The Raw Facts

Allow me to spear the notion that it's good to eat only what is uncooked

RAW FOOD, ACCORDING to its more zealous enthusiasts, is what we should all be eating, all the time. Advocates claim that if we eat living foods, we'll "experience perfect health" and "a whole new concept of beauty," even "change our lives." On the jacket of Matthew Kenney's book, "Raw Food/Real World, 100 Recipes to Get the Glow," Kenney's partner, Sarma Melngailis, claims that "light, clean, natural and alive foods make you feel light, clean, and more alive." Oh, and "sexy."

Before he started cooking in the raw, so to speak, Kenney authored two books on cooked food, "Matthew Kenney's Mediterranean Cooking" and "Big City Cooking." He has been chef and/or owner at more restaurants than you can shake a raw carrot at, including Matthew's, Canteen, Commune, Commissary and Mezze, plus a string of juice cafés called Blue Green, where everything is raw. Until they left their joint venture, Pure Food and Wine, last fall, Kenney and Melngailis were head chefs and co-owners of the restaurant in New York City that earned some acclaim and a great deal of buzz for serving only foods that were both vegan and raw, meaning nothing was ever exposed to a temperature above 118 degrees. But that doesn't mean the food wasn't manipulated in various and extreme ways.

Like most aficionados of raw food, this energetic and creative duo blended, pureed, partially dehydrated, reconstituted and reassembled the foods into mockups of familiar items like "pastas," made with leathery sheets of semi-dried zucchini, and almond tarts, made with nut butters and chocolate but no flour, dairy or eggs. And while the style in which it is presented is fresh and admittedly sexy, none of this is terribly new. The Raw Foods Movement has been going on — in fits and starts — since at least the middle of the 19th century. Along with therapeutic baths, various cleansing regimens and temperance, abstinence, self-denial and general repentance, a diet of raw foods has been prescribed by all sorts of people for all sorts of reasons.

Personally, I have always had a little trouble with this. I mean, I like a salad as well as the next guy, and a handful of peanuts and an apple is a fine substitute for a hot lunch now and again. But I have never been able to swallow the idea — let alone the menu — of an all-raw-foods diet. The notion carries with it a certain brand of moral superiority that smacks of Puritanism, or perhaps the peculiar brand of Catholicism to which I was subjected thoroughly enough (thank you very much, Sister Mary Rebecca) during my (mercifully) short stint in parochial school.

But until last spring, I could never come up with a clear argument against raw food. I had to assume that I was, as the nuns and priests sought to persuade me, simply a bad boy, morally inferior in some way. Then, last April, I attended the annual conference of the International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP) in Dallas, and I had the tremendous pleasure of hearing the keynote address delivered by one Dr. Richard Wrangham, professor of biological anthropology at Harvard University. Wrangham, who spends a good deal of time contemplating and illuminating the profound similarities between human beings and our closest relatives, the other large primates, sneaked in and out of Dallas before the local authorities could arrest him for preaching Darwinism.

His lecture, "The Natural Cook: The Significance of Paleo Gastronomy," exploded once and for all — at least in my mind — the myth of a raw-food diet and its supposed superiority over a diet of cooked foods. "Every culture in the world relies on cooking, apparently because a raw-foodist lifestyle is simply inadequate for people living at subsistence level," he said. It's all well and good for people who can afford to pulverize, blend, semi-dehydrate and manipulate their food with countertop appliances, but when you're in the bush, a raw-food diet simply will not supply a human brain with the calories it needs to function. Even if it could, we would have to chew and swallow for something like 16 hours a day.

Wrangham discussed Darwin's assertion that the art of making fire was the singular discovery that set us apart from our fellow critters. (I'm paraphrasing here.) And, he contended, cooking is the key that made us human. We have been cooking for at least 200,000 years — long enough, according to this eminent anthropologist, to make us physically dependent on the habit. Before our Stone Age ancestors learned to manipulate fire and apply it to the tough roots, grains and pulses (seeds) that provided our ancestors with their sustenance, they simply were not recognizably human.

This makes me happy. I love knowing that cooking is not some kind of luxury or aberration from the Noble Savage way of life; it is fundamental to who and what we are. The hearth is more than a place where we gather to tell our story; it is, in fact, the source of our story. We are not "fallen," because we cook; rather we have risen because we cook.

When I talked about all this with Matthew Kenney, he concurred. "I don't eat only raw foods," he said. "And the raw foods I eat at home are not the same raw foods I serve in a restaurant. At home, I eat a handful of Macadamia nuts, an avocado, whatever; I eat simply. And the more I get into raw foods, the more simply I want to eat. But when they are dining out, people want something more elaborate."

Recently, the couple opened Heirloom, a 150-seat Manhattan restaurant that is vegetarian but less draconian than Pure was; that is, it's not all raw.

Greg Atkinson is author of "Entertaining in the Northwest Style." He can be reached at greg@northwestessentials.com. Susan Jouflas is The Seattle Times' assistant art director/features.