There is this trajectory I keep seeing. People start out omniverous, but they begin having some issues with meat, so they become vegetarian. After a while, they get used to that and start thinking about those poor chickens in their cages, or start reading a little too much about sustainability. They decide to try to become vegan. Eventually they succeed in getting their animal product consumption down to a minimum.
But then, all of the sudden, they have no more cooking challenges, and everyone around them is vegan, and they miss that radical exploratory feeling they used to get every time they baked a vegan cookie. But their animal product consumption is down to zero, and where do you go from zero?
Answer: Raw Foodism.
They stop cooking and instantly all their old recipes are impossible to make, their friends all think they are a weirdo, and they are feeling that familiar lightheaded feeling from when they dropped red meat in the first place and became anemic. Ah, memories.
I started down this road. I’ve made raw cheesecake, raw hummous, raw tacos. It was sort of fun. I’ve felt the “raw food buzz” many people get when they do a couple days of 100% raw food.
I’ve also read a bit about nutrition and cooking and the chemical reactions that happen when you cook stuff, and I’ve come to this conclusion:
Raw food is healthy, but not because it’s raw.
Raw foodists (rightly) rave about the wonderful changes in their lives that came when they went raw. But what they often fail to recognize is that switching to raw foodism means several things:
- No longer eating cooked food
- Cutting way back or eliminating grains
- Eating way more fruits and vegetables
- Eliminating processed and refined foods, notably flour and sugar
- Thinking WAY more about your diet
Now, raw foodism seems to have some benefits. I’m not arguing with that. But we can attribute those benefits to any of these six changes. Changes #2-#6 are, to differing extents, well accepted ways to improve your health. Change #1 is extremely iffy.
Raw foodists point out that cooking breaks down some nutrients into less nutritious things. But it also breaks down useless things into nutrients. Raw carrots are probably less healthy than cooked carrots. But deep fried original recipe falafel is probably just as nutritious (or more nutritious) than the dried spicy nut paste balls raw foodists eat.
Raw foodists often speculate that there are living enzymes in foods that are necessary for us to digest those foods, and that cooking kills the enzymes. But the truth is, many enzymes simply don’t work in the pH of our digestive system. And the human body creates many enzymes to aid digestion.
And let’s not forget the downsides to raw foodism:
- The weirder and more impossible your food practices seem to other people, the less likely they are to want to try them out in their own life. In extreme cases you can actually push people away from wanting to try partial vegetarianism or veganism.
- You often have to buy extremely non-local, expensive, high-energy footprint food
- It can be pretty hard to get the nutrients you need. It says something that even the most hardcore raw foodists rarely eat more than 80 or 90% raw.
In the end, I think raw foodism provides some valuable insights, and some tasty recipes. Eating more fruits and veggies, eating them less cooked, eating less processed foods, these are all great practices. But–and this is just one person’s opinion–I think avoiding cooked food as if it is some kind of poison is a little misguided.
