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.