The Cultured Girl

I recently had dinner at a vegan restaurant in San Francisco called Cafe Gratitude, which focuses almost exclusively on live and raw foods. While I don’t plan to convert to the raw regimen anytime soon, I was pleasantly surprised at how tasty the food was. (I had an avocado stuffed with sunflower-seed pate and topped with cashew sour cream.) Basically, everything at the place was made out of nuts, because apparently even vegan staples like beans and soy require more cooking than the raw foods philosophy allows.

More than anything, the meal made me wonder about the whole raw and live foods. Basically, the dietary philosophy prohibits eating foods that are “cooked” in the classic sense—that is, using temperatures higher than 116 degrees. (That even includes coffee, which for raw foodies is cold-pressed for hours instead of being brewed.) Not only are raw foods higher in nutrients, but they are also rich in enzymes, which are used in food digestion. Those enzymes break down at 116 degrees, changing the molecular structure of the food, so your body basically has to do more work to digest the cooked stuff. If that all sounds a bit kooky, well, it is. According to a user poll on rawfoods.com, even the devotees aren’t that devoted: Only 10 percent of poll respondents stick to a 100 percent all-raw diet.