| >> Raw-food diet? 'Uncooked' doesn't mean 'easy' |
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Would somebody please explain to me why we're still hearing about raw food diets? When this ridiculously labor-intensive way of eating first started getting attention five or six years ago, I ignored it and hoped it would go the way of the grapefruit diet. OK, that's not entirely true. At the time, I was vegan and . . . At this point, we need to interrupt to define our terms. Vegetarians generally eat dairy, but no meat. Vegans eat no animal products at all, often not even honey. Raw foodists make vegans look like culinary party animals. Raw foodists believe heating food above a certain temperature (somewhere around 118 degrees) destroys its beneficial enzymes. They contend that this is bad for your health. So everything raw foodists eat is, well, raw. As you can imagine, that is somewhat limiting. It's also naturally vegan, which returns me to my point -- I didn't initially dismiss raw foodism. As a vegan at the time, I was intrigued by this new approach, so I grabbed a handful of cookbooks (yes, I get the irony of that) on the subject and took a look. It had to be a misprint or a joke, I figured: I couldn't find a single recipe that took fewer than six hours to prepare, and many took more. Eighteen hours to make a sandwich? The reason for the lengthy prep times, I learned, is that to replicate foods that otherwise require cooking, ingredients are either soaked in water or dehydrated for long periods, and sometimes both. Rice, for example, is soaked overnight. "Bread" is a mash of grains and sprouts that have been soaked, flattened into thin bread-like cakes and then dehydrated. Yum! Now, don't get me wrong; I am not afraid of working hard for good, healthy food. I frequently make my own pasta and ice cream, I grow my own herbs and I even make all of my 9-month-old son's baby food from scratch. But there is work and then there is raw foodism. It's
not so much that I disagree with the philosophy behind raw foodism.
I have no doubt it is an incredibly healthy way to eat. I also
don't doubt that you can make some excellent and delicious dishes
this way. It was after this consideration that I dismissed this way of eating as a short-lived fad. I was wrong. Not about it being a fad, but about its duration. During the past few years I have seen so many mainstream media references to this diet you would think Dr. Atkins had somehow endorsed the raw food idea. It's got to be the novelty of it. It certainly does not, cannot, reflect a rising tide of Average Joes dining on raw almond milk and "ravioli" made (over the course of many hours) from flaked coconut meat. The latter dish is an example from one of the latest raw food cookbooks, Matthew Kenney and Sarma Melngailis' "Raw Food/Real World" (Regan Books, $34.95, 384 pages). When my review copy arrived recently, my first thought was hopeful. This diet has been floating around for a few years now. Surely somebody has come up with a way to make it accessible for the average person. Surely Kenney and Melngailis would be the sort of people to do it. Both graduated from the French Culinary Institute, and Kenney has received numerous accolades as an up-and-coming chef. Well, it was a nice thought. Although many of the book's salads seem simple and speedy to make (but then again, they are salads -- shouldn't they be?), step one (of five) of the double mango and Thai basil salad takes 24 to 48 hours. That's not a typo. Who cooks this way? The soups are mostly gazpacho or other chilled varieties, and seem reasonable, but recipes in other sections of the book are so complicated as to be comical. Because nothing can be cooked, every ingredient has to be specially prepared. Thus, for the mushroom and fava bean tarts, you must first make the tart shells (nine to 15 hours), then the filling (24 hours), the topping (90 minutes) and the sauce (a relatively speedy 30 minutes). Real world, indeed! I think I'll take my chances with cooked food, dead enzymes and all. My favorite line in this gorgeously illustrated book is in a pep talk the authors give toward the end. "We believe it's important to keep in mind that this whole process should be fun, and we think that the best approach is to be open minded," they write. Fun. Right, I'll get on that as soon as I finish soaking and dehydrating next week's dinner. In the meantime, I decided to give the authors the benefit of the doubt and try one of their simple recipes. Since they both have real chef credentials, I assumed their food would probably be quite good, assuming one had the stamina to make it. The theory held, at least for the recipe I tried (and I had time to try only one). Pineapple-Cucumber Gazpacho was quite good. Refreshing and with a bit of bite. I like it. Total prep time -- about 10 minutes. That I like most of all. Source: http://www.oregonlive.com/foodday/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/exclude/1122545094215391.xml&coll=7&thispage=1
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