Today has been somewhat of a crappy day and I am fairly angry right now. I keep wondering if the Kanekiki Farm is really a raw vegan community. Inside the farm we follow the raw vegan diet, but outside the farm the rules are different. That doesn’t feel right to me…
My Doubts about the Kanekiki Farm being a Raw Vegan Community
I woke up early, did my yoga with Jake and ate five papayas for breakfast, no issue with that. Then I put on my work clothes and harvested the back of the Kanekiki farm.
Harvesting was fun, but I was in a bad mood. I have been in a bad mood since yesterday when we decided to take a trip to Green Sands Beach with the Kanekiki Community and some of us ended up wasting a lot of time because a select group people wanted to stop to eat cooked food.
I brought this up during our meeting today and I was grateful that I was able to speak to everyone and be heard. I expressed my discomfort with the Kanekiki community and shared that I feel like I am having identity problems. The issue is that we called the Kanekiki farm a “raw vegan community” but a large majority of the people who live in the Kanekiki farm eat cooked foods almost every day. This, to me, is a misrepresentation of what the community is really about.
Despite my bad mood I was still able to take some awesome pictures. Here is Jake and I getting a huge jackfruit straight off the tree.
Is the Kanekiki Farm a Raw Vegan Community?
If you visit the Kanekiki farm website you will see that on the home page of the site the first line says “Kanekiki Community is a low fat raw vegan community inspired by Dr Douglas Graham’s 80/10/10 lifestyle”.
Furthermore, the about page of the Kanekiki farm website says “We are a cooperative community dedicated to living in tune with the natural order of life… Through embracing, encouraging and educating practices such as permaculture, self-governance and low-fat raw vegan lifestyle, we hope to create a ripple effect of mindfulness towards living simply and consciously.”
I may be too picky on this topic but the definition of a community is “a group of people living in the same place or having a particular characteristic in common” or “a feeling of fellowship with others, as a result of sharing common attitudes, interests, and goals”. On the other hand raw veganism is defined as “a vegan diet that excludes all food and products of animal origin, as well as cooked food”.
With these definitions in mind I struggle to see how the Kanekiki farm is a raw vegan community. Surely enough, nobody eats cooked foods on the property and that could be good enough for some but, unfortunately perhaps, I have higher expectations and I tend to be very picky when it comes to words and vocabulary because I value True Speech. Needless to say, I am not perfect either and I invite everyone to call me out if I am being misleading with the words I say.
The issue is that, to me, having people eating cooked foods outside the Kanekiki farm means that either the whole community isn’t raw vegan, or those individuals are not part of the community. I don’t see a way around this. We could come up with excuses and exceptions but it doesn’t take away from the fact that we are misleading when we say that the Kanekiki farm members are part of a raw vegan community. I can’t help to see it this way.
Is the Kanekiki Farm a Flexible Raw Vegan Community?
I would be happy saying that the Kanekiki farm is a flexible raw vegan community, or a community that practices raw veganism, or a community who aspires to be raw vegan, there are many ways to reword this. I brought this up during our meeting today and Bill said that people inside a community are also individuals that have free will. I agree with this, but to me it seems that the free will of the people in the community is destroying the essence of the community itself.
The example I gave to Jake was the following: Let’s say we have a community or “recovering drug addicts” who live together in a home where no drugs are allowed. Now let’s say one of those people CONSIOUSLY CHOOSES to do drugs when he/she is outside the house, is that person a recovering drug addict or a current drug addict. To me, it is clear that person is a drug addict. What happens if two, three, four people or more from that community are regularly doing drugs outside the house? Do you still have a community of recovering drug addicts or a community of current drug addicts? Are the people doing drugs outside of the community? This is the dilemma I find myself in.
On the brighter side, further down on the about page it says that “Our community aspires to be 80/10/10 low fat raw * vegan” and that some people in the community “struggle to be raw”. This is a little closer to the truth and I am glad this is on the site. That being said, it is not explicit enough and I would feel more comfortable if this type of wording was higher up on the page and also found on the home page. It is a matter of integrity and transparency.
If you want to know what the 80/10/10 diet is all about I recomend you read Douglas Graham book:
Speaking My Thoughts during our Community Meeting
Like I said before, I brought this up during meeting and everyone respected my words. They heard what I said and some people offered their ideas, unfortunately, no change was made. I am sure the people who eat cooked foods will continue to do so idealizing those meals for their flavor and disregarding the damage that it causes to their health and the environment.
On top of that, the fact that some people eat cooked food off the Kanekiki farm on a regular basis takes support away from those who want to be fully raw vegan on and off the farm. To name a few examples, I ate cooked food on my third day in Hawaii because I saw Matt eating chips and having soup, I remember thinking to myself “if he is doing it, why shouldn’t I do the same?”. Nick was here for four weeks before he could be fully raw for a single day, I know for a fact that it was because he saw so many people eating cooked food all the time.
Getting Feedback after the Meeting
I had people approach me after the meeting to say thank you for bringing this topic up. They appreciated my courage and my ability to simplify the issue and communicate it in a non-aggressive way. I feel grateful for that and I still know that even though this may not be a 100% raw vegan community, it still is an awesome community with awesome people.
We all screw up from time to time, we all “fall of the wagon”. I just want to see us trying, I want us to stay on track and be able to back up what we say. I am sure my speech today added wood to the fire and I trust it will take us on the right direction. Whether Kanekiki ends up being fully raw vegan, or partially raw vegan is still to be seen. One thing is for sure, I will not stop fighting for my values and what I believe to be true, loving and beautiful.
Finding Oranges and Jackfruit on My Papaya Island
The rest of my day went pretty well. I must admit though, I did not follow through 100% with my 7 day papaya fast. This morning, after harvesting with Jake, we sat down and had some of the best oranges I ever had. They were super juice, super colorful, super fresh, right off the tree… how could I say no to that?
I felt a little bad breaking my papaya fast, on the other hand, I broke it with a mono-meal of one of the healthiest fruits I can eat in one of the most optimal states it can be eaten. I don’t even know if eating the oranges was a better, or worse act than eating papayas alone all day. I got to tell you, I am not super proud to having broken my fast, but at the same time, I don’t regret eating the oranges.
I also don’t regret having some jackfruit after our meeting. More than anything I did it to share in the experience. We all ate together, under the shining sun, sitting in the grass on a common area of the Kanekiki farm. I don’t think jackfruit is the healthiest fruit out there but it is certainly not bad at all. Again, I had it on its own, far away from my preceding and proceeding meals. After than I had a dozen papayas to close the day.
I can see that just like I can have exceptions during my papaya fast and include oranges and jackfruit, some other people from the Kanekiki Farm may choose to include cooked foods on their raw vegan diet. I don’t have an issue with that, I just have an issue with us saying we are a raw vegan community when sometimes it seems like we are not. We need some change.
