Sonoma County Independent, Aug 99: In the Raw

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In the Raw

 

A quick taste of the uncooked and living-food movement

 

By Marina Wolf

 

THERE IT IS on my plate, a piece of pizza unlike any I've ever seen.

The crust is buckwheat groats, soaked for days, then mashed and laid

out to dry in the sun. The sauce is guacamole, pungent with raw

garlic and raw chile peppers. On top are sprinkled sun-dried

tomatoes, chewy bits of mushroom, bitter leafy greens, and . . .

could that be mint and borage flowers?

 

I'm not here to review the restaurant, Organica. I just want to

taste the food and see what goes into preparing raw-gourmet cuisine.

 

For starters, I can see that most American diners would not

recognize this heap of salad bits as even a loose analog of their

beloved pepperoni and cheese pie. But this is what they call pizza

at Organica, a San Francisco restaurant that's on the cutting edge

of the raw and living-foods movement.

 

Literally cutting edge.

 

The only tools in Organica's kitchen involve blades--knives,

scissors, food processors, blenders, juicers, slicers. There is no

oven or stovetop--principles of raw food prohibit heating food over

about 112 degrees, lest the enzymes in the menu item die and

become " toxic " --so the kitchen is curiously spacious and airy. Even

the door is left open to the cool San Francisco breeze, as if to

minimize the vegetable's shock in the move from refrigerator to

plate.

 

The ingredients are easy, but the labor isn't, not for the high-

concept creations that chef Juliano turns out and teaches through

classes and his recent book Raw: The Uncooked Book (HarperCollins;

$32). Those may just be cabbage leaves in his Thai " pasta, " but

somebody had to shred them. Three chefs work at the back at Organica

on a Sunday afternoon, and the food still takes 30 minutes to

arrive.

 

Of course, most raw foodists don't eat like this every day. David

Klein, a raw-food trainer in Sebastopol, shares an outline of the

food in a typical raw-food day: a few oranges and grapefruit juice

for breakfast, a bunch of bananas and a cluster of cukes through

late morning and lunchtime, a whole honeydew melon in the afternoon,

more bananas and cucumbers and a head of lettuce for dinner.

 

Not surprisingly, Klein finds most restaurant productions of raw

food to be over the top. " It's interesting, it's a great way to get

people into it, but we're supposed to be getting back to nature

here, " he says. " Our physiology just doesn't call for all kinds of

complex fancy prepared foods. "

 

However you slice the raw-food way, it's far more than the five

servings of fruits and vegetables recommended by the USDA food

pyramid, which the raw foodists have stood on its head and

flattened. Some eat mostly fruits (fruitarians), or mostly juice

(juicearians), or mostly sprouts (sproutarians). Raw foodists

believe that their diets provide ample nutrition and calories for

life, and inasmuch as some members of this tiny subculture (about

1,000 people to Klein's Living Nutrition magazine) have

been eating raw for decades, nutritional adequacy doesn't seem to be

a problem.

 

Those who turn to raw food generally do it for their health; the

online and print raw-food forums are awash in dramatic stories of

recovery--from cancer, ulcers, heart disease.

 

I DON'T KNOW about the specifics of these claims--it wouldn't be the

first time that conventional dietary recommendations have been

proven wrong. And I'm intrigued by the sweeping philosophy expressed

in the final paragraph of a recent cover article of Living

Nutrition: " The all-raw and living path, as it sweeps away the

cobwebs of the past, facilitates our journey of discovery, of living

in the immeasurable, dynamic, unknowable Life energy that is our

true and blissful Be-ing. "

 

Hey, no problem. I can dig the buzz from a really ripe peach or an

exceptionally snappy snow pea. But I'm having a hard time finding

the immeasurable, dynamic Life energy in the ersatz pizza sitting in

front of me. Its crust is earthy and plain and the guacamole burns

my mouth, while the tomatoes and mushrooms have been soaking too

long in the seaweed water, so all I get is salt. I don't want to

hurt the feelings of the earnestly enthusiastic waitstaff, so I ask

for a carton to go.

 

Then I toss it out on my way to a Russian deli across town, where

creamy napoleon pastries and a well-cured kol'basa await.

 

Toxic 'n' tasty--oh, yeah!