I Have A Hard Time Eating Raw

Question
Heya,

I have no trouble eating raw red meat and raw eggs but when it comes to raw livers, chicken and all those I cannot eat it for the life of me, my puke-reflex comes in and I cannot swallow it.

For lack of a better word, it is incredibly disgusting :).

How did you learn to eat all these meats that are so hard to get down (for me atleast!).

Answer
It's all a question of habit. For example, these days, after many years on rawpalaeo, I've had to be even more careful when eating cooked foods as I now often get an urge to vomit the food, c.30-60 minutes after eating it(such as when I stupidly ate an organic christmas pudding some months ago). Used to be that that only happened, earlier in my rawpaleo phase, on those rare social occasions when  I ate any highly processed cooked foods, but now it occurs with unprocessed cooked foods as well.

There are various suggestions:- you can start by cooking all the foods you find disgusting raw. Then, every so often, as you get used to each stage, you lower the cooking temperature by 1 degree, until you eventually after weeks/months are able to eat the food raw at room temperature.During the experiment, you should add any processed sauces you like in any amount, then gradually lower the amounts of such processed sauces, replacing them with raw versions of sauces. Eventually, you'll, like most long-term Rawpalaeos, not bother with those extra raw sauces and eat the raw animal foods on their own.

Another trick is to go out and eat raw animal foods in public areas. The whole gag-reflex thing is solely due to long-term social conditioning and habits, so that if you are able to eat raw animal foods in public in a friendly setting, that will help you on a subconscious level. Try eating sashimi(raw fish) at Japanese Sashimi restaurants(in Japan they even offer raw horsemeat(basashi) and raw hornets!), then there's raw meat kitfo at ethiopian restaurants, beef carpaccio/steak tartare aavailable at most French/Hungarian/Russian etc. restaurants.

Re chicken:- Don't assume you'll get to like all raw animal foods as everyone has individual tastes, plus there's the question of whether the animal was fed on good nutrition. For example, I loathed the taste of raw organic,free-range chicken, at the start of the diet, and I still do. I suspect this is at least partly because chickens(and ducks) in the UK are almost always fed on highly unnatural 100% grain-filled diets. I have no problems at all in eating raw wild mallard duck, by comparison, as wild animals tend to eat much healthier foods, overall.

Another trick I used with raw liver was to cut it into very tiny slivers, roughly a third or a half of the volume of my little finger, gulp them down without chewing, then quickly chase each swallow of raw liver with a huge gulp of alkaline mineral-water(from natural springs). That got round the gag-reflex.

Lastly, it's a very good idea to look around all the various farmers' markets in your area(ethnic markets are also well worth visiting) and then buy small amounts of every unusual piece of raw animal food(or raw plant food for that matter), and then taste each piece. You will find that, even at the start of the diet, at least 5% of the raw animal foods you try will taste fine, right from the start, and you'll be able to get used to more and more raw animal foods as your tastes change. For example, I would go to brixton market(a caribbean-oriented market) where I'd buy raw goatmeat, I would go to Borough Market where I'd buy raw sharkmeat or raw swordfish from my local fishmonger or wild hare carcasses from my nearest farmers' market etc. There's even great variety of foods within the same species of animal. For example, one can now buy heather-fed lamb or samphire-fed lamb from some farms in the UK(which is actually better than grassfed meats).

Generally speaking, most rawpalaeos who eat mostly raw, tend to get the relevant taste-change from cooked to raw c.8-12 months into the diet. Of course, people can always make mistakes, on an individual basis, which slows down the taste-change. For example, at the very start of going in for RAF foods, I made the mistake of thinking it was OK to eat raw grainfed meats from intensively-farmed animals, but the taste was so revolting that it was very fortunate that I then found a source of wildcaught raw seafood and subsequently a source of raw grassfed meats. Then I also found that consuming any raw dairy not only gave me addictive cravings for dairy but also temporarily  reduced my appetite and tastes for raw meats, to a great extent.

HTH,
RPG.

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