Our eating habits would follow a similar pattern throughout my childhood: We sought out the bee pollen and the goldenseal and the usnea tinctures and tisanes and tonics, we made the pomegranate concentrate breakfast drinks; we
swilled cold - pressed olive
oil before a meal, ate no salt for a month, and choked down the wheatgrass and the hot water with maple syrup, lemon, and cayenne before morning meditations with the guru on her retreats in the foothills outside of Sacramento, which we started attending when I was a young teenager, and where I would learn new extremes of dietary asceticism.