just wondering if the powdered form of wheatgrass is still "alive"?

cheers

Boyd

Some grass powders have been heated above temperatures that would make them still considerable as "raw food" - it absolutely depends on the brand. GreenKamut brand is dried at 88 degrees Fahrenheit, and I use it when I travel, but there is a lot of disagreement about whether dried powders can be considered "alive". Most people say you can't call anything dried "alive" - however, in terms of enzyme-destruction, the powders that have been dried at low temperatures (like GreenKamut) can still be eaten on a "raw-food" diet. Many raw-foodists encourage their use when you can't get fresh, or just don't feel like it. But in my experience, it just isn't alive and effective the way fresh is.

It's a sort of semantic thing - I do feel a healthy dose (I mean a big, intense, dense dose) of the "raw" powders give me nourishment and alkalize me when I am too acid and need greenery. I can use them and say I am 100%. But I'd be hesitant to call them "alive", even the better brands that are low-temp. dried with of course no additives at all!

By the way, Boyd, I am trying frozen wheatgrass juice - I am a bit uneasy about it because it is not in a fresh state - what I observe is rather contradictory. It feels MUCH more "alive" than powdered, but the powdered packs more nutritive punch and it feels that way, too. I think that the frozen has caused a small bit of fascinating skin detox, which the powdered has never had the alive-power to do; but I don't at all feel I could comfortably live a few days on just the frozen, and I often do just have days where the powdered is my only food - for instance, travelling places where organic is unavailable like long train rides.

No it is no longer alive. When a food is alive, its cells are still conducting the functions of life - respiration, metabolism, etc. Dried powders can't do this. However, if the juice has been prepared at low temperatures, very few toxins may have been introduced as compared to juices prepared at high temperatures. So while there is nutrient loss in a dehydrated food, the toxin addition is very low.

yes it is still alive. Remember, if your ecology is poor.. it doesnt matter how much you drink if the nutrients can't be absorbed in the villious lining.

This subject interests me a lot - Bryan, how do the cells of, say, a fruit conduct respiration, either still on the tree or vine or off? What is the respiration of a fruit like? I try not to draw harsh lines between what is animate or even sentient and what is not, but how is a fruit from a tree alive in this sense - it is the living tree that metabolizes and respires, isn't it?

I often think of wanting to eat only what is alive - but then I have ethical problems with that!

I don't know the specifics of the mechanics of fruit respiration. But I know that bananas give off a gas, that when placed with other fruits seems to make them ripen faster. Also, the bananas get gassed when they are green to promote their ripening.

Fruit is definitely alive. I've cut into an avocado, decided that it was too hard to eat, and put the avocado back together, and the skin has healed itself after a few days.

I certainly don't have ethical problems with eating living fruit. This is a gift of the trees and plants, and animals live in sybiosis with fruiting plants to move and help their seeds and offspring grow and flourish.

I know - I could drive myself crazy worrying about consciousness. And then worrying about being less than live myself if I don't eat other "live cells". There is a good book called THE GHOSTS OF EVOLUTION all about how fruits like avocadoes evolved symbiotically for the kind of macrofauna who are now extinct, the kind who could eat them whole! The fruits are the symbiots left behind after their mammals have been killed off - in this case, by people. The mammals would @#$%& out the seed whole and viable (like mango pits and avocado pits). Macrofauna weigh more than 100 pounds, so right now I am macrofauna, too!

Megan

Stockholm, I find what you wrote totally intriguing...but also mindboggling. Isn't a macrofauna animals equivilant in SIZE to worms?

Never really thought about what type of animals might eat mangos whole...did humanoids kill off such creatures in the land before time? maybe this is the key as to why humans began eating meat. aout of need to kill off creatures that were devouring all their mangos.

alive or not ?
From my years of teaching Botany and Biology, I can tell you that all FRESH fruit are alive ( the cells are living, breathing, etc). That is not the case with dry ou dehydrated fruits. They are raw but not alive. Same thing for veggies, etc. if dehydrated. Unheated seeds and nuts are dormant - the living process starts when they are soaked...
All green powders, even process at low temperature, are not alive.... just impossible !

love to all
Cynthia

I was lying in bed last night realizing I had made a stupid mistake - I apologize so much!! The word I meant was "megafauna", not macrofauna - you are absolutely right that "macrofauna" are creatures visible to us with the naked eye, and "microfauna" need some sort of amplification before we can see them. Apparently, "megafauna" can be used in just this way as well, but it also refers to mammals, birds and reptiles who were huger than most we know of today - "Pleistocene megafauna" refers to these mutualists for whom certain fruit plants still surviving today evolved - the poetic image is that the plants are "mourning them". Here's an excerpt from a customer review of the book I mentioned that goes into the theory that we can tell a lot about what fauna were around tens of thousands of years ago by looking at the remaining members of that eco-system (such as the mango and avocado) - I think it's an exciting way to think about fruit and to see that WE are not necessarily the animals in the symbiotic equasion!: "The exciting idea in this book is that there are trees that "lament" the passing of the mastodons and the other extinct megafauna that once distributed their seeds. What animal now regularly eats the avocado whole, swallows the seed and excretes it far from the tree in a steamy, nourishing pile of dung? No such animal exists in the Western Hemisphere to which the avocado is native. (Barlow reports that elephants in Africa, where the avocado has been introduced, eat the avocado and do indeed excrete its pit whole.)
How about the mango with its pulp that adheres so tightly to the rather large pit? As Barlow surmises, such fruits were "designed" for mutualists that would take the fruit whole and let the pit pass through their digestive systems to emerge intact for germination away from the mother tree. Note that the avocado pit is not only too large to pass comfortably through the digestive system of any current native animal of the Americas, but is also highly toxic so that such an animal would have quickly learned not to chew it. Note too that the mango pit is extremely hard, thus encouraging a large animal to swallow it along with the closely adhering pulp rather than try to chew it or spit it out. Consider also the papaya. The fruit are large and soft so that a large animal could easily take one into his or her mouth and just mash it lightly and swallow. Note too that the fruits of the papaya tree grow not high in the tree, nor is the tree a low lying bush. Instead the tree is taller than a bush but its fruits are clustered at a height supermarket-convenient for a large animal to pluck.
Barlow considers a number of other trees, the honey locust and the osage orange, for example, as examples of ecological anachronisms, trees that have out-lived their mutualists and consequently must form new partnerships with other seed distributors or face extinction. For those trees that have pleased humans, the avocado, the mango, the papaya, etc., there is no immediate danger, but some other trees are at the edge of extinction. Their fruits fall to the ground and stay there until they rot. New trees grow only down hill when an occasional flood of water moves their fruit to a new location. In short this book is about those trees--anachronisms--have been without their mutualists since the mass extinction of the megafauna of the Western Hemisphere that took place about 13,000 years ago. [The book is] not only very readable, but is full of the excitement of scientific discovery, vivid and concrete, and packed with an amazing amount of information so that not only the trees described, but the giant sloths, mastodons and mammoths--the ghosts of harvests past--come alive on the pages.
What Barlow does more than anything is open our eyes to the ecological nature of fruit and the relationships that exist between trees and the animals who eat the fruit. We learn how color, taste, aroma, texture, nutritional value, toughness of rind, size, shape, number of seeds and how they are encased, etc.--how all these qualities of fruit have evolved to entice the animals who will faithfully distribute the seeds, but also how some qualities discourage other animals, "pulp thieves" or "seed predators," that benefit from the food provided by the tree, but do not help in its propagation."

As for that mass extinction 12,000 or so years ago (when the woolly mammoth died), it's called the Pleistocene extinction and happened during the most recent Ice Age there has been (we are due another one in about 88,000 years!). There are three factors that are supposed to have caused the dying out of the biggies, friends of fruit trees. They call it "kill, chill, and ill" - killing is hunting - it's funny to think of these angry Neanderthals running after woollies with spears, saying "Grunt ugh, that'll learn ya to eat MY mangoes - pchoo!" - well, not funny, no. But actually it's thought that people turned to eating them because the Ice Age made it more difficult for them to grow food, so they took it out on the animals. The "ill" part is the theory that all these colonizing people brought pathogens with them and the biggies just hadn't evolved to fend them off, so they died of sickness or were more vulnerable to cold or hunting because of it (or vice versa).

Anyway, it makes me look at an avocado a different way, and makes me want to help out the parent plant by burying the pit in a nice steamy pile of poo, rather than a horrible old plastic bag destined for the ocean or somewhere sterile.

I want to find the most qualified person to talk to Sandy. I personally think Bryan disagrees with Rawgetarian the most. I personally want to do a 3 way call and let sandy talk to who the people on here agree most who can see if what sandy says is legitimate...otherwise...I will still assume that everyone on here is brainwashed into thinking rawfoods will heal people and have a super short attention span due to the lack of a good ecology.

Whoever would like to tlak to sandy let me know.
ps. Please judge the information we give...not the person. I don't like certain people either and many are competitors of mine but I still respect their knowledge and what they do.

Rawgetarian, khale has scolded me for being unkind to you, and I was thinking the same thing myself. I really need this community right now as I go raw and I need it to be a friendly place for everyone trying to be raw vegan. I think that we could have a better chance of getting along if you just kept one person to a username - having two people use the same one is unnecessary, isn't it? Don't you like to think as a single unit? Is it that you are married?

Also, why not start a raw diary so that people can know more about you as a person - whether you like tap dancing, or knitting, or making your own shampoo - that sort of information is endearing. We are all trying to be raw vegans here and do have that in common. I know that you watch television and stuff like that - but that is not a hobby many of us can relate to - what else do you like to do? I do agree that we don't have to like everyone here personally, but why not show us the person you are, or, as you say, people you are? What happens to me is, if I like the person, I naturally tend to trust that what the person is saying is worth my paying a lot of attention to, even if I end up rejecting it as not good for me. Make "friends" first, and then people will think, "I want to be like you" because they like you! Then maybe they will accept the things you say.

I once had a three-way conversation with you a pretty long time ago on the phone - I remember now - you advertised on Craig's List for someone to help you post appliances on ebay.com, remember? I thought the 3-way was a fake and couldn't figure out why, what purpose it had. I just want to say that can't we keep things nice and polite here and TRY to consider everyone's feelings? I apologize for not doing this myself. I'd like this to be a supportive community that legitimately educates and informs, but also...supports. Let's try for that and not go after anyone here for any reason. And tell Sandy I asked.

Wow, TSS, that book does sound fascinating; I'm going to read it in a few weeks. I love the idea that these fruit trees are mourning their original symbiots; I'm just imagining a misty rain forest, and the last, gentle cry of the megafauna sounding out to the tree's receptive, yearning cells.

DE, that's a poignant image and I charge you to bring it to digital life. I went to your site and really liked it!

I think I meant "symbionts"; these are the organisms like the giant sloths or us who are in a symbiotic relationship with the tree, but the tree, the other organism, is the real "giver" and may or may not, get something back or something equal in return!

The book also goes into the anachronistic trees who are mourning for dinosaurs, carrion eaters who used to love eating, for example, gingko tree pods - now the pods just fall unloved and uneaten and unspread to the ground!

xo

I don't know but after just growing wheat grass for the first time and it being so freaking easy...had grass within days. I really don't see the point in using powdered.

I agree with Bryan

LikeItOrNot Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I don't know but after just growing wheat grass
> for the first time and it being so freaking
> easy...had grass within days. I really don't see
> the point in using powdered.


Wow, only someone who has the kind of energy you get being raw would say the process of sprouting, growing and juicing your own wheat grass is "so freaking easy"! Right on!

I am starting to work on the same thing, trying to decide if I want to hang a few lights in my apartment, kind of limited space to grow what I need for daily consumption.

Right now I am doing vitamineral greens daily, which are raw but I agree with Bryan that it is not truly green. There really is nothing like swishing fresh wheat grass around your mouth and swallowing down that sweet biting gulp!

You guys are inspiring me to grow wheat grass on my balconey!