For days now I’ve been talking to everybody I can find, asking them how long they’ve been raw, how they found the diet, how they make it work financially, what they eat, why they eat it, and what they think about the rift that has opened up between Durianrider and Freelee and the remaining WFF pioneers. Mostly what I’ve learned is that nobody wants to discuss the controversy. Instead, we talk endlessly about food: what kinds of fruit we could buy where we lived, what kinds we wanted to try, our dietary goals and aspirations. Many were working to become fully raw, and those who were already strove for intense cleansing or fasting. Many said they were “always hungry” or “always thinking about food.” It’s generally believed that the development of agriculture made civilization possible, freeing early humans from lives in which nearly all of their time had to be spent planning and pursuing food. But you could also say that agriculture, and the divisions of labor it propagated, created the ancestors of our present-day lifestyle options — specializations in class, consumption, and daily routine that have grown more numerous and finely demarcated over time. Lifestyle differentiation made possible lifestyle choice, including the choice to adopt a lifestyle in which you would once again spend nearly all of your time thinking about eating.