More Thoughts on Raw Food

Ever since my lovely dining experience at Pure Food and Wine last week my brain’s been bursting with thoughts on raw food.  I started typing and these ideas started breeding on my computer screen, and I think I should probably just press “post” before this little essay gets even further out of hand.  Comments welcome.

Raw Food, just so ya’ll know what I’m referring to, is a diet of all fruits, veggies, nuts, and grains and legumes that are “raw” in the way that they are not heated over 118 degrees.  Grains and legumes are often sprouted to make them digestible.

I first heard of raw foods a few years ago and was sorta like “yeah, right, who *does* this?  Then started reading up on it a bit.  I got a few cookbooks.  I tried “cooking” a few raw meals to see what the hype was about, and look at me now – eating at raw restaurants and blogging my little heart out on the subject.

Here’s the general “raw” argument from wikipedia:

• Raw foods contain enzymes which act as catalysts to regulate the digestive process in the body. Heating food degrades or destroys these enzymes in food.
• Eating food without enzymes makes digestion more difficult; deprives the body of enzymes; and leads to toxicity in the body, to excess consumption of food, and therefore to obesity and chronic disease.
• Raw foods contain bacteria and other micro-organisms that stimulate the immune system and enhance digestion by populating the digestive tract with beneficial flora.
  Living and raw foods have higher nutrient values than foods that have been cooked.

My personal raw thoughts after the jump.

Since I’m not a doctor I don’t really know how to confirm or deny the above logic that makes eating raw sound like it’s more efficient and beneficial than other eating lifestyles.  Instead, I’ll list a few of the reasons that I find this raw foods stuff interesting:

1) Health
2) Preparation and Variety
3) Intention and Gratitude
4) Energy

Health –
Again, I’m not a doctor, nurse, nutritionist, or even a well-read health hobbyist, so I can’t really vouch for the reasons stated above of why eating raw foods is a superior diet.  What I can say is that it seems pretty hard to go wrong when you’re eating all whole, unprocessed foods.  I’m unsure if it’s better for you than a balanced vegetarian or vegan diet (or even a healthy omnivorous diet.)  I’m not entirely convinced about the 118 degree line you don’t want to drag your veggies across.  But I’m intrigued enough to keep an open mind a listen for more.

Preparation and (lack of) variety-
Raw food, by the very virtue of being “raw,” makes eating an interesting and varied diet a continual challenge, requiring a lot of creative, ingenious preparation.  This does, on the plus side, generate creativity and appreciation for the food, but let’s look at this seriously: people are busy, people work, people have families to feed.  Dehydrating your own “bread” in advance, chopping, blending and otherwise making creative textures out of very fresh fruit and veggies (which Mother Nature decided to make beautiful, but not bite or fork sized for dainty human consumption) is not only time consuming but requires advance planning, trips to the farmers market, produce store, etc.  These do all seem like good things to me, but can be rather difficult to accomplish with an otherwise busy lifestyle.  I’ve seen raw bread, chocolate, honey, etc in my local Brooklyn natural foods stores now and living in NYC I’m lucky enough to have access to a handful of raw restaurants.  But as a busy Brooklynite, I hardly have time to make a home cooked meal more than a few days a week though fresh, good food is an obvious interest of mine, I’m skeptical of making one more leap of difficulty in food preparation.  The techniques and some equipment used frequently by raw foodists aren’t necessarily familiar to me or other home cooks.  And what I’ve noticed is that some common raw techniques (bean sprouting, dehydrating, etc.) require lots of advance planning, kitchen space, and in the case of dehydrating a lot of “active” prep time - if you consider waiting around for you dehydrator “active.”  Eating raw is a challenging lifestyle, and though I’m happy to see people take such a serious (can I even say loving?) approach to food preparation, some of the sci-fi (I’m thinking of dehydrating and whatever whipping/emulsion technique Pure Food and Wine used to make that excellent non-dairy ice cream!) cooking techniques seem strangely discordant to the straight-from-the-earth-to-your-mouth concept.  Also of concern is feeling deprived a lack of variety of foods — thinking I might miss hot soup in the winter specifically!  However, as a vegetarian it’s often assumed by non-vegetarians that I feel deprived because I don’t eat meat, which is totally not true so maybe it’s not a concern of raw foodists either.

Intention and Gratitude-
Because of the effort outlined above need to live a raw lifestyle, thinking about food and ingestion is something that raw foodists probably spend a lot of time on.  The upshot to this is that they cultivate a high appreciation and gratitude for the food they consume and a gratitude to freshness, vitality and a connectedness to the earth.  If nothing else, this is a good thing that anyone could benefit from, though there is no reason that gratitude and appreciation needs to be restricted to a raw foods lifestyle – anyone can be grateful and spend a few moments to appreciate what they eat and where it came from.

Enegry –
This one is a little esoteric, but it’s just sort of a feeling I have so bear with me – Let’s pretend for a sec that all food has an energy.  Chi, qi, an aura, energy, you know what I’m saying.   If you could visualize and compare the energy of a fast food cheeseburger, a tofu veggie stirfy, and a raw salad what do you think that would look like?  The energy of a cheeseburger would be all muddy and processed and striped of nutrients, dark, cloudy, spotty, and also residual with the rather unpleasant energy of a slaughterhouse cow.
The tofu veggie stirfry, stay with me folks, might be a clearer, stronger, more clean n’ natural energy as it is all plant-based.  The raw salad, brilliant with all the chi of sunlight and nutrients straight from the earth, would be the clear winner in this case.  Not sure how much this all is worth, but thanks for hearing me out on this one.

In Conclusion - I’m certainly interested and open minded about the benefits of raw foods, though I see the difficulty in preparing enough of a variety of dishes a drawback serious enough to deter people from reaping the befits of this foodstyle.  However, just as I suspect that omnivores can reap benefits from eating occasionally (or often!) eating vegetarian, the vegetarian/vegan can benefit from going occasionally raw.*

*I have, however, read somewhere that unless you eat ALL raw, it spoils most of the benefits since your body still continues to produce enzymes that raw foods give provide naturally, thus lessening the benefit of your body having to do less digestive work. (Though I still think sometimes is better than never!)

If you’re a raw foodist, entertaining the idea, think it’s crazy, whatever, I’d love to hear from you on any/all of these fronts.  Just trying to keep an open, realistic mind to this stuff and am happy to hear from any experts out there.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 4th, 2006 at 5:15 pm and is filed under Food Theory. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.