Hi Lynnzard, I also hunt with bows (and arrows, and most other equipment) that I make myself. I live in Vermont, so my sapling of choice is shagbark hickory, and a friend of mine and I are planning on trekking down to the Green Mountain National Forest before the end of the month and I hope to score a pignut hickory sapling or two. My primary target is whitetail deer here in Vermont, but we have a moose archery season now and I also buy a turkey tag each year. I've been hunting for about 6 years and have never taken game with a bow, it's not easy. Maybe this year..;-)

In fact, it is possible to make a compound bow. You won't make it from carbon fiber and fiberglass like the manufactured ones, but I've seen photographs of wood-limbed compounds made by enterprising folks with lots of power tools and spare time. I can't speak to how well they shoot. The sense I got was that it was a novelty project just to see if it could be done, and they were successful. PaleoPlanet is a good resource for those who want to learn the craft of making bows. We learn by doing though, so reading about it won't guarantee success as much as making lots of mistakes and paying attention.

I attended a potluck earlier this afternoon put on by a local Transition Town group, which was coupled with a public talk by Ascent of Humanity and Sacred Economics author Charles Eisenstein. I thought I'd be bold and bring a raw meat dish to the potluck to see if anyone would eat it.

I have a decent amount of whitetail deer from this past hunting season, so elected to make sushi rolls. I laid thin slices of raw whitetail deer back strap on nori and wrapped them around a few leaves of green onion and a sliver of crimson carrot (a variety that's deep red on the outside but orange on the inside, a beautiful contrast). I brought some pickled ginger to offer as a condiment, and also made a sauce from raw honey and dijon mustard. As is the custom at these potlucks, I wrote the ingredients on a notecard by the platter so that everyone knew what was being served, and specifically noted that the meat was raw.

Results: 2 pounds of raw deer meat sushi GONE!

Several people asked about the dish, not too surprising given the prevailing taboos against eating raw meat. I explained my largely raw diet and that I've never had problems with parasites or 'bad' bacteria. I also explained that one of my motivations for exploring a raw diet is to reduce my energy demand, as over 30 percent of all energy used to deliver food to people's mouths is used in the home, and much of this is used to cook or process food. Since Transition Towns are all about adapting to Energy Descent (i.e. fossil fuel depletion), people were intrigued by the idea of adopting a raw diet to reduce the embodied energy of food. Most of the people who asked about the dish tried it and agreed the flavor was appealing, especially with the honey mustard sauce.

Unfortunately I didn't get a picture of the rolls before I put them out on the big table, but I'll make more tomorrow for my own personal consumption so I'll take a photo then and upload it. Success is sweet, with or without a honey mustard sauce!

A new documentary has been released. It features David Wolfe and Daniel Vitalis. It's available to watch free on the Internet until March 31 here: http://www.hungryforchange.tv/online-premiere

Eating less while on a raw omnivorous diet than on cooked diets is normal. I also began eating fewer calories per day, and have still steadily gained muscle mass. I've also shifted from eating three or four large meals per day to one or two meals per day, and sometimes go for a day or more without eating at all just because I don't feel hungry.

It hadn't occurred to me to mention this, but in addition to cold-water swimming, I also attend sweat lodges on a fairly regular basis so I expose myself to both extremes of cold and heat. I suspect they work together to give me the good health I enjoy, along with a clean, largely un-processed diet.

I was being facetious.

Haven't heard of the obesity paradox. I don't buy it. Can you link to an article or other resource backing this claim up?

I can't either, so if that's the best you can do then I'm afraid you've stalled short of convincing me...

And no, I'm not mocking PaleoPhil. I'm being simultaneously fun and serious.

Would it be alright to eat carnivores such as wolves and coyotes raw in the wild? I heard that carnivores have more toxins the higher up you go in the food chain.

Don't know, never tried it. I know from skinning wild land carnivores they carry a lot of parasites. If you buy into AV's theory that parasites are good for you, eat up! If not, you should probably avoid them.

That biomagnification of pollutants has negative health implications has been debunked in the mind of TylerDurden, but not necessarily for the rest of us. I studied this issue first hand while working on my masters degree in Environmental Chemistry, Toxicology and Risk Assessment, and I can say that I'm convinced TD is dead wrong on this issue. Lots of epidemiological studies have found links between eating contaminated food and all sorts of maladies.

Virtually every place in the world has some fruit available during one season or another. What would be lacking in climates with cold winters is fruit available year-round, or in sizable quantities.

The Paleo Diet as currently practiced (including one based on raw foods) is an artifact of the fossil fueled era where we have the energy subsidies to ship select foods from the four corners of the Earth to anywhere people can afford them. If we didn't have these fossil fuels, I suspect the diet of everyone on this forum would look radically different.

I ate raw chicken once, and got a mild case of salmonella. The chicken was locally raised and "organic", but I don't know how cleanly it was butchered. I got the salmonella under control after a day or so by taking small amounts of raw apple cider vinegar mixed in water, and was more or less eating normally 4 days after the onset of symptoms.

I have no other ailments to report, and in fact haven't really been sick aside from this one incident since starting this diet.

Edit: For reference, I started including raw animal foods in my diet back in 2003, and they started making up a substantial part of my diet in 2009.

And as an afterthought, I suspect the fact that she grows most of her own food is a key to her success, as the nutrient contents of most vegetable foods decline from the moment they're picked and by the time most vegetable foods reach a retail outlet (like a supermarket, or often even a farmer's market) they are quite nutrient poor.

The ability to pick from a plant and eat immediately is huge as far as nutrient density goes.