Angry in the Great White North

Arrow has been gaining weight after going on a hunger strike, now that his followers have been sending him food. You see, it wasn't a strike in protest of his conditions or to bring attention to some cause.

He didn't like prison food. More specifically, he doesn't eat food that is cooked. He is a "raw foodist".

I have to admit, I've never head of a "foodist" before. Apparently, these are people who think vegans are awful people destroying the environment, wasting all those resources preparing and cooking food.

For a foodist, food should only be eaten raw. But there is science, of a sort, behind their thinking:

Raw and Living Foods are foods that contain enzymes. In general, the act of heating food over 116 degrees F destroys enzymes in food. (Enzymes start to degrade in as little as 106 degrees F). All cooked food is devoid of enzymes, furthermore cooking food changes the molecular structure of the food and renders it toxic. Living and raw foods also have enormously higher nutrient values than the foods that have been cooked.

Like a lot of movements, the science is half-right. Enzymes are necessary to the functioning of cells, but all cells manufacture enzymes, and other proteins, out of basic building blocks consumed by the cell, and using instructions encoded in the DNA. What is DNA except a long list of recipes for making proteins? But is there something to eating an enzyme? Whatever doubts I had about that were dispelled with this:

Enzymes assist in the digestion of foods. They are known to be the "Life-Force" and or "energy" of food.

Enzymes that are already in the body help in the digestion of foods, not the enzymes, if any, in the food. And they are not the "energy". If they were sources of energy, they would be consumed by the living processes of cells. By definition, an enzyme is an organic catalyst, which means it is not consumed by the chemical process it aids. Instead, each enzyme is designed to aid a chemical reaction of some kind, either by lowering the temperature at which it occurs, or by speeding it up. The reaction happens, molecules are consumed and new molecules (waste products) created, and energy is released, but the enzyme remains.

Anyone who can't tell the difference between an enzyme and an energy source should not be giving out dietary advice.

Humans are omnivores, but mostly carnivores. We lack the enzyme ptyalin to pre-digest grains -- in fact, we can't process cellulose at all, at any stage in our digestive tract. All plant cells have rigid cell walls built with cellulose -- that's what distinguishes a plant from an animal, by the way -- and cellulose is just starch and starch is just sugar and sugar is energy. To not be able to digest cellulose is to throw away a huge source of energy, suggesting we are lousy herbivores. We do have critical enzymes and symbiotic bacteria that allows us to eat meat, something that is entirely lacking in herbivores. That is not an accident, nor an optional feature:

But we also have a sense of taste for sweet things, a sense we would not have if it were not useful in some way. So fruit or honey may have formed part of our diet. But it cannot have been an important part of that diet because fruit contains little or no protein, and honey none at all; and protein on a daily basis is essential for health. The evidence above demonstrates that the human digestive tract is extremely inefficient when coping with foods of vegetable origin. With no bacteria and no enzymes capable of breaking down the cell walls to release the small amounts of nutrients inside, we can only eat many of these foods after they have been cooked. As Nature must have intended that all foods should be eaten raw, they cannot have formed a significant part of our diet during our evolution. During our evolution, therefore, when we lived well, our diet must have been high in animal protein and fat, supplemented with wild fruit, but only during lean times would it include other foods of vegetable origin. As more than 99.9% of our genetic makeup evolved and was determined before we, as a species, started to heat and cook foods, that must still be the correct diet for us today.

In other words, humans can efficiently digest raw uncooked meat, but not raw uncooked vegetables. No amount of politically correct liberal hand-wringing about "life energy" can change what evolution has designed.

Too bad for Mr. Arrow (whose real name is Michael Scarpitti) and his followers.

But then some people think Tre Arrow and his ilk are fools for eating raw dead food. They insist on eating raw living food:

Qwerty....plants foods quite literally contain Light. They feed themselves by photosynthesis...taking the energy of the sun and making it into *food*. When we eat plants we are eating light. When you put your hands around a living plant you can feel it vibrate..its *aura*. You cant get that from a dead animal..it no longer contains life energy. *Light*. Even when a plant is severed, it can regrow, so it retains its light, and we eat it. We are Light Beings! According to the path I follow, the more light you hold in your body, the more *enlightened* you will become!

Oh, brother. They're grazers, gnawing off the tops of growning plants, moving from shrub to shrub, trying to get their daily recommended allowance of light! Can you think of anything more absurd?

I don't know if Tre Arrow is an eco-terrorist, but he is an idiot. And I do believe that Canada has the sovereign right to set minimum standards for refugees and immigrants. Let's start with some minimum level of common sense.