I often feel that if a potential parent could sample just one day of what it could be like to be with their to-be-born children on raw food they would unequivocally decide to bring their children up this way.  The level of contentment, the energy and lovingness of children in this biochemical brain state turns parenting into love affair and can make being with one’s children the favourite time you can have.  Watching them grow so beautifully and learn so effortlessly, the healthy happy days, the originality of their minds, buzzing with helpful neurotransmitters.  The joy they take in their food – enjoying their salads more than a ‘normal’ child would enjoy their chips and sweets, their interest in and love of nature and enthusiasm for life have made them my favourite companions.  Well this has been the story of raw children for me anyway.  We started when they were but a baby and a toddler and to them raw food is their food of choice and cooked food not really food at all.  But with courage, confidence and commitment I think the transition can be made at any age until adolescence when it probably is going to be mainly the child’s own decision unless you have a much bigger appetite for battles than me.

Feeding a child raw food is going to give them substantially different brain biochemistry and enhance the development of their brains in ways that I think will surprise us when the current generation of raw children is grown up.  It will give them much easier access to expanded mind states, to greater creativity, inspiration, confidence and general enjoyment of life.  Bringing up children in the energetic vibration that is created by eating food raw is creating a different experience of life.  It is helping to changing the pattern of experience on this planet.  With greater energetic awareness there is naturally much greater closeness and cooperation between people – and what a delight it is when this happens between parents and children.  The number of rules and the reasons to be cross goes down, and the inclination to pet and cuddle goes up.  My raw children have astounded me with their levels of initiative and eagerness to help.

I love to allow my children as much freedom as is practical but the basic main meals are non-negotiable.  I go by the general principle that if you create healthy brain biochemistry the brain will start to operate in more enlightened ways leading to choices of behaviours that are more loving and generally useful to everyone. Then, because of the way the children naturally become, there is less need for control in other areas of behaviour.  For me, the role of mother is very much about creating a safe, nurturing environment where the children are free to choose, create and play at a level they feel ready for. The further we have gone in this direction ourselves the easier it is to create this for our children.  Regarding instinct, our natural instincts are so corrupted by our unnatural ways of living that they really are not operating fully by any means in our current state. Eating consciousness enhancing raw food and superfoods will actually help refine the intuition but children do need support and protection in a world that does not offer entirely life-supporting options.  What makes for happy children is strong confident parents who can take a lead and show their children a way of life that is positive and rewarding.  Letting children go with the food options that are thrown at us all by popular culture is not really giving them a true choice – it is throwing them under the wheels of lunacy.  Given the chance to know what it feels like to be healthily nourished, they can, as they get older make truly informed choices, based on experience.  Most days I feed my young children a blended salad/soup including strong green leaves.  When this was first introduced they resisted it but now love it.  My seven year old son now will still choose to eat it even if he has the choice not to because he says it makes him feel so much better.  Taste buds do adapt when the body decides it likes what it is receiving.  Minimising choices also allow children’s minds to relax so that they can get on with enjoying their food.  Having said all this there can still be fun choices – an apple or a pear?  Whole salad or chopped salad?  Chocolate pudding now or in half an hour?  Do you fancy a pudding or a pie? It’s not a totalitarian regime – just a haven from the madness of popular cultural eating habits.  And when children have learned to enjoy such healthy food, then every meal becomes a celebration and when ‘little treats’ can be handed out several times a day.  Some of my children’s favourites are oranges, figs with a little raw cheese inside, a spoonful of bee pollen with flax oil, and a handful of goji berries.  We have bowls of fruit on permanent display for snacks – and to add to the ambience.  The children also love to go foraging, their favourite wild green being the local Devon wild garlic leaves.

Our daily diet is based on the following food groups:

Fruit - including tropical fruit such as mangoes, figs (particularly good for brain chemistry), papayas and bananas; berries and other fruit.  We enjoy melons, apricots, apples and pears, cherries, kakis, grapes, currants, oranges, lemons, grapefruit, avocados, tomatoes, cucumber etc.

Nuts and Seeds - fruit is not dense enough to supply all our nutritional needs in our current state. Nuts and seeds give us dense nutrition.  They should be soaked for a few hours before use to break down their growth inhibitors which interfere in digestion and assimilation of nutrients.  We include a wide variety - hemp is our staple, we also eat sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, sesame seeds, hazels (filberts), walnuts, almonds, coconut, macadamias, brazils and pecans.

Greens - needed for minerals, chlorophyll and protein, they also alkalise the body in a way that is essential to counteract the acid-forming properties of most nuts and seeds and some other foods. Dark greens are the most nutritious, wild are phenomenal – and it’s a wonderful experience to pick them with children.  Green superfoods are also helpful.

Oils - we get fatty acids from nuts and seeds but to keep the correct balance between omega 3 and omega 6 essential fatty acids flaxseed (linseed) oil is very helpful.  This oil is very unstable and needs to be kept sealed and cool.  I think the higher quality oils are also the ones that taste best.   My favourite brand is Stone Mills which, to my surprise after previous experiences of lower quality flax oil, is delicious and we have delighted in pouring it all over our chocolate pudding and eating it with teaspoons of bee pollen. Flax oil has to be converted inside us to DHA which the brain needs.  Coconut oil helps this process.
Animal Products - we have found these, in small quantities to be one of the keys for us in staying completely raw.  We use raw goat’s milk, kefir, and unpasteurised cheese.  .  They are a vital source of vitamins D and A, fat soluble vitamins which are difficult to obtain in sufficient quantities and in an assimilable form from elsewhere.  B12 needs also to come from animal sources - plant sourced B12 is not the form humans need and can even get in the way of proper B12 absorption.  I suspect there are also subtle factors in animal products that we do not fully understand yet.  I think of them of a kind of superfood.  We have found ethical sources of these products. There is more information about this under Raw Dairy Suppliers on www.rawcuisine.co.uk.

Superfoods and Supplements - due to poor quality of soil (including organic because of long term soil erosion), fruit being picked unripe, storage, pollution, the fact that the human gut is probably not working at its best, and the suppressed state of the human brain, we need all the help we can get.    I and the children  eat green superfoods, goji berries, raw cacao, maca, bee pollen,  purple corn, camu camu, seaweed, crystal manna and other superfoods and also take MSM and zeolite.

Water - of course- our main constituent - it is well known now that we should drink plenty of good water - spring or filtered.

The menu for us typically works out something like this at the moment:

Our current breakfast is chocolate pudding made up along the following lines and topped with kefir, fruit such as mango or berries and flax oil.

300g  hemp seeds soaked overnight in water
juice of 3 oranges
zest of 1 orange
3 dried figs, soaked overnight in water
3 dried apricots, soaked overnight in water
50g sunflower seeds, soaked overnight in water
50g pumpkin seeds
50g soaked sesame seeds
3 bananas
½ tsp coconut butter or a few chunks fresh coconut
1 tsps raw chocolate powder
1 tsps cacao nibs
A handful goji berries
1 tsp maca
1 tsp hemp leaf powder
Sprinklings of other superfoods such  as camu camu, purple corn, crystal manna, suma, mesquite, etherium gold
A handful of berries such as blueberries, blackberries or strawberries

Drain the hemp seeds and blend with the orange juice and some water from the soaked dried fruit as necessary.  Strain and squeeze through muslin (a muslin bag is easiest) to make hemp milk. Drain the soaked ingredients and blend all the  ingredients together until smooth. 

Our mid-day meal is generally the raw green soup (blended salad or smoothie) I mentioned: 

2 big handfuls green leaves such as watercress, rocket, wild greens and a little parsley or basil
1 large tomato
1 sun-dried tomato (optional)
1 stick celery
2 carrots
1 avocado
¼ tsp MSM
1 tsp green superfood powder
1 pint water
Optional extras:
½ bell pepper
¼ tsp mushroom powder e.g. reishi, shitake

Blended till smooth.

We top the soup with things like:
grated carrot
grated raw hard cheese
sprouts e.g. red clover, alfalfa, broccoli, fenugreek
sprinkling tremella mushroom powder
¼ tsp crystal manna

Later in the afternoon we have a big mixed salad with lots of greens, and including grated root vegetables and avocado or olives or a rich avocado or miso (unpasteurised) based dressing.  We have a little unpasteurised cheese with it or after it.

These meals cover the full range of our nutritional needs, faithfully, every day.  We have extra treats according to what we feel like – generally some combination of fruit, dried fruit, nuts, seeds, superfoods etc

So what about the cost of all this, the time and rigmarole involved and the social side?  I have had very positive experiences on all these counts… 

On a basic level, cooking food damages it and wastes nutrients so you get better value for money with raw food.  The confusion arises because by the time people get onto raw food they start to get very discriminating about what they put into their bodies so end up spending more on high quality foods.  These foods are often better value in terms of what you get nutrition wise for every pound you spend.  Personally I prioritise food in our budget because if our brain is well nourished we will enjoy our lives in way that cannot be compensated for in any amount of spending on what you might call entertainment (distraction from its condition for the mind?).  In fact I have managed to feed my children a high quality raw food diet most of the time on a very careful budget – financial limits are the reality for many parents and I have been glad of the opportunity to learn how to do it this way and make it more accessible.  With better nourished brains of course we have the potential to do more and maybe earn more, there also seem to be more hours in the day and a more effective use of time and resources from having a clearer mental state.  Speaking of the time factor, once you are in the new routines of raw – the different shopping lists, soaking routines etc it is so much quicker in my experience than cooking.  It’s so much easier to get children involved in the process and they love it and appreciate their food so much more. On the social side, we take a delicious raw cake, dessert or savoury to share if we are invited to a social gathering and these offerings always seem to be enjoyed.  When my son attended school for a few months there were many approving glances at his salad lunch.  These days children are given a free piece of fruit of veg every day at school and there is increasing appreciation of the need to get children into healthy eating habits.  My children enjoy their food immensely and are simply not interested in junk food.  Fruit is a snack they can share with any other child.  Because of the headspace that raw food takes you into it gets easier to get along with people in general and the children tend to behave in ways that people like. So that is a social plus.  And as the trend towards happier eating habits increases, there will be more people on the same wavelength to hang out with.  By the time these children are grown up, raw will be seen as normal as vegetarianism and I imagine there will be a raw option in most restaurants.  So let’s not resist any longer and go where the energy is, where the life-force is, rejuvenate our brains and those of our children and see where this expanding consciousnesses leads us.

This article is based on what works for us, me , Bertie (7) and Lizzy (5 ½) in our experience of being almost all raw since July 2001 and Lizzy’s whole life. I must add that I am deeply indebted to Tish for the information she has shared with me in the time I have known her. Our eating guidelines are based on hers. I adopted them after the first three years of exploration of raw food ideas because I could vividly see that they worked for her children, Lexi and Jago, in a very special way and in turn they have worked for mine.  There are very few people with experience of making raw work long term with young growing children and there are differences in what an adult with accumulated reserves can get by on and what children need to grow and thrive on.  It has been an intensive learning experience for me.  I am very happy to hear from anyone regarding bringing up children this way.  Just email me at enquiries@rawcuisine.co.uk.  There are a lot of common factors in human experience but we all are finding our own way.  I hope these ideas are useful and inspiring. 

This article was written for Funky Raw Magazine spring 2007.

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