The Raw Deal

On a recent weeknight, two San Francisco omnivores went on what they proudly referred to as a “healthy date” to Café Gratitude. A raw vegan

restaurant, Café Gratitude serves, with a few exceptions, nothing that has been heated to over 118 degrees Fahrenheit, to keep the food’s vitamins, minerals, and enzymes intact.

The man had “nacho cheese” made of cashews, and the woman had “pizza,” also with nut cheese, and raw vegetables, piled on top of what looked like a big Wasa cracker. For dessert they had a slice of banana cream pie, whose creaminess was the result of coconut milk and coconut butter, sweetened with agave nectar, with a crust made of coconut and dates. There was no doubt in their minds that they were giving their bodies the temple treatment. Imagine their surprise if they were to have learned that, in the eyes of some raw foodists, they were nearly eating the equivalent of McDonald’s.

Raw food has become glamorous. Restaurants like Café Gratitude are opening up around the country—from Present Moment Café in St. Augustine, Florida, to Maggie’s Mercantile in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania—and lines of raw packaged foods are hitting the shelves of Whole Foods. You can get raw takeout, like at Pure Food and Wine in New York City, or have it delivered to you from catering companies like Los Angeles’s RAWvolution.

But this commercial success has led to a schism in the raw foods community. A school of purists thinks “gourmet” restaurants like Gratitude are seducing mainstream diners with secretly unhealthy

food. These traditionalists eat very little refined oil, few processed foods, or things like nut pâtés (an avocado or the occasional handful of nuts is about as caloric as it gets). Dinner, they believe, should be salad, or maybe tomatoes puréed with mango. In their eyes, the gourmet trend is potentially destructive to the raw foods movement because its aim is sales, not maximum health. Some of them feel that diners like the couple at Gratitude are getting hoodwinked into thinking they’re being healthy, when in fact they’re eating a lot of excess fat and calories.

“It’s an unfortunate twist to expose people to what we’re saying is something different, and the world’s most nutritious foods, then giving them raw pizza and raw lasagne,” says Douglas Graham, a raw foods author and endurance athlete. “We miss the opportunity to make use of raw foods for what they are, rather than turn them into a poor excuse of mimicry of something that was never truly, if you will, nutritious in the first place.”

The gourmet raw foodists counter that their pies and pizzas are gateway dishes to eating more raw fruits and vegetables.

“For people who really need comfort foods, they would not be able to start out eating simply,” says Cherie Soria, founder of the Living Light Culinary Arts Institute in Fort Bragg, California, a gourmet raw foods cooking school.

And those in the gourmet camp point out that nut pâté and banana cream pie are still a big step up from trans-fatty fries and hormone-laden burgers. At the raw restaurant Quintessence in New York City, you can get the Big Moc: two “burger” patties with lettuce, tomato, and special sauce.

What both camps share is an almost religious worship of raw fruits and vegetables, and a belief that people should be eating them as much as possible, all day long. It’s the groups’ methods that differ: the pop-lite megachurch version of gourmet raw versus the messianic approach of purists like Graham. The megachurch may get more members, but they may not be well schooled in the particulars.

LET THERE BE CHEESE

At a conference at the Living Light Culinary Arts Institute last August, in a small room on the top floor, raw foods author and chiropractor Leslie van Romer shared a traumatic childhood memory. Her voice trembling with anger, the lanky van Romer spoke of being forced to eat roasted chicken and chocolate chip cookies at the family dinner table.

“Is it any wonder we’re physically addicted to sugar, salt, caffeine, oils, and flavors, and we’ve been physically addicted since birth?!” she spat. One must be “vigilant,” and stave off cravings, van Romer

said. She advocated a diet of 10 kinds of fruits and 10 kinds of vegetables a day—what she calls her “10/10” diet. The philosophy is that procuring so many types of produce won’t leave you much time, head space, or stomach capacity to eat much else. “There are things being served here at Living Light,” van Romer said, conspiratorially, “that aren’t necessarily good for you.”

Yes, in fact a few rooms down, raw foods chef Nomi Shannon demonstrated how to make whipped cream out of blended cashews, dates, and agave nectar. The audience of about 50 raw foods enthusiasts scribbled notes, and when the grayish-white paste was passed around in Dixie Cups, the attendees greedily scraped the bottoms of the cups with their spoons. Downstairs, a couple of hippies were selling raw, “spiritual” chocolates, according to their sign.

Fifteen years ago, the idea of a raw foodist eating whipped cream might have been the opening line of a joke. The movement started in the second half of the 20th century, when a handful of raw food health activists emerged, the most prominent being Herbert Shelton and Ann Wigmore, an intense woman with giant glasses, a pageboy haircut, and shiny shirts.

The diet was hard-core. Cherie Soria attended a Wigmore retreat in the early 1990s, before starting the Living Light Culinary Arts Institute, and found that the food was all blended into a

bland green soup. “Once a week we had a salad we could chew, but there was something like soup over it.” The point of the diet was optimum health, not enjoyment.

After being served a fermented sunflower pâté that seemed like a bad version of raw vegan cheese, Soria started experimenting to find out if she could make a really good version. Turned out that soaked, ground, fermented almonds had the same texture as feta. Cashew cheese “was so much like Philly Cream Cheese you could hardly tell the difference,” and she could make Parmesan from pine nuts in a dehydrator with salt.

Raw, the first (and now defunct) raw foods restaurant in the world, as far as anybody can remember, opened in San Francisco around that same time, in 1993. Juliano (one word, like Madonna) discovered how to make raw crackers, the base for gourmet raw mainstays like sandwiches and pizza, when a jar of buckwheat he’d been sprouting became “oversprouted, slimy, and gross.” Immobilized by a foot injury, he couldn’t attend to it and it became “totally dried out” into a kind of tasty crust.

By 1997, people had figured out how to make raw versions of things like enchiladas, pizza, and lasagne, and Soria had opened the Living Light Culinary Arts Institute. Today, the school has trained more than 2,000 chefs, including Roxanne Klein of the now-closed Roxanne’s restaurant in Marin County, California, and probably the most famous raw foods chef. Klein is friends with raw foodist and actor Woody Harrelson, and she coauthored a “cookbook,” Raw, with Chef Charlie Trotter. In large part thanks to her, raw foods broke free of their fringy-hippie vibe and became associated with Hollywood and celebrity. Eating raw no longer meant having to eat green mush served by somebody with a pageboy haircut. But it also meant you were no longer eating for optimum health.

WEIRD SCIENCE

Raw foodists talk about how they don’t need sleep. They feel light. They glow. They heal themselves from fatal illnesses. Ann Wigmore wrote about successfully treating her colon cancer by eating weeds she’d foraged in a vacant lot.

Unlike vegetarianism or even veganism, raw foodism has a halo effect that often feels divorced from a scientific understanding of nutrition. Sarma Melngailis, who owns New York’s Pure Food

and Wine, described the feeling of going raw on her blog as “like being on E.”

Raw foodists claim that when plants are cooked, their enzymes are broken down so that the body must use its own enzymes to digest the food. This, raw foodists say, overtaxes the body. But scientists have not found this to be true.

“This is nonsense,” says David A. Levinsky, professor of nutritional sciences and psychology at Cornell University. “One of the first things our body does when a particular food is ingested is break the proteins down anyway, so we can absorb them.” The body produces more than enough enzymes, say scientists, to digest food without the help of the plants’ enzymes.

Though some vitamins and minerals—folic acid, for instance—are sensitive to heat and can be destroyed by cooking, studies have shown that letting vegetables sit for a week or two in your fridge before eating them will cause them to lose more nutritional value than steaming or lightly sautéing them.

“If you boil vegetables to death, you’ll lose some of the vitamins, but most people don’t do it this way,” says Bruce N. Ames, professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of California–Berkeley.

However the persistence of this belief about cooking and enzymes serves the gourmet raw foods movement well. Like the label organic, the term raw has begun to stretch to include not just caloric restaurant food but also packaged energy bars, granola, candy, and other questionably healthy items.

The same old rules apply to raw foods as they do to any kind of diet: Fats, sugars, and even protein should be consumed in extreme moderation, and one should eat as many water- and fiber-rich fruits and vegetables as possible. But the consumer can justify eating a candy bar, and even think it’s healthy, because it hasn’t been cooked and therefore contains magical, life-giving enzymes.

Rick Dina, a Northern California chiropractor and raw foods educator who teaches at Living Light, has an office close to where Roxanne’s restaurant was. “My wife and I would meet [fans of the restaurant] who said, ‘I went on a raw food diet, and I gained weight!’” says Dina. “Well, they went on a gourmet raw food diet, which is rich, creamy, and dehydrated. They kind of defeated the purpose.”

Dina is one of the purists: For breakfast he has a few cantaloupes; for lunch, salad; for dinner, salad. But he thinks eating lots of vegetables, even if you’re also eating cooked grains and the occasional piece of meat, is better than eating a bunch of sweet, processed foods that just happen to be raw. He jokingly calls people who go raw, only to eat packaged foods and restaurant dishes, productarians.

Purist Douglas Graham authored a book called The 80/10/10 Diet, which refers to the percentage of carbohydrates to fat to protein he believes should comprise one’s daily caloric intake. A typical breakfast consists of eight peaches. Lunch or dinner might be a bowl of soup made from three tomatoes blended up with two cucumbers.

“So far, at least in the last 20 years that I have been talking about 80/10/10, nobody has wanted to follow suit,” says Graham, referring to the world of raw foods cookbook authors, chefs, and entrepreneurs. “There’s no product associated with it. Nothing to sell. People can do it on their own.”

And therein lies the conundrum for the raw foods movement. How do you commercialize vegetable matter in its natural state? How do you sell a diet that’s founded on the idea that you can do nothing better for your health than picking and eating weeds from a vacant lot? The answer is, you can’t.