295536 Tue Dec 30 17:14:25 -0800 2003 15 27 General Chowhounding Topics 0 1624518 As many of you might have heard already, there is a new movement sweeping through many fine restaurants embracing the philosophy of raw foods or living foods. Sure, as a veggie head, I can appreciate any chance for bringing vegetarian/vegan options to fine cuisine, but does it work? Can you pull off raw food as fine cuisine? Now with the publication of Trotter's new cookbook (written with Roxanne Klein), "Raw" it seems that this movement has hit the big time. I've never been to Roxanne's restaurant in CA nor opted for the raw menu at Trotter's, but after flipping through the book, I have to admit I am very intrigued. I've always loved the veggie menu at Trotter's, and have tried to adapt a lot of my cooking in his style. But using cashew cheese in a terrine? Has anybody tried these dishes before? If you are unfamiliar with raw foods, it is the concept that when processed, foods lose much of their nutritional value. Hence, raw cuisine prohibits using foods that have been "processed," in other words, the temp of the food is not allowed to reach 118 deg F. This also precludes the use of any meat, poultry, fish, or animal product (cheese, milk, cream, eggs). The thought goes on to say that all foods inherently have the requisite digestive enzymes to break itself down. When you cook food, these enzymes are then denatured and lost. This translates into "more stress" for our GI tract and less complete breakdown and use of the food. Tue Dec 30 17:14:25 -0800 2003 0 Musigny 1 1624522 I live in Los Angeles and have had a chance to try many "raw food" dishes and found it antithetical to everything I like about good food. We have *wonderful* produce here but you wouldn't know if from the raw food movement. There isn't a lot of focus on using great or locally sourced vegetables and most of the "cuisine" requires copious amounts of non-native, imported produce, i.e. tons of young coconut. Many of the vegetables are mangled, pulverized, smashed, and pounded to mimic "known foods" rather than good foods. I find the idea of a carefully composed salad with an organic cheese far, FAR more appealing then flax faux cardboard "pizza" and a great peach superior to ground carob goo masquerading as dessert. I shop most weeks at the terrific Hollywood Farmer's Market. There is stall calling itself "Seed Cuisine" which sells *disgusting* raw foods. The back of the stand is piled full of shipping boxes from third world countries shipped halfway across the world, fueled by petrochemical waste. The irony is great. Tue Dec 30 17:41:10 -0800 2003 1624518 0 JudiAU 2 1624540 love yr post! i hv not tried any raw "cuisine" yet, and i may taste eventually.... but to me, "raw" is locally grown, organic produce eaten in it most perfectly ripe and tasty state, no contrivances necessary. Tue Dec 30 19:48:28 -0800 2003 1624522 0 fat kitty 3 1624563 I have to second this opinion. For my tastes, the best "food movement" around at the moment is the "SlowFood" movement and the similar (and related) trend led by people like Alice Waters of using local and seasonal ingrediants in restaurants (and home cooking). These can often be organic and frequently are heirloom varieties. At times this means taking some popular dishes off of a menu, and it frequently means somewhat more work for the home cook (though not all that much) but the different in flavors, intensity, and overall goodness is quite significent. But I am not a fan of the "raw" movement as I have seen it described so far. Sure, I love sushi as much as the next person, but I also want many dishes "processed" so I don't get sick, and I certainly enjoy many non-raw dishes (cheese immediately comes to mind). Cooking is an art made of many things - great ingrediants and selection/combination of them is just one, presentation is another, but the other part is certainly the preparation - which includes the more "traditional" elements of cooking (heating things, processing them, allowing for the chemical and other changes that occur and result in the wonderful flavors, safe-to-eat dishes, and many delicious things NOT found in nature (bread for example, beer/wine for another). I'm not sure I understand how the "raw" movement justifies drinking wine with their meals if they are so against "processed" foods of any kind. Anyway, I hope the Slow Food/local/regional/organic movement keeps growing. Shannon Tue Dec 30 22:23:28 -0800 2003 1624540 0 Shannon Clark 4 1624621 First of all, I have worked as a personal chef, and am a graduate of Johnson & Wales culinary school where I took many nutrition classes. Before that, I was enrolled in a pre-med program in undergrad, so I took a lot of physiology classes. One of my clients as a personal chef was a crazy rich lady who was into juicing. That was fine, I made her vegetable juices for her, no problem. She was also a vegan. No problem, I can cook vegan food that tastes just as good as anything else. She wanted me to put oxygenated water in her juices--whatever, she is paying me, I will do it. Then, she caught whiff of the raw foods fad from her daughter and son in law. And she handed me these cookbooks, and she wanted me to make raw food for her. She started telling me about all the enzymes that are in fresh foods, and how heat kills them. I tried to tell her that our stomach acid kills them, too, but she would not listen. I tried to tell her that leaving protein-laden foods in an oven (ground soaked grain paste drying out to become "pizza crust") below 140 degrees F for longer than four hours was food-borne illness. She relented on that point, when I said I would not make anything that was actively dangerous to her, because I didn't want to be responsible for harming her. But she insisted on doing this raw foods diet. So, I ground, soaked, pureed, juiced, dehydrated and otherwise mangled perfectly good vegetables, fruits, nuts and grains and created glop of various levels of edibility for her. Some of it tasted good, but most of it was distinctly unappetizing. She would watch me cook, using a food processor, juicer, blender, dehydrator and tell me how much more "natural" this cuisine was--how it was the way man cooked at the dawn of time. I wanted to look at her and say, "If that is the case, where is the neolithic Cusinart? Where is the neolithic juicer?" The fact is, without all of the specialized electrical equipment, I couldn't produce those foods. Grain simply isn't digestible without soaking it and grinding it finely, if it is uncooked. If early man ate that way, the cook would burn more calories grinding, pureeing and mashing everything to make it edible than they took in eating it, and thus would starve to death! Then, I met the daughter and son-in-law, who had not eaten cooked food in five years. They looked like they had come from a concentration camp. Their skin was sallow and thier eyes were hollow. Their hair was dull and thin. And they were so painfully thin, I could have easily lifted them with one arm, both the man and the woman. Granted, I am a big, muscular farm-girl created out of fine Germanic engineering, but still--these folks were boney. And they both had sniffles and hacking coughs. They obviously were malnourished. Willfully. To sum up: raw fruits and vegetables are great as part of a balanced diet that includes cooked foods. We evolved eating cooked foods, and cooking not only renders many foods edible that are basically inedible, but it also makes many foods safe from parasites and disease-causing bacteria. In the interest of nutrition and health, as well as culinary artistry--avoid the "raw foods fad" like the plague that it is. Wed Dec 31 11:48:24 -0800 2003 1624563 0 BarbaraF 5 1624705 Exactly what I would have said, if only I could write as well. This too shall pass. Thu Jan 01 12:11:14 -0800 2004 1624621 0 Karl 3 1624661 Agreed. The intense labor involved in making these foods is enough to send anyone back to the corner fast-food joint just to get a meal in their stomach, because you could starve by the time this stuff is dehydrated, dried, sliced, diced, rolled & combined. Another gripe is that this is just not nutritionally sound - "denaturing" happens inside our own bodies as well as through the cooking process. AND food tastes good hot! Half of good restaurant service is getting the food to the table hot. Last night I baked fresh orange/cardamom sweet bread, and you can bet it was in my mouth moments after it was cool enough (marginally) to slice. And it was goooood. Wed Dec 31 17:36:19 -0800 2003 1624540 0 snackish 1 1624525 There is a excellent review of Roxannes that was posted by Cabrales earlier this year, after reading that I was sure I would not waste time trying it myself. I have tried some of the offerings at Farmers Markets here in LA and agree completely with JudiAU, the concepts and flavors of the "new" raw foods just don't do anything for me. Charlie Trotter's style has always placed a huge emphasis on exotic sourced items and always seemed very elitist to me. I am much more impressed by the Alice Waters school, local and pure. There are some good points about eating foods in a less processed state. When I first stopped eating red meat and had not yet found a diet/level of vegitarianism that was healthy for me, I experimented for almost a year eating only raw foods. With a group of like minded friends, it was fun to play around with all kinds of raw combinations. It sensitized my taste buds to the fine qualities of fruits and vegies, and I tried many things I never apprieciated before, persimons, homemade olives, cashew butter. Most of what I ate was really just variations of salads, we didnt try to mimic cooked foods really. We used lots of local grown produce , which is pretty easy here in So. Cal. I also lost the last of my teenage baby fat!! But I will NEVER forget the flavor of the first bite of cooked food I tasted, how incredibly delicious it seemed! And I have to say being on a raw food diet for a year, did not provide a huge health benefit, if anything it seemed to reduce immunity to infections, and some of my friends developed dermitis and things that must have been symptoms of some missing nutrients!! Tue Dec 30 18:21:44 -0800 2003 1624518 0 ciaolette 2 1624541 I have never tried raw food, but I had a roommate in college who was a raw foodist, and she was very careful to make sure she had the right balance of nutrients. That said, she was _always_ sick, and had terrible acne. Her other raw food friends at the school were much the same-- always had the flu or a cold, bad acne, bad skin, thin/falling out hair, and (to me, at least), a funny body odor, like yeast. (Not that a carnivore's odor isn't offensive to some, but . . .) Tue Dec 30 19:58:11 -0800 2003 1624525 0 EMDB 1 1624547 As a pretense to a complete "cuisine" it is really not worth taking seriously, and in that guise is often just masking an ersatz religion. But I welcome creative ideas about preparing interesting raw foods; unfortunately, most of the new ideas don't seem terribly durable.... Tue Dec 30 20:58:37 -0800 2003 1624518 0 Karl S. 1 1624558 Well, just to give you context for my remarks, I am neither a vegan nor a vegetarian, nor am I connected with the food or healthcare industries in any way, well, except as a lay consumer. I've done the teensiest amount of research on the raw food movement simply because about 8 years ago I lived near a restaurant in San Francisco called, well, "Raw" (later changed its name to Organics, I think) and it piqued my curiosity. That having been said, humankind "invented" fire fairly early in evolution and we've been cooking our foods for oodles of eons since then. Certainly I believe that processing and the use of chemicals has gotten way out of hand in the last hundred years or so, which has endangered our health and our planet. But, I think a movement towards "raw" cuisine is extreme and reactionary. As far as raw food as cuisine is concerned, well, I found the food at Raw lacked the subtlety and delicate balance I expect of fine cuisine. Also --and this is something I've never understood about vegetarian or vegan cuisine in general when I've encountered it-- everything on the menu was a mock of some meat or cooked dish, including a beet juice drink called "blood." Blech. I've linked below Dr. Andrew Weil's thoughts on the raw food movement. He's sort of the pop guru on nutrition these days... Also, if you are a subscriber to the UC Berkeley Wellness Letter, you can find their comments in the July 2003 edition on their website. For those who are not subscribers, you can just see the summary paragraph if you cut and paste the link below into your browser: http://wellnessletter.com/search/search.php?q=raw+food&r=20 ~TDQ Link: http://www.drweil.com/app/cda/drw_cda.html-command=TodayQA-questionId=3035-pt=Question Tue Dec 30 21:40:25 -0800 2003 1624518 0 The Dairy Queen 2 1624594 Thank you for the link. When I saw the thread title, I thought of a Jeffrey Steingarten column entitled "Salad The Silent Killer". He addresses the same problems with raw foods that Dr. Weil does- lack of disgestibility, toxins, etc. As I understood it, humans invented cooking in order to make a lot of foods more nutritious for us. Many foods need to be cooked for them to be really good for us. Wed Dec 31 09:10:18 -0800 2003 1624558 0 lissar 3 1624646 i don't know that the purpose was nutrition, but i am almost certain that the thousandth straight day of raw buffalo butt had somebody near tears! Wed Dec 31 15:24:47 -0800 2003 1624594 0 renee 1 1624565 Strict raw foodism is a pseudoscientific excuse for an eating disorder. Obviously, ample servings produce are key to a healthy diet. An ideal diet includes a wide variety of raw and cooked foods. Gentle cooking by stir frying, steaming, or blanching can offer the best of both worlds in terms of taste and nutrition. Some nutrients are best absorbed from cooked foods, and others from raw foods. A strict raw food diet excludes way too many healthy foods. Tue Dec 30 22:29:10 -0800 2003 1624518 0 Lindsay B. 2 1624577 If God wanted us to eat all food raw She wouldn't have invented fire. Wed Dec 31 00:45:35 -0800 2003 1624565 0 Dorothy 1 1624588 I am not a raw-foodist. However, I bought the RAW book in hopes of experimenting with raw food as fine cuisine. Prior to the purchase, I have enjoyed, and still do enjoy the water and meat from young coconut and pick up cases frequently from a local Asian market. I like to make nut milks and incorporate them into some of my breakfast concoctions. I also love fresh ripe fruits and vegetables at their peak eaten raw in salads, out of hand, juiced and made into smoothies. I have owned a dehydrator for some time, and I have a Champion juicer sitting prominently on my counter for 10 years - these items are used with frequency in preparing raw cuisine. I would require a high-speed blender to complete the holy trinity of raw-food preparation, but I'm conducting my experiments with the aid of a cuisinart and regular old blender. So far, I have made a few staple items out of the book. First, I made the fermented beverage, rejuvelac, in order to prepare the cashew cheese. I like the stuff and it was fun to sprout the wheat and watch it ferment on my kitchen counter. The resulting cashew cheese is interesting in a yeasty-cheesy way and a little bit sticky in texture. Okay sampled on a rye wasa cracker on it's own, but I think I will like it better jazzed up with additional seasoning. A nice alternative for someone who is dairy-free. Also made the golden flax dragon crackers (just finished dehydrating this morning to perfect crispiness). I tasted a corner last night and they were very, very good, Even picky young daughter was compelled to try a nibble and wanted more, stating they reminded her of Indian food - which they do with the addition of garam masala in a papadum way. I will definitely make these again with other spice and flavor combinations because it is simply a great cracker which bakes while I sleep! Plenty of advance prep and organization is involved to utilize this book,not unlike other Trotter books, but I'm enjoying the process. Wed Dec 31 08:25:07 -0800 2003 1624518 0 Heidi Claire