Vegetarian Times: Raw Energy
Who says food that's delicious and healthy has to be cooked?
VALERIE REISS
06/01/1998
In the midst of the tiny Maui beach town of Paia, where palm trees sway in ocean breezes and streets are lined with charming buildings of turquoise, pink and green, you'll find the Raw Experience restaurant.
Inside, artwork of vegetables, fruits and edible flowers adorn the walls, and amid the pleasant hum of conversation, a mix of tourists, beachgoers and neighborhood residents linger at wooden tables over heaping plates of delicious local cuisine.
This could be any scene in any restaurant in any idyllic beach community. Except for one thing: Nothing served here 3 not the soups, the pasta, tostadas, falafel or even the fruit pies 3 is cooked. Where most restaurants put stoves, Raw Experience co-owners Jeremy Safron and Ren˜e Underkoffler have installed sprouting racks, juicers, fermenting crocks and dehydrators.
The Raw Experience is at the forefront of a diet movement based on raw or living foods 3 and Safron and Underkoffler are dedicated to spreading the word. While raw foodists often use the terms "raw" and "live" interchangeably, there are distinctions. "Raw" simply refers to fruits and vegetables in their uncooked state. "Live" refers to fermented, cultured and sprouted foods.
Tapping into the trend, a number of all raw and partially raw-foods restaurants have sprung up around the country. There's the recently opened Ozone in New York City, Delights of the Garden in Washington, D.C., Karyn's Fresh Comer in Chicago, and in California (ever the leader in healthful eating), there's the San Francisco-based offshoot of Raw Experience and Garden Taste in Del Mar. Plus, the movement has sprouted support groups and prompted plenty of Internet activity (see Resources, p. 46). "Raw food is the hip thing now," raves Aris La Tham, a 22-year raw foodist and owner of Sun Fired, in Brooklyn, N.Y.
Spearheaded in the early 1970s by the late Ann Wigmore, M.D., founder of the Ann Wigmore Institute in Puerto Rico, and Viktoras Kulvinskas, author of Survival into the 21st Century (21st Century Publications, 1975), the raw/living foods movement is all about conserving metabolic enzymes. Enzyme preservation is the secret to health, states Wigmore in her book The Hippocrates Diet (Avery, 1984). Our bodies produce a finite number of enzymes, according to biochemist and nutrition researcher Edward Howell, M.D., whose book Enzyme Nutrition: The Food Enzyme Concept (Avery Publishing, 1985) is considered the bible of the raw-foods movement. Cooked food, he says, is devoid of enzymes (heating to above 112 degrees, which is well below normal cooking temperatures, destroys enzymes) and therefore requires the body to expend metabolic enzymes for digestion. This depletes the body's reserves and, Howell claims, causes us to age faster and succumb more easily to disease. Raw food, however, retains these precious enzymes; they aid in the digestion process, allowing the body to conserve its enzyme stores and thus maintain good health more readily.
Gabriel Cousens, M.D., author of Conscious Eating (Vision Books, 1992) and founder of the Patagonia, Ariz.-based Tree of Life Rejuvenation Center, which specializes in live-food orientated health programs, says, "A properly balanced diet of live foods is the best diet for enhancing the rejuvenation and anti-aging process." And many devotees claim going raw boosts their energy and alertness.
Underkoffler shrugs off the suggestion that raw dining is just the latest diet trend in a long line of flash-in-the-pan food fads. "For some people it's definitely a fad," she says simply. "But whatever gets you into it, after a while, you can't deny the changes."
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