The ‘I Really’ Hate to Cook’ Diet

Saute until golden. Bake until bubbly. Simmer until tender.

Oh, no, you don’t--not if you know what’s good for you.

That’s the edict from eaters who have renounced what most of the human race has savored since the taming of fire: cooked food. “The great harm of cooking is that it destroys or drives off the life force in the food,” proclaims “live food” advocate Joe Alexander in his book “Blatant Raw Foodist Propaganda” (Blue Dolphin Publishing, 1990).

Mainstream nutritionists, however, have never recognized “life force” as an element of nutrition. They say that many foods, such as spinach, are not only more palatable and digestible when cooked but also have more available nutrition. And public health workers will always be suspicious of foods that have not been heated to levels known to kill dangerous microbes.

Raw foodies don’t care. “Just look at how strong and alive a fresh raw carrot looks and compare that to the limp and decaying appearance of a cooked carrot,” says Alexander, who cheerfully blames cooked food for everything from rampant obesity to “ugly music and art.”

An isolated culinary extremist? Tell it to the 100 members of San Francisco Live Food Enthusiasts, who meet for potlucks serving, say, carrot-pulp sushi. Or the patrons of Raw, a San Francisco restaurant that serves uncooked wild rice, soaked for 30 days “with daily rinsing at sunset.” Or the entrepreneur who’s about to open a drive-through live-food restaurant on Maui that will showcase his raw carob-hazelnut torte.

Or to restaurateur and recipe book author Imar Hutchins, who’s working to set up an empire of franchised raw vegetarian restaurants based on his Delights of the Garden establishments in Atlanta, Cleveland and Washington, D.C. Hutchins got interested in raw food when he and a group of housemates at Morehouse College in Atlanta began modifying their vegan diets (free of animal products) in search of the healthiest possible variation.

The recipes in his book, “Delights of the Garden” (Doubleday, $15.95), originally called “The Joy of Not Cooking” until fear of litigation prompted a name change, mimic traditional fare. His entrees include vegetable “tuna” (made with the pulp from putting carrots through an electric juicer) and “un-pizza.” The dessert menu features raw brownies and apple, berry and sweet potato pies.

Hutchins is a conservative by live-foodist standards. “We’re trying to bridge the gap between people who just eat sprouted stuff or blue-green algae and people who eat fast food,” he explains. His elaborate pies, for example, are fashioned with raw crusts, filling and topping. “It doesn’t matter how good it tastes. If it doesn’t look like a pie, people aren’t going to like it.”

Raw pie crusts? Discard all notions of cutting lard into flour with a pastry knife. Hutchins’ crusts involve banana chips and dried fruits pulverized in a food processor into a sweet, sticky puree that presses easily into a pie plate.

His wanton ways with mixing and chopping put Hutchins at one extreme of the live-food spectrum. At the other, along with algae advocates and devotees of sprouted seeds and grasses, are those who restrict their diets to whole fruit, unsullied by a touch of a blade that might impair the life force. And there are the followers of Natural Hygiene, a philosophy that prohibits the eating of fruits with vegetables, nuts or seeds, among other complex rules about food combining. Their optimum meal consists of a single type of food.

This creates slight logistic complications at the potlucks of San Francisco Live Food Enthusiasts, group organizer Dorleen Tong says. Separate tables for fruits, vegetables and mixed cuisine help keep the peace.

Restaurateur Juliano, the owner of Raw, has eaten only fruit for two years both for his health and because of the environmental passions that motivate many live-food enthusiasts.

“You give life every time you eat fruit,” claims Juliano, 24, who uses no last name. “You spit this seed out and you give life to a tree which will give back to you. It creates no trash, uses no electricity.”

Naturally, he adds, “I feel great.” Thanks to his diet, he says, he needs almost no sleep and absolutely no water, since he gets all the fluids he needs from the fruit.

What about protein, iron, vitamins and other such concerns? “Only people who eat cooked foods have to worry about that.”

Alexander’s “Blatant Raw Foodist Propaganda” sums up that concept: “Cooking destroys the natural chemical composition of the food. The vitamins are altered and destroyed, the proteins are scrambled, the enzymes are torn to pieces.”

The live-food philosophy is closely linked with vegetarianism, though “Blatant Raw Foodist Propaganda” mentions one late enthusiast of the 1950s, John Tobe, who savored raw meat and eggs. Tobe beat the odds by dying of cancer rather than food poisoning. (With the increased incidence of salmonella and other organisms in eggs and meat, such a diet is considered extremely risky today.)

The cuisine at Raw--which is soon to open a branch in Los Angeles, Juliano says--is more typical of today’s live-food lifestyle. It consists almost entirely of fruits, vegetables and the flowers that liberally decorate the artistically presented dishes.

The only grains Juliano uses are buckwheat--in sun-baked pizza crusts--and the soaked Manitok wild rice, harvested by Chippewa Indians in canoes, the menu notes. The rice, slightly al dente but soft enough to eat, is folded into an avocado-tomato blend that’s shaped into a flower design on a hand-thrown pottery platter and decorated with Johnny-jump-ups.

“This dish truly contains the spirit of the Chippewa and the life force of the raw,” the menu enthuses.

Jeremy Safran, a live-food distributor and caterer on Maui, says he’ll open the restaurant Loving Foods in the town of Haiku there this month.

“We’re proudest of the desserts,” he says, especially of his specialty, carob hazelnut torte. Safran is also self-publishing a book of raw recipes titled “The Raw Truth: The Art of Loving Foods.”

He explains why he shuns processed foods: “They’re handled by all these people. Some of them are angry, some of them are upset, some of them are stressed out.” By the time a product reaches the store shelves, he adds, “There’s more food content in the box than in the food.”

He has no problem with chopped and pureed ingredients, however. “If it’s done with pure intention and pure thought and the people are conscious, then that’s beautiful.”

Dorleen Tong eats grains and nuts as well as produce, chopped and pureed if she wants. Her group, in fact, runs a lending “library” of equipment such as Champion juicers and food processors, as well as books relating to the live-food lifestyle.

Tong, 49, has been eating raw food almost exclusively for about seven years, falling off the wagon only when she visits her mother for a traditional Chinese dinner.

“I feel a little sluggish, a little hung over for a couple of days after eating mom’s home cooking,” says Tong, a teacher of English as a second language. But her raw diet makes her feel great on very little sleep and prevents colds and sore throats, she says. A staple of her diet is hulled oats, soaked overnight. When something fancier is called for, she makes sushi--the traditional seaweed wrapped around such fillings as seasoned carrot pulp.

“One of my favorite fillings is buckwheat greens with mock tuna, made in a blender from sunflower seeds, kelp, onions, green onions, garlic and lemon juice.” With chopped hearts of celery, she says, it perfectly mimics tuna with hard-cooked eggs.

“We’re in the middle on dietary issues,” says Steve Hurwitz, spokesman for the Living Foods Institute in Santa Cruz. “We believe people really live in today’s world. You can’t go back to nature in today’s society and expect you’ll have total health. That’s not realistic.”

Still, he says, “Somebody who eats even 50% raw food has just done their body a whole lot of good.”

* For more information on “raw foodism,” the San Francisco Live Food Enthusiasts offer a “Sprout Line” at (415) 751-2806.