my fellow naija writer/director esosa edosomwan has a great blog, raw girl in a toxic world, about her lifestyle as a raw foodist. i am not fully raw, but i've been walking my vegetarian-aspiring-to-rawness path for almost 15 years now, culminating with about a full year or so eating a 65% raw food diet. i have since fallen way off the raw food bandwagon, though i am trying to get back on it.

it's not as hard to do in nyc as you might think with all the farmer's markets around the city, a healthy dose of elbow grease to cut up all those veggies and a rabid love of sushi. the thing i miss most about it, apart from my figure back then, is how wonderful my body felt when i was eating clean-burning fuel. though naija food can be some of the most delicious in the world, it can also be extremely fattening. my mom all but cut palm oil out of the kitchen when we were growing up and i think i took it a lot further than that. i will definitely still have the occasional akara, puff puff and the like, but i will not touch certain things.

it's really rare to find another raw naija, which is not the real reason esosa and i became friends, but it's a nice perk. she's got a film coming out, brooklyn shakara, starring gbenga akinnagbe (from The Wire), who is also now incidentally a brooklyn resident. (and if you poke around on vimeo you can watch esosa's going home and see a little cameo of me doing a floor stretch.)