawaiian nuances

Nice to be able to flush toilet paper down the toilet bowl and not have to divert my eyes from the garbage bin full of tissues and other grosser things. It’s also bizarre to walk down the neighborhoods for several kilometers without seeing a single soul on the streets or drive the highways for tens of kilometres with hardly any cars . Almost feels like I’m in the apocalypse or some weird Tom Cruise movie. Maybe not as weird as ‘Vanillla Sky’ but still, weird. 

Jesse was reprimanding Kaile the other night and said, "I don't like the way you're talking. You're being sassy. Come back here." I guess I've only ever used it in a positive term of describing a beautiful woman with a little bit of edge but not as an adjective for kids being impertinent. I like it though!  


Also, was joking around with Elton the other day and he said, "Whoa. You're salty!". I didn't quite know if it was a compliment or an insult. Here it's used as a adjective to describe someone who's bitter.

The population here seems to be the 180º opposite of that on the mainland (of USA). The majority population here are the Asians - Japanese, Filipinos, Chinese and Koreans in addition to many mixed blood Asians. Sort of the equivalent of the inter-marriage of european hereditary line across the Anglo-Saxons on the mainland. Here in Hawaii, there's hardly any Mexicans or African Americans. Not meaning to sound racist in any way but it is an interesting contrast to what I'm used to seeing on the mainland.

Besides calling people who are of Hawaiian descent Hawaiians, the term is used very discrimately. Whenever I say, "Is that a Hawaiian thing?" or "Is that a Hawaiian meal?" or "Hawaiians are so friendly." Elton growls, "You can't say that.". The proper way is to say or call them 'locals' since 'Hawaiian'  refers to the bloodline race. 

The locals here also love eating dried fruits as snacks from what they call 'crack seed stores' (funny!) which only sell hundreds of these dried fruits. Either salty, sour or sweet, they give a punch of flavor in the mouth. I think in this sense, the local tastebuds are adapted to the southern chinese. These ones are Li hing sweet mui (sweet dried plums) and lime balls (sour). 

Fresh fruits

I love the way fruit trees are so plentiful around every street corner here. Every home seems to have a mango lemon or orange tree in their yard. Living in Chicago and Beijing have given me a huge appreciation for planting fruits, veggies and herbs in one's own backyard and eating the juicy tasty produce for free! God's gift to mankind in the purest sense - sun, soil and water. 

I picked some oranges off of the orange tree in our yard. Biting into it, I swear I've never tasted any orange juicier. Juices flowed all over my fingers and squirted all over my hands and clothes. Also tasted different, sort of like a tangy woody tangerine. 

Thank God for the weather!

I am in paradise...literally. Weather here hits a high of 27ºC during the day and a low of 20ºC in the night. Very temperate. No sweating. I almost feel guilty for literally being here enjoying the sun in my face when I think of the unseasonably freezing cold that has encapsulated all of Europe, the US Northeast and Midwest regions including my beloved Chicagoland. It even SNOWED 4 inches in Shanghai today resulting in flights cancelled and vegetable prices doubling as a result of transportation issues.


Here I am, cruising around Tantalus - a gorgeous mountain road winding through a dreamy tropical rainforest spotted with hiking trails; watching a man doing a relatively new thing called 'stand up paddle boarding' on Sandy Beach near Makapu'u and watching people cliff jumping at Port Lock on the island of O'ahu. Life doesn't seem quite fair, does it? Feel like stopping and kissing the ground I'm walking on.