Anne Mitchell Young <shedevil @ aloss.net> wrote:
: But "raw food" as a term has a bad rap - folks think of it as freakish
: at best, cultish at worst. And in part with good reason - many of the
: websites do give that impression.

: The reality, however, is that any time you put together a dish with
: fresh produce or nuts or grains, which haven't been cooked, well,
: you've created a raw food dish!

The concept of 'raw, unprocessed' food has similar problems of
definition to that of 'making food from scratch', which is being
discussed in another thread.

If I dry apricots in the sun, I've processed them. If I make my
grapes into wine, I've got processed grape juice. If I ferment them
all the way to vinegar, I've processed them even farther. Yogurt
bacteria process my milk, but that's already been lost as a raw
food due to pasteurization. If drying a fruit processes it,
should cooling it in the refrigerator be viewed as processing it too?

Pressing oils from fruit or vegetables is a process that induces
change, even cold pressing. Extracting the juice and discarding
the rest of a fruit/vegetable is very heavy processing, which can
change the nature of the original produce more than light steaming
of the uncut item.

I eat a lot of raw things--seeds and nuts and fruit of all
varieties and many vegetables too, and I usually eat them plain:
a tomato, a handful of cashews, almonds, pistachios when I can
find them, an apple, an orange, a carrot. I eat them because they
taste good, and I don't feel a need for recipes..then again, I'm
always ready to try something different.

--thelma

: Anne