I went to a raw food workshop/dinner last night. When I first got there, I immediately saw that it wasn't very well attended--and I suspected as much before even going: it was a midweek event inside a creepy university building (Human Ecology) when most would rather be outside enjoying the setting sun on a perfect spring evening. But I was there, at any rate, and took my spot halfway through the speaker's introduction on cleaning nuts and seeds. The woman spoke of the evils of municipal tap water, how there's no way she'd want any chloride or fluoride or any other -ide (or some other noxious chemical for that matter) anywhere near her food. Raw foods, having miraculously rescued her from the brink of death, was the world's saviour and she was a firm believer in its powers. And right then I knew I was in for a treat. I braced myself for bad science to follow and, sure enough, the onslaught began shortly. She discussed the necessity of cleaning vegetables with hydrogen peroxide and vinegar because the brown spots of lettuce actually produce E. coli. A curious audience member wondered, doesn't water purification by ionization transformed water from a 3-atom molecule to a 5-atom molecule? She side-stepped the question and began to explain that steam distillation is superior to reverse osmosis just because. Also, raw apple cider vinegar is better than white vinegar because the acetic acid (she was sure to enunciate this term slowly and clearly) in white vinegar destroys red corpuscules in your blood. I fought hard not to yell out that her precious steam-distilled water would have a very similar effect; instead I bit my lip until it was rather sore and prayed that the free food would come quickly.

We often believe we are duly swayed by logic and that the decisions we make are rational. Infomercials try to convince us that we need their products by weaving simple truisms ("people want to be healthy") into a web of citations of questionable value and jargon-filled propaganda ("acetic acid destroys red corpuscules"). It all seems to make sense because we're not quite certain what they're really saying but the part we understand sure does seem right. And if that's not enough, there are the passionate and excited pleas of spokespeople that this product has outright changed their lives ("it gave me my life back!"). With such enthusiasm, they just couldn't be wrong. And all of a sudden, we've become aware of this problem we never knew we had and the solution speaks directly to our faces--thank God I was watching that informercial! It's in this climate of susceptibility that advertisements for the All-Mighty Cleanse for colon health or Coral Calcium Supreme for everything else catch our attention and swell in us a feeling of entitlement to the benefits that these products undoubtedly provide. We wonder how we've ever survived without them--or whether we'll continue to survive if we don't get some quickly.

And so after the workshop, I pondered the fate of my health. I don't think I'll go raw at any point soon even though I care about my health just as much as the next person. Perhaps I'm a little more skeptical about such things because I think I know better. But with a growing number of possible sources of information and just about as many contradicting opinions about the same topic, it's getting harder and harder to keep things straight. For this one though, I still think I'm right.