Good Samaritan - I want to tell you that you did some good with this thread and your videos.

When I was on gitmr and trying to help my mother who was not a vegetarian like I was PaleoPhil and Tsurugi Oni were trying to help me. Phil was saying how raw marrow would be so very good for her with her condition. Tsurugi Oni posted the video of you sitting so calmly and beautifully eating bone marrow at the table with a spoon and I was mesmerized - not because you were eating raw meat, but because I had seen so many videos and pictures of vegan raw fooders acting wild and crazy, scattered and hyper. But there you were with this beautiful calmness, groundedness, sweetness eating away with your kids around you like a Buddha. It made a massive impression with me that stayed.

One reason may be that oysters are very high in calcium and zinc both of which are necessary for nail health. If you get white dots on your nails it means that you are zinc deficient btw.

Wolf - I make raw cheesecakes. I made up how to do it on my own. Are you still interested?

The sad thing is that in the US they might very well be able to stop paleo except for people that can hunt and forage. It likely will get more and more difficult  They have been quite successful at outlawing raw milk which then made Johanna Budwig's exceptional cure for cancer very difficult - to say the least - which seems crazy to me - so I can easily imagine raw meat being outlawed if it becomes something that people start to eat raw. The FDA told the man I met yesterday that raises his own grass-fed cows that he makes into hamburgers at his hamburger joint here in town that if he cooked a burger "rare" he had to get every customer who buys one to sign the receipt and then he had to keep that receipt for THREE YEARS or he can be closed down.

They outlawed many raw foods as a matter of fact. They might be successful at pasteurizing all eggs in the near future. They have made it almost impossible to get raw almonds and soon you might not be able to get any raw nuts. They made raw peach and apricot kernels illegal except to be sold for cosmetic use. Almost all fruits that are imported to this country are irradiated. They are now trying to pass laws where it will be illegal for you to save seeds from your own plants. They work at entrapping small farmers and any vendor. They set up sting operations to make examples of the small fries so others won't try. They went after an Amish farmer because one of his young daughters took some money for raw milk even though not one person ever got sick from that farm - if anything they were the spitting images of health - and they only had a small group of people coming to the farm for milk.

All it would take, I think, is for a large enough quantity of people claiming to be cured of cancer and never feeling better in their lives by eating raw meat and then one person (maybe even paid to say it) saying they felt sick from eating some raw meat - for suddenly no one in  America to be able to buy raw meat in a store again. It could all be processed with some chemical or be flash-pasteurized.

Think about how hard it is to buy grass-fed animals or to get free-range eggs. The reason most Americans can't get raw milk is because if people were able to get it - soon the big dairy businesses would not be able to compete with the quality so the big businesses use their big bucks to squash the small guy any way they can. It happens constantly. What a fight there is here in Texas. And - the cattle industry is very strong here so if they think that natural grass-fed cattle is gong to steal the business from their feed-lots and the only way they can fight it is to make all meat toxic by law - you can bet they would use their MASSIVE power, connections, money and powerful lawyers to achieve that - quickly and easily.

Ok - so I'm a cynic - but I've been watching this whole thing for too long. I can't believe how fast our supply of decent food is being destroyed in front of my eyes. So even if a cure is based on being able to get decent food from a store...... I don't keep it as part of my list of cures that they can't outlaw. The small group of paleos are better off actually NOT being too mainstream, having gurus and big press or too many people realizing its power. Sad - so sad - but I think it's true.   

I just need to make a comment on this - one of my favorite topics - raw cheese and raw dairy.

Most raw cheeses are not raw. Most say they are raw because they use raw milk - but mean that they use unpasteurized milk to start but then heat it - usually somewhere between 160 and 190 degrees depending on the recipe. There are no laws on the definition of the word "raw" in labeling.

It's actually quite rare to find actual raw hard cheeses. Ah - but if you ever do you might change your mind about cheese. I get mine from a local raw dairy farmer that does not heat the milk AT ALL.  My husband who was horribly allergic to cheese eats it and feels great from it. I feel wonderful from it.

I also make my own quark cheese from raw milk from native grass-fed only Jersey cows. From this I get fermented butter. OH MY!

I've gone long periods with and without and none of these things give me constipation - if anything they make things move faster. I have never felt a negative side-affect.

Just my personal experience so far...........

It is really really hard to find the real good stuff though.

One chicken needs about an acre to find enough food to not have its food supplemented. Even grain feeds are usually supplemented with either soy or fishmeal to achieve the high protein diets that chickens need to pump out 300 eggs a year. Soy can be really bad for chickens.

Even if you get pastured hens it DOES NOT mean that they find their own food. The only place you will find that is if just a small amount of hens are raised on a large ranch for the people that eat them. I love to watch the hens jump up in my yard to get grass seeds. Hens do eat grains. Most chicken food though is almost exclusively corn especially if it is organic because it's hard to get a good enough variety of different grains and still get that organic label. Even backyard chicken folk don't realize that the pellets are super high heated.

I feed my hens food produced by a local person, my leftovers and I will grow them bugs myself when there are not enough in the yard - which is almost always. Hens do not usually eat grass - they eat grass seed. They do eat other greens though.

I have seen my hens catch even a small snake.

Chickens are mostly carnivorous.

But I could go on about chickens forever!

Living in Texas - Y'all is generally used to refer to the folks that I'm actually talking to (second person plural). Maybe what I should have asked is if wanting to get back to living in the the wilderness is a general desire in the group or just the folks that posted already?

Paleo is more than just diet PaleoPhil has told me.

Eve - do you like living in San Francisco? Would you rather be living somewhere, somehow else?

Being new to Paleo - this is a serious question:

Are Paleos against cities and humid climates? I like living on the outskirt of a city and going out to the country.... but I love having easy access to cultural events and the vibe of a city. I like both the country and the city. I also love the higher humidity climates.

Do y'all only like living in the country?

You would think that birds would be more careful generally where they lay their eggs but ducks are downright stupid about it. I used to live by the ocean and nothing in the world was easier to get than turtle eggs. We used to have to fight like crazy during sea turtle season to protect them because they are so very endangered now. 

All I have are my chickens' unfertilized eggs. The yolks taste great to me, the whites don't. So I eat what tastes good! My dogs will eat the yolks first too if they eat the white at all. The yolk is what the chicks use for food and the white is a only backup food source, is a shock absorber and allows for air circulation. If the whites looked good and tasted good though I'd eat it cuz I trust myself more than some scientist that only fries his eggs and puts margarine on his wonder bread!

Fertilized wild feeding bird eggs were not analyzed and even if they were does that necessarily mean that it would have any pertinence to a raw foodist at all? Myy dogs didn't have to ask me if the whites were good for them. I don't need to ask a scientist to figure out if the whites are good for me.

Only stupid humans care about wasting a part of a food that we innately feel is not good for us. Bunnies take nibbles from each leaf. Many carnivores take the best and leave what's leftover for scavengers. I put the whites back into the chicken food. What? Yep. I figure that my chickens are not getting as much protein as they should in the drought with not enough bugs right now. They also get the leftover eggshells for calcium. But what I really need to do is raise them some more bugs - their natural food. They will eat those first. You never saw such excitement as when I bring them bugs.

We all know innately what is good or not for us if we aren't too far away from ourselves.

Strangely enough I find that because I cannot get tree-ripened fruit - that frozen organic is often the best. Of course it's better not to freeze - but often the fruit is picked at its peak just before freezing and therefore feels better to my body than the fruits that I can buy in the store.

Joe - I lived in a place that had 100% humidity almost all year and I loved it. My skin was always moisturized.    I also lived in Seville and visited where you are in the North and traveled along the coast of Portugal on bike during the summer so I know what you are referring to.

The key is to adapt your eating and drinking style to the place where you live. I found that it was very important to drink enough water. Where you are is not nearly as hot as the areas where I lived in 100 % humidity so it will be easier on you. But if you do get hot there is nothing like certain fruits to cool you. I live in Austin Texas now and when the intense humidity and heat hit in summer I can be outside in the August sun gardening all day when everyone else is hiding under a rock because during those time I make frozen smoothies and eat watermelon - both of which bring your body temperature down dramatically and make the heat, sun and humidity actually feel good. You must re-mineralize though. I find that the right salt can make all the difference. I use iced peppermint and hibiscus as well. Very cooling to the system.

Meat is usually warming and fruit is cooling. Fruitarians and vegans can have a horrible time in winter and need to add all sorts of warming foods to be able to survive. It's no coincidence that summer is when fruits are most available! 

If fruits don't work for you at least the peppermint and the hibiscus teas might?

Embrace the humidity and you could use it as a way to sweat out impurities of living in a city. Remember the electrolytes. There are many ways to balance these. I eat lots of seaweed when out in the humidity to replenish. If it's cold and damp it's actually harder on the system. Then you need foods to help strengthen your lungs and warm you while drying at the same time. For when I've lived in such places I found ginger to be a great ally. Ginger dries and warms and is great for the lungs and the digestion - which can have a harder time in cold/damp weather. There are other firey drying herbs and foods too.

But before I make more suggestions - are you feeling hot or cold along with the damp?

Wolf, HIT and Eve, strange that there are fewer cuts of bison. I mean - what do they do with the rest?

I'm going to email the farm in San Antonio and ask them what cuts they have, ask more details on slaughter and feshness and then ask if they can bring some things to the farmer's market next week for me. I got hubbie some bison a couple of weeks ago to cook and he made it very rare and liked it - so that is promising. I'm in Texas - so there are some really good sources here - and therefore maybe I can get a larger variety? I also got him some raw ground beef from a farm that seemed ok and he made himself a very rare hamburger and was purring - so I think I've already been getting him used to the idea.

I've been saying for about half a year now that if he's going to be eating meat he shouldn't eat the crap in restaurants and eat grass-fed made at home because of what I learned when learning about dairy - and then I started buying it for him. He said, "Is this the same woman that told me in our last house that our kitchen was going to be "cruelty free"? I kind of turned purple and blamed it on the fact that we got dogs. He was like - This is just too weird.    Now he's watching me eat steak and knows that I'm dead serious about doing anything I can to improve his diet. Because of it he's now ready to make things, listen to all your advice and even made a lovely sauce for the raw himachi for lunch today.

And........ he was willing to wait the half an hour between the himachi and the salad even!

I read him what y'all say... and I take notes.

Thank you!

Eve wrote: I quit vegetarianism after four decades because my body signals were unmistakable.

Wow! LOL - you have me beat sister! 

What were your body signals if you don't mind me asking?