If you’ve read the previous chapters, you’ve heard my story. You know how and why I began eating raw, how it has changed my life, and what pleasure and satisfaction it has brought me. As a result, if you’re not already into raw food, I hope you’re at least beginning to understand the benefits of eating this way. You already have some ideas about what raw food is. If nothing more, you know that raw food is uncooked! That’s a start. But we haven’t really discussed the question what is raw food? The answer seems simple enough but, in fact, not all uncooked foods—not even uncooked foods of the same kind—are created equal. One uncooked cauliflower is not as good for you as the next. Since not everyone who eats raw agrees about what to eat and what not to eat, let me begin to explain.
Different people will say different things about what is raw and what is not. Strictly speaking, any form of alteration, adulteration, depletion, or transformation of a food that diminishes its original nutritional content or modifies its living structure makes it less than “truly raw.” But we live in an imperfect world. I accept that. My standard for food is this: the more living, fresh, organic, and uncooked a food is, the better! Dr. Brantley once told me that the closer I eat to God—meaning from the earth to me with no one in between cooking, X-raying, homogenizing, and so forth—the better it is for me. I like to think that when it comes to what we put into our bodies, we should take the ancient Greek father of medicine, Hippocrates, seriously and “first do no harm.” But why just avoid harm? Why not do good too? I want the best food my body can find. Here are some factors to look out for as you start exploring the world of raw food.
Some raw foods are intrinsically more desirable—meaning they’re better in nutritional quality and more “life giving”—than others. Cooking isn’t the only thing that damages food. Today many foods, without our being told, are being “irradiated.” A food that is irradiated isn’t cooked in the traditional sense, but it is processed in a way that alters the molecular structure and the integrity of food. It is hit with radiation. I believe it is no longer life giving in the same way that a natural, unadulterated food is. You’ll hear all sorts of things about how irradiation is harmless. But supposedly so is cooking. How does irradiation work? There are three different kinds of irradiation technology. One exposes foods to a radioactive substance, either cobalt or cesium. Another streams high-energy electrons into the food. The third zaps food with X-rays. Each kills supposedly disease-causing microorganisms even though a certain amount of the right soil organism is actually good for you. At the same time they kill essential life-giving enzymes and nutrients. Speaking for myself, if food is irradiated I want nothing to do with it.
Similarly, salad greens that are soaked in preservatives such as sulfites to keep them crisp and colorful on the salad bar (or even in the produce section of your supermarket) are raw from the standpoint of cooking. But while they appear fresh for a longtime, they simply aren’t. It’s all show. They have more in common with a well-made-up embalmed veggie corpse than live, organic raw food. They can cause liver toxicity and elicit severe allergic-like reactions in sensitive people. I can’t honestly consider preservative-filled foods raw.
When I say I want fresh food, I mean food that is still living. Preservatives are out, period. Substances that were formerly foods but have turned into potential museum exhibits simply are not food. That means no MSG (monosodium glutamate), no BHA (butylated hydroxyanisole) or BHT (butylated hydroxytoluene). No sodium nitrite, sodium sulfite, or sodium dioxide. These chemicals are not welcome in my kitchen, let alone in my body. (Read the labels on most dried fruits!)
Canned foods are never fresh, and most have preservatives in them. Even if they don’t contain preservatives, they are nearly always cooked before being canned. And whether they are cooked or not, keeping something in a can on a shelf for a long time requires that the enzymes be destroyed so that the food would be dead, and if the food’s not dead I don’t want to know what might be alive and growing inside!
Fresh-picked foods sprayed with pesticides or grown in soils that have been depleted of their mineral content may be raw in the sense that they are uncooked, but they too are far less than ideal as foods because they might contain potentially dangerous chemical additives or have been robbed of essential nutrients that your body craves. And what about foods that have been genetically altered? That’s a subject worthy of a whole book. But let’s just say this: perhaps we should take a hint from the Europeans, who will not import American foods that have been altered genetically or have been injected with hormones. They consider these foods to be a significant health risk.
For a food to be living, it has to be fresh. Whenever any food is harvested it begins to lose its vitality. Some foods are naturally protected from the air, and their vitality is captured, slowing down the process of spoiling. The peel on a banana, for example, is virtually airtight. It’s nature’s attempt at keeping the fruit’s nutritious contents fresh for as long as possible. Remove the peel and expose it to air, and you better eat it or it will turn brown and rapidly start to spoil. Bananas travel well. If they didn’t, we wouldn’t get them in North America. Some other foods don’t stay fresh nearly as long. Meat and fish, for example, deteriorate very quickly, and even some fruits and vegetables such as mineral-dense lettuces last only a few days in prime condition after being picked.
Since the beginning of time, humans have tried to preserve food from the ravages of time and the changes of seasons. In recent history, we have developed refrigeration, freezing, and vacuum sealing—the three best ways to keep many foods fresh for as long as possible. But not all of these methods are good for all foods. A frozen banana may in itself be delicious, but have you ever seen what one looks and tastes like after it is thawed? Trust me, while it may be the next best thing to a ripe, truly fresh banana in terms of nutrition, it looks and tastes nothing like a fresh banana—or anything the vast majority of us would want to eat.
Thankfully, fresh foods are readily available almost everywhere today. (For a starter list of places where you might find some, check out chapter 6.) As a general rule, Dr. Brantley once told me that if you can’t find the top ten items on your shopping list in the two outermost aisles of the supermarket—where you find the fresh produce and the meat and fish departments—you’re not buying raw food. And even there, you may not be choosing the best examples of raw foods that you could find if you make some extra effort.
The economics of producing food has created a trade-off between what is most nutritious and what produces the highest yield and most reliable crop. To succeed in the highly competitive world of agriculture, farmers put artificial pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers into soils. It’s not good for the soil, it’s not good for the food, and it’s not good for you and me. But it is good for business because it keeps food costs down and profits predictable. As a result, there’s a lot of produce out there in the stores that looks good but could be a lot better for you (and taste better too) if it weren’t for the power and profit making of big business. Let’s hear it for laissez-faire capitalism!
It’s hard to believe that just a century ago this was not so. But the development of chemicals and technologies for warfare in World Wars I and II spawned the agri-chemical business and with it came the use of DDT (dichlorodiphenyl-trichloroethane) as a way to kill insects in 1939. DDT has since been banned in the United States, but parathion, an organophosphorous pesticide developed in 1943, is still used today. So are countless other synthetic substances. And while produce exposed to DDT is not supposed to be imported into the United States, some does slip through.
There was a time when farming was organic. Organic agriculture is the oldest form of agriculture on earth. Instead of using artificial chemical fertilizers and pesticides, organic farmers rotate and cover crops and use natural-based products to maintain soils and increase their fertility. They allow fields to lie fallow, to “rest.” They use natural means to limit the growth of pests and increase the populations of beneficial insects (yes, there are “good bugs”). As a result, the food you get is not laced with chemicals that can make you sick. It is organic (natural, or living) as opposed to inorganic (artificial, or dead).
It seems like a pretty simple concept to me: “healthy soil, healthy food, healthy people”—which is also the slogan of the Rodale Institute, associated with Rodale Press, the health-and-fitness publisher. If we are principally concerned about people (and not just profits) we should promote the production and consumption of healthy food, and the healthiest foods come from healthy soils. In stores such as Whole Foods Market and Wild Oats, the produce is marked either “conventional” or “organic.” If I have a choice, I buy foods that are organic. While they’re not putting the major supermarket chains out of business, more and more Whole Foods Market and Wild Oats stores and others like them are opening all across the United States and in Canada. You can find the one nearest to you through their Web sites, www.wholefoods.com and www.wildoats.com. But even if there isn’t one near you, it’s still possible to find smaller local supermarkets and health-food stores that carry organic foods. Call around and ask the health-food stores. Just be very picky and careful about your raw sources.
Okay, this seems obvious—raw food is uncooked food. In the United States, by law, raw foods should be clearly marked with terms such as raw, cold-pressed, unpasteurized, crude, crue, uncooked, unprocessed, and so on. That’s pretty simple. But the problem is that there are all sorts of cooked foods masquerading as raw. These include various dairy products. If something is pasteurized, it is cooked. You won’t find raw milk in the dairy section (in most places, it’s actually against the law). And unless your supermarket has an excellent cheese selection and is serious about marking the raw ones, you’ll have to spend some time looking at labels to identify the ones that aren’t pasteurized or have additives. (It’s amazing what you’ll find in the cheese section, including some things labeled “cheese product”—meaning they aren’t really cheese at all!) Generally speaking, unless it’s found in the produce section of the store or bought directly from the farm, raw food must say “raw.” If it doesn’t, it is nearly certain that what you have is not raw.
Canned foods are almost certain to be cooked. That canned tuna is not raw. Forget canned vegetables. Even if they bear some resemblance to fresh, uncooked food, they’re not. They’re cooked.
Take lox, for example. Though it looks a lot like sliced, fresh salmon, lox is smoked salmon and, yes, smoking is cooking. But in some stores right next to the lox in the same sort of packaging you’ll find salmon slices in marinades or cured with salt, and these can be considered raw. (My favorite kind is Spence & Company gravlax.) So it’s not always so easy to tell cooked from uncooked food at first glance. It’s important to actually read the label to see how things are prepared. It may take awhile, but you’ll begin to get very good at figuring out which foods are cooked and which are not because they are side by side. It’s just a matter of practice, and once you know you’ll keep coming back for your favorite products.
The temperature at which food is served is not a reliable indicator of whether something is raw or cooked. Of course, if food is steaming hot you know it is cooked. But there are gazpachos that are served cold but are made with canned tomatoes that are definitely cooked. There are cold pasta salads that are made from cooked wheat, something I won’t even consider eating. And the hummus you’ll find in your local supermarket has cooked chickpeas even though it’s kept refrigerated. Then again, there are raw pastas, such as the Spaghetti al Pesto and Raw Hummus in chapter 10 that are neither made from wheat nor served chilled (they’re served at room temperature).
One restaurant I frequent in New York is Sushi Samba. The tuna and salmon seviches there are among my favorite main courses, and that’s why these recipes are also in this book. Along with their various kinds of sashimi, you couldn’t ask for more delicious, high-protein raw foods anywhere.
Seviche and sashimi are raw foods but sushi itself is not. That’s right—though it is served cold, sushi is typically made from a combination of various uncooked, sashimi-grade seafoods and cooked white rice. Since rice is hard and undigestible when it’s uncooked, the only way to eat it raw is to germinate it, which they don’t do at most non-raw restaurants. So give me the fish but spare me the rice.
One of the most common misconceptions people have about eating raw food is that it’s really all about salads, which is wrong on two fronts. First, as you already know by now, there is a lot more to eat without cooking than lettuce and veggies in a bowl. But equally wrong is the notion that anything you find in a salad is raw. Like sushi, many salads are mixed foods, partially raw and partially cooked. For example, if you have a hard-boiled egg in a salad, it’s cooked. If you add dressing, there is a good chance that it’s made, either partially or fully, from cooked ingredients. I am not saying you can never eat anything that is cooked. What I am saying is that a lot of raw foods come with cooked foods, and you should be aware of that. And, as with sushi, even if the food on your plate seems raw, you should be honest with yourself and recognize that you’re eating a mixed food.
It’s also important to make some distinctions among vegetarian, vegan, and raw food. When people hear that I eat raw food, many assume I’m a vegetarian. I’m not. The fact is that more and more, I’m inclined to pass on eating meat. But I do eat raw dairy products and some raw fish if I find a reliable source. The day may come when I give up eating these things entirely, and then I will be a raw vegetarian.
There are many raw foodists who are vegetarians, and a good number are not only vegetarians but go one step further and become vegans. A vegan diet not only excludes animal flesh but all other animal products as well. This means no eggs, no dairy, and in some circles even no honey since it is an animal product; most vegans cook their food. But most of the best-known figures in the raw-food movement eat a raw-vegan diet. My favorite raw restaurants do not serve meat, fish, eggs, milk, or cheese. Some serve honey. They are considered raw-vegan restaurants.
There are a number of reasons people choose one or another of the possible forms of raw foodism. I started eating raw for health reasons. Many start out with health concerns that lead them to associate with people whose worldview includes other ethical issues and philosophies. While I am a spiritually sensitive person, my own religious background and moral convictions have meant I’ve never so much as flirted with Eastern religious philosophies or practices where dietary practices and prohibitions are spelled out explicitly. Many who follow this route become vegetarian or vegan. Not me. Besides, there are essential nutrients and oils that are more readily available in meats, fish, and dairy than they are in vegetables.
Quintessence Restaurant, my regular haunt in New York, serves vegan food but allows honey products. And while probably only a very few of its patrons think of it as anything but a raw restaurant, in fact all of its food is also kosher. Not being Jewish, eating kosher food isn’t essential to me. But even for the non-observant there is something to be said for traditional dietary regulations. I don’t eat bottom-dwelling seafood, for example, and if it comes out of the water but doesn’t have fins (unless it’s a sea vegetable) I won’t touch it. Nevertheless, anyone who wants to keep kosher should know that it’s possible to eat both raw and kosher. Recipes in the book like Spaghetti al Pesto, Carol’s Everyday Guacamole and countless utterly scrumptious desserts prove that indeed it’s “easy as (raw) pie.”