Get Sunfired Up with Aris LaTham
How the Sun Cooks Our Food For Us
In case you missed our recent Instagram Live interview with Aris LaTham, we thought we’d share some of his wisdom and passion for you here too. We wanted to know, how do we go sunfired and how is it similar to being vegan?
At the time of the interview, Aris was on day 28 of a 74 day juice fast, or juice feast, as he likes to call it. He chose 74 days because he is 74 years old. One day of pure juice for each trip of the sun.
With an undeniable energy, Aris traverses a conversational terrain from the evolution of linguistics, to texture and flavor, to comparisons of the watermelon vine to a water hose to healthy bowel movements.
What we are most interested in at the moment–what does it mean to be sunfired?
Aris Latham is a master of language. He studied linguistics and has learned many languages, from Spanish to Sanskrit, Italian to Arabic, and Swahili–just to name a few. Language matters. The words we use matter.
And that’s why Aris calls his style of eating sunfired.
“There is only one chef on this planet. And that’s the sun.” Aris says.
The sun visits every country, every community, every garden, and every ghetto. It truly doesn’t discriminate.
A Bit of History from Aris LaTham
Humans have been on the planet for around one million years. Somewhere along the journey, some 300,000 years ago, humans learned to use fire, and from then, our processes changed. We stopped relying on the sun to cook our food as it grew and started using higher heat to change the dynamics of things we called food. From there, it was just a couple hundred thousand year hop to a time when we are even using microwaves.
Food doesn’t need to be cooked because it is cooked by the sun, or sunfired. The idea behind sunfired foods is a direct transfer of solar energy through the plants to us.
According to Aris, it is during the growing period when food undergoes the cooking process and we have all kinds of plant food available to us, filled with optimum nutrition from the sun.
“We do not believe in charring, burning, grilling, or roasting our foods. Fire is a destroyer of life. Everything dies after a certain level of heat.”
Get Your Solar Energy Straight From the Vine
When we consume sunfired foods, we are taking in that perfect energy from the sun. Food is never heated over 135 degrees, which is the maximum heat it would be during sunfire.
Diets and the language defining them have changed a lot over the years. We used to be vegetarians, then vegans, sometimes it’s just veg and now, a lot of people use the term plant-based. But plant-based can mean a lot of things, and it can include a lot of unnecessary modifications. We don’t need a lot of these.
A good example is textured vegetable protein. We don’t need that. Vegetables have texture. Many of them are even similar to flesh. Some of Aris’s favorite examples are heart of palm, artichoke hearts, bamboo blossoms, and jackfruit. You can pull jackfruit just like you would any kind of meat. And from there, it’s all about the seasoning.
“The seasoning is where it’s at,” says Aris. You can’t really argue with that.
In the past 28 days, Aris has consumed over 300 different types of fruits. He has added in garlic leaf, moringa, all kinds of herbs, and lots of avocados. He embodies vitality. You can see it and hear it.
It’s not too late to watch Keith’s interview with Aris. Get inspired to go sunfired!
