Dick Gregory - Dick Gregorys Natural Diet for Folks Who Eat: Cookin with Mother Nature

TO MOTHER NATURE

and her faithful children

nutritionists, naturopaths, life

extensionists, chiropractors, and

all others loving the natural way

of lifewho have persevered through years

of ridicule, rejection and scorn and

found their reward in cookin with

Mother Nature

Readers who are considering adopting the raw-juice therapy, fasting or other dietary regimens suggested in this book should be advised that what works for some will not work for others. Anyone considering a diet should first consult his or her physician, particularly anyone with a special medical problem.

This is a book for folks who are willing to take time to stop and think. Ive often said that one of the biggest problems in America today is that we Americans just dont think, not just about foodabout anything.

The trouble with us Americans is that weve never thought. Remember that old cleanser commercial? Keep the rust out of the entire house! So folks would clean up all the rusty spots. But if they ever thought to pick up that can of cleanser after it had been sitting for a while, sure enough theyd have found that little brown rusty ring!

Lets take another example. We spend millions of dollars in the United States every year for civil defense buildings. But do you realize most of them are closed on weekends? Its as if we think our enemies are planning to fight a five-day war! Even Israel took six days.

Life insurance is another good example. Probably no other group of people on the face of this earth spends more money on life insurance than we do in the United States. Did you ever stop and think that you have to be slightly stupid to buy life insurance? But just analyze this. Youre betting the insurance company people that youre going to die. And theyre betting you that you are going to live. And youre hoping they win. And they charge you.

Sometimes the strangest things cause you to stop and think. I remember when I first started thinking about whether or not it was right to eat meat. It was on Thanksgiving Day a number of years ago. I had been drinking while I waited for the turkey to get done. It takes a turkey a long time. By the time I was standing at the head of the table with my carving knife, I suddenly had the strangest thoughts. I got to thinking that there might be some beings on another planet somewhere who are as intelligent compared with us as we are compared with turkeys.

Now thats a disturbing thought! I could just see myself in some strange planetary oven, being basted and roasted. It would be one thing to roast white folks brown; theyd be trying to figure out a way to undone us black folks. I even thought about myself lying on a platter all filled with stuffing!

Then I had visions of these beings from another planet going to the butcher shop with their meat list. I wonder what theyd call their butcher shops? Theyd probably call them folks shops. I could hear them placing an order: Give me a half dozen Oriental knees, two Caucasian feet and twelve fresh Black lips. And the folks-shopkeeper comes back smiling and says, These Black lips are so fresh theyre still talkin. After that little fantasy, I couldnt eat my Thanksgiving dinner. But it started me thinking.

There would be a whole lot of changes in America if we Americans decided one day to start thinking. And one of the biggest and most important changes would be in the traditional American diet. The old saying is very true: You are what you eat. It would be more accurate, perhaps, to say: You are what you assimilate. That is, your body literally is what you assimilate from the foodsor more frequently thingsyou eat to rebuild cells and what you eliminate as waste products of the cell-building activity as you revitalize yourself each day.

If you just stop and look around you, you can seeand many of you can feelthe sorry results of the eating habits of the majority of folks in America today. Folks getting old twenty, thirty, forty or even fifty years before their time. Swollen ankles, varicose veins, pot bellies, bald heads, arthritis, rheumatism, ulcers, sinus trouble, eye trouble, mental illness, gallstones, prostate gland trouble, hemorrhoids, heart trouble, liver trouble, kidney trouble, overweight, underweight, anemia, bad feet, headaches, short breath, cant sleep or cant wake up, no energy, tired blood, sitting in front of the television set all evening and falling asleep watching itthe list is endless and very, very familiar.

Dr. Laura Newman, in her 1970 book Make Your Juicer Your Drugstore, reports: During the last 50 years in the U.S.A., the increase of Epilepsy has been 450%; Diabetes, 1800%; Brights Disease, 650%; Anemia, 300%; Insanity, 400%; Heart Trouble, 300%; Cancer, 308%; and, while we have the distinction of raising the worlds best hogs, we have 75% of the worlds Sinus Trouble.

The sad truth is that all of these afflictions, and their unbelievable increase, are the result of Americans habit of putting garbage in their stomach instead of in the disposal. Most folks throw leftover garbage in the incinerator, disposal or garbage canbut only after they have tossed down or gulpedseldom chewed!the greatest percentage of garbage into their own bodies.

It is very hard to unlearn the falsehoods we have accepted as truth all our lives. So much of what we are taughtboth in school and at our mothers kneeis nothing more than accepted, handed-down opinion that simply will not hold up under cold, hard analysis or weather the test of new experience. The great scientist Albert Einstein described most of what we learn as a collection of prejudices which are fed to us with a porridge spoon before our eighteenth year. In schools at all grade levels, teachers present the current theories and notions of the time as though they were established facts. But the passage of time, combined with new experience and research, makes yesterdays facts todays myths, superstitions and falsehoods.

Einsteins description is uniquely appropriate when it comes to the matter of personal diet. We are literally spoon fed wrong food and wrong notions about what we ought to eat! It begins when we are babies and food is inserted in our mouths; we are offered no choice. For many of us the process never changes! The only alternative babies have is to spit it outwhich of course they often do. Mothers see that reaction as something babies go through until they learn how to eat rather than as the natural response of innocence to a violation of Mother Natures rules!

Teachers in the great centers of education in the ancient world (e.g., Pythagoras at Crotona) were very hip. They understood that it was impossible for folks to learn anything until they had experienced its truth for themselves. So the ancient teachers set up a curriculum where their pupils practiced the arts of numerology and dynamic geometry, for example, to experience the faculty of intuition. From that experience a pupil could go on to apprehend the essential laws of cosmic motion.

This book is based upon that ancient understanding of how we learn. The book grew out of my own personal experience. Its pages reflect what I have learnedwhat I have experienced as Truth and what I hope you will try for yourselfin my new life of cookin with Mother Nature.

Unless you are already very heavy into the natural-food-and-way-of-life movement, most of what you read in Natural Diet for Folks Who Eat will go against everything youve ever believed about food, eating, health and disease. I can only say to you, Dont feel too bad. I started out on an equal footing with the worst-eatin reader of these pages!