USA Today, 10/27/97: Stripping the diet raw

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Stripping the diet raw

 

SAN FRANCISCO - Food fads come and go - Pan Asian, haute Southern,

Pacific Rim fusion - but the latest dining trend is actually the

oldest: eating food raw.

 

Raw foodists, also known as living foodists, take their diets about

two steps beyond vegetarianism. And they're cooking up new ways to

bring uncooked foods to health-conscious diners.

 

" Out of every living thing on the planet, animals, plants, insects,

none are overweight or out of shape except for the ones that eat

cooked foods, " says Juliano (who goes by only his first name), owner

of the 2-year-old Raw Living Foods restaurant in the trendy Sunset

area. " By eating raw foods, you're doing a great service to the

planet but especially to yourself. "

 

Lean, fit and virtually bounding with energy, 27-year-old Juliano, a

raw foodist for nearly five years, is a poster boy for the cause.

 

And it's a cause that's getting more attention. Celebrities

including Woody Harrelson, Demi Moore and Robin Williams have

dropped by Raw restaurant. Several Web sites are devoted to the raw

food regimen, including All Raw Times (www.rawtimes.com), which

includes recipes, food suppliers and diet information. The American

Living Foods Institute near Glendale, Calif., disseminates

information on raw foods and acts as a living-foods health clinic.

Living Nutrition is a year-old magazine out of Sebastopol, Calif.,

devoted to the raw-food lifestyle. And Raw restaurant's Juliano is

writing one of the first raw foods recipe books, called Raw, the

Uncooked Book.

 

" Raw foodists hold that cooking destroys many vitamins and minerals

and essential food enzymes, " says Barbara Haspel, co-author with her

daughter Tamar of the New York-based healthy eating newsletter

Dreaded Broccoli. That means no grilled eggplant. No marinara sauce.

Not even stir-fried tofu cubes.

 

But it isn't all carrot sticks. Raw foods can also include pizzas

and burritos. Sort of.

 

At Raw Living Foods restaurant, Juliano serves up pizzes, distant

cousins of pizzas that are served on a sprouted buckwheat

and " baked " by sitting in the sun for several hours. Raw's " sushi "

isn't fish at all, but gussied-up carrot pulp that tastes

surprisingly like salmon. The rice isn't cooked, but soaked in water

for 30 days until it becomes soft and palatable. And the " chips "

that come with the spicy guacamole appetizer aren't fried triangles,

but meaty slices of sweet potato, coconut and carrot.

 

" In most restaurants, tortillas are deep-fried. But I take a purple

cabbage leaf, pull it off, and it's automatically a tortilla. It's a

neat color, there's no package to become trash. It's better than a

flour tortilla, " Juliano says.

 

Instead of vegetable-flavored pasta, Juliano offers " zucchini

linguine, " julienned zucchini that " tastes just like al dente pasta

with sauce. "

 

A glass of vino with that raw pasta? No problem. Since wine goes

through no heating process, it gets the thumbs up from Juliano. Beer

is a no-no since the hops are boiled, and the distillation process

knocks liquor out of the living-food diet.

 

A glass of wine and a plate of pasta. Sounds like standard

California cuisine. But not all diners will be spurning Spago. After

a meal at Raw, Dreaded Broccoli's Tamar Haspel concluded, " human

beings have been cooking for thousands of years. This restaurant

does not give me compelling reason to stop. "

 

Still, raw foodism seems to be growing. Next month, Juliano will

move Raw to larger quarters to meet customer demand. And two more

living-food restaurants have opened recently: Lovin' Life in

Fairfax, Calif., and Raw Experience in Paia, Hawaii. And living-food

advocates cite the proliferation of juice bars as proof that their

regimen is entering the mainstream.

 

Although raw foodism seems to be on the rise, it's unlikely to

become as big a culinary trend as, say, nouvelle

cuisine. " Vegetarians are a minority of the population, and rawists

are a very small minority of that, " Barbara Haspel says. " Few people

are completely committed to it. "

 

For those who are, health is a motivating factor. " The source of

most health problems is what we eat, " says Ed Douglas, director of

the American Living Foods Institute, a raw foodist for more than 20

years. " Whoever started cooking food 40,000 years ago didn't realize

that we are not designed to eat cooked food. We're designed like

other species to eat food in the raw form. "

 

Why? Stephen Arlin, co-author of Nature's First Law: The Raw-Food

Diet (Maul Brothers Publishing, $14.95), puts it succinctly: " Cooked

food is poison. " Strict believers think that cooking destroys foods'

vitamins and minerals and that cooked foods clog the intestines and

colon, leading to ills from cancer to diabetes.

 

But food safety experts raise cautions about the raw food diet. " I

can understand the principle, but it's fraught with danger, " says

Nicols Fox, author of Spoiled: The Dangerous Truth About a Food

Chain Gone Haywire (HarperCollins, $25). " In terms of pathogens,

we're looking at a whole host of bugs we haven't seen on vegetables

before, including salmonella and cyclospora. " Heat is one important

way of removing those threats, she says.

 

Understanding the dynamics of the raw food diet is essential, Arlin

agrees. Living foodists eat about 70% fruit. But, he says, that's

using the botanical definition of fruit, " so that means anything

that contains within itself the seeds for regeneration of the plant,

like bell peppers, cucumbers and squash. " He fills out his diet with

raw nuts and leafy greens. After years of eating cooked foods, the

raw food diet can take some getting used to, he admits. " But after a

while, " he says, " it will feel perfectly natural. "

 

For Juliano, the raw food diet is perfectly natural. " After all, " he

says, " before there was fire, there was raw. "

 

By Cathy Hainer, USA TODAY