Tale of Two Raws

Last month I was reading Time magazine and came across The 100 Thing Challenge written by Lisa McLaughlin. Catchy title, intriguing concept - which is, according to Dave Bruno at guynameddave, by this coming November he will have paired his personal possessions to 100, and live with those 100 for a year. This picture is of his garage on Flickr. Whoa, he has some work to do!  Bunches of people are joining him and dumping their stuff willy nilly.

After I read the article, and now after visiting his first site stuckinstuff, I look around my kitchen and can’t imagine functioning with out my blender, food processor, half dozen stainless steel bowls or myriad cutting boards which I seem to collect at an alarming rate.

Doing raw food requires a certain amount of stuff, if you are going to really commit to it. I know there are some cookbooks, good ones too, (Raw Foods for Busy People by Jordan Maerin, for one) that don’t use machines or have optional recipes to use without machines.  But if you are going to embrace the lifestyle, I think (know) dehydrators, blenders and food processors make it a whole lot easier.

I can hear some of you grinding your teeth right now, chomping at the bit to bring me down. Okay, have at it.  It’s just my little ole opinion, after all. But as I was considering the 100 Thing Challenge, I got a clutching feeling in my chest thinking about storing my machines for a year. For sure we couldn’t survive at Raw Raw Foods with out them, but that I never considered.

From a philosophical view - what would I remove from my every day life? What would you do without? How much more than 100 things do I have? Gees, my supplements alone almost top off the list!! Opens your eyes, doesn’t it? How have we become such collectors of things? It just snuck up on us.

I wish Dave good luck with the plan, and thanks for the concept. I bet the folks over at Zen Habits get some visits!