Living in the Raw

Whether you think it's a weird fad, a life saving therapy, or culinary delight, the controversial raw foods movement is in Chicago's face.

by Dennis Rodkin

Conscious Choice, March 2003

Shortly after Karen Wojtowich of Bolingbrook, Illinois, started living in the raw, she began to feel really, really good. Jenny Cornbleet, in Highland Park, Illinois, reports that when she's in the raw, "it's more colorful and more fun." Mike Smith even opens his West Loop loft for parties where everybody's in the raw.

"It's really beautiful and more like what people were made to do," Smith says of the parties. "Once people try it, they recognize it as a great experience they want to have as often as possible."

Eating in the raw -- a diet of plant-based foods that have not been cooked or heated in any way above 120 degrees F -- is rapidly becoming one of the hottest food lifestyles in Chicago. It's the focus of cafes in Lincoln Park and Wilmette, Illinois, at meetings of a popular west-suburban healthy-eating organization, in cooking classes at Whole Foods Markets, and even in the newest cookbook, Raw Food, by Chicago's own superstar chef, Charlie Trotter.

By elevating vegetables to the primary spot on the plate, Trotter and the many others who have embraced raw eating, get to indulge what he calls the "continued pursuit of the purity of flavor." For him, that pursuit initially manifested itself 13 years ago when he offered an all-vegetable tasting menu at his eponymous, legendary Lincoln Park restaurant and evolved over the years. "It's through this pursuit of purity that I seek out 'cleaner' foods that are both seasonal and organic," he says. "In order to really bring the flavors forward and not 'dumb down' their essence, I started to de-emphasize the use of cream, butter, and oil in my presentations." The result: "not only do you have food that tastes great, but it is actually good for you as well."

In the eyes of its advocates, raw eating is the healthiest dietary lifestyle possible. "Everything your body needs can be found in a plant-based, no-cook diet," says Keith Nemec, a chiropractic physician who advocates the raw diet for clients at his Total Health Institute in Wheaton, Illinois. "If anything were lacking, we'd see it in the animals who naturally eat a raw diet. But they don't develop cancer, diabetes and other degenerative diseases that we do." Nemec and many other proponents of a raw diet claim that cooking vegetables and fruits denatures them, leeching out or destroying their health-promoting vitamins, minerals, and enzymes.

A diet of raw foods incorporates not only the obvious cold salads and fresh sliced fruits but far more esoteric items like juiced fruits and vegetables, pates made from seeds or nuts, pasta substitutes crafted from finely sliced zucchini, and chips made from dehydrated kale or other greens.

Raw and Robust

Although it's been around a long time -- some proponents note that humans ate that way exclusively for nearly four million years, only beginning to cook food a relatively recent 50,000 years ago -- the raw food diet has contemporary currency because it combines two attributes that don't always co-exist: it's both healthy and tasty.

A star witness for the healthfulness of raw foods is Karyn Calabrese, "I don't know what a doctor bill looks like." Calabrese is the 56-year-old proprietor of Karyn's Fresh Corner, a nine-year-old deli and food store that is Chicago's pre-eminent outpost for raw food, in a new location in Lincoln Park since last fall. Calabrese, a whirling dervish and a well of vitality, has been eating primarily raw for about 25 years, a period in which she claims she has "never been sick a day."

Because it eschews meat and processed foods, the raw food diet is naturally moderate in fat, cholesterol, carbohydrates and sodium -- healthy enough at that, even if it didn't possess the healing powers its advocates lay claim to. To those, Karen Wojtowich, 44-year-old programmer from Bolingbrook, gladly testifies. Nearly three years ago, frustrated by doctors' inability to diagnose her all-over illness that resembled fibromyalgia, Wojtowich came across some information on raw foods on the Internet. She then attended a one-day raw foods seminar run by the west suburban Organic Food Network, and decided to give it a shot.

"I started out with wheat grass juice and started incorporating other raw foods into my diet," Wojtowich says. "I started to feel better, gradually, and to lose those strange aches that had been all over my body, and by about 12 weeks I was feeling great." Before turning to raw foods, she had been reduced to relying on a walker; three months later, she says, she was able to run if necessary. "The raw foods helped strengthen and cleanse my body, which it must have really needed [judging by] how bad it had gotten," she says.

Taste Sensations

On the other side, are the high profile witnesses for the simple unadulterated flavor of raw foods, "I have always felt that vegetables can add great complexity to cuisine," chef Trotter says. "The versatility and the unbelievable variety of them make it almost impossible to run out of ideas."

"This is food in its unadulterated, natural state; it's gloriously colorful and delicious," says Jenny Cornbleet, a personal chef, caterer, and teacher of raw food-preparation (don't call it "cooking"). At her classes at Whole Foods Markets in Evanston and Deerfield, Illinois, as well as at Karyn's, Cornbleet puts the emphasis on such treats as vegetarian sushimaki, spinach apple soup, spicy Mexican cabbage, ginger lemon coconut chutney, and cinnamon rolls with a lemon-pecan glaze, all made the no-heat way.

Mike Smith, too, is way into the taste sensations. "When you use these organic pomegranate seeds, fresh green coconut meat, herbs and other things that are in the raw foods recipes, you get flavors that a lot of Americans have never, ever tasted," he says. "[Most are] used to a lot of similar-tasting, non-smelling cooked foods, and then you're treated to these intense new flavors. It's an amazing experience."

The freshness wave that has swept over American dining rooms in the past generation reaches its peak with raw food, where nothing is processed, boiled or otherwise robbed of its nature-ripened perfection. Raw foods are healthy, for sure, but controversy rests in the question of exactly how healthy they are. Nobody denies that increasing the quantities of fruits, vegetables, and nuts in one's diet is a positive health step.

Live Enzymes, Raw Emotions

But so-called "raw-foodists" also say that the very process of cooking a food destroys its nutritional integrity...that only when served uncooked do most fruits, vegetables, and nuts retain all the natural enzymes they need to nourish the body fully. They say all plant-based foods naturally contain enzymes that contribute to the digestibility of the very foods in which they occur, and that plant-based foods cooked at temperatures over 105 to 120 degrees F (schools of thought vary on the exact temperature) are, essentially, dead with their enzymes literally burned out. When confronted with food that is enzyme-deficient, Nemec says, "we have to deplete our body's natural store of enzymes to digest it. It's like a bank account of enzymes; the more food you eat that has no enzymes the more you have to go into your account to make a withdrawal. You're not making any deposits and the account runs down. This is why people's health diminishes as they age."

Some mainstream nutritionists vehemently disagree. Judy Beto, a professor of nutrition science at Dominican University in River Forest, Illinois, counters Nemec's bank account analogy with a little car talk: "The tires on your car are there to move the car, like the enzymes are there in your body to digest food. If you don't drive your car, yes, the tires will last a lot longer than if you drive it around, but why have the car then?" In other words, the body is designed to digest food. Let it do its job.

Beto adds that the enzyme-depletion idea would work if "the body had a limited supply of enzymes, but it doesn't. It makes new ones. You never hear of a person saying in his seventies, 'I can't digest food anymore because my body has no enzymes left.' It doesn't happen."

On top of that, Nelda Mercer, an Ann Arbor, Michigan private-practice dietitian who formerly served as director of community nutrition at the University of Michigan Medical Center, observes that in at least a few cases, cooking actually makes vegetables better for you. Lycopene, a compound that occurs naturally in tomatoes that has been shown to help decrease the risk of prostate cancer, "is more concentrated and absorbs into the body better in something cooked like tomato sauce than in raw tomatoes," she says. Moreover, a Rutgers University study shows that eaters of cooked broccoli absorb five times the iron over those who eat it raw.

Still, Beto, Mercer, and other nutrition experts say that there's certainly no harm in upping your intake of raw fruits and vegetables -- especially if what they replace is nutrition-deficient junk food -- simply for the clearly established health benefits of eating more fruits and vegetables, less meat, and less processed fats.

Raw: a Lot or a Little

Fortunately, the concept of a raw foods diet is fluid and allows for non-fanatical devotion; there's no higher authority demanding 100-percent compliance. Although some devotees, such as Calabrese, go all raw all the time, it doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing proposition. "There aren't a lot of rules; we ought to eat for our bio-individuality," says Laura Black, a Warrenville nutritionist who heads the Wheaton-based Organic Foods Network. "Some people -- like me -- find they need fish in their diet but eat a lot of raw food at other times. And especially here in Chicago, it goes with the seasons. Most of us here need hot foods like soups in the winter to keep our bodies warm. If you were in a place like California or Florida, it would be a lot easier to be 100 percent raw. But it's really just about doing what you can."

Calabrese, though, says that eating raw instills "such a high of well being" in a person that most who try eating a little raw find themselves angling ever upward toward a higher percentage of raw food in their diet. In classes she leads at her Lincoln Park food-and-health emporium, she prods students to go all raw for a month -- if they're big meat eaters, she ramps them up slowly, first going vegetarian and adding to that incrementally. Most of the students wind up hitting their mark -- all raw -- happily, she says. They may fall back from eating 100 percent raw, but she believes most of them stay well over 50 percent. Why? Because of the upward spike in their vitality. "You know how good you felt when you became a vegetarian?" she says. "And then later, when you went vegan, you got another boost? Well, you get another one, a much bigger one, when you start eating raw foods!"

However, not everyone realizes those benefits -- particularly people whose body type isn't suited to it. Althea Northage-Orr, president of the Chicago College of Healing Arts and a practitioner of Traditional Chinese Medicine, notes that for a person with "cold digestion," who often feels heavy after eating and is prone to gassiness, switching to raw food can be disastrous. "This is someone who already is deficient in digestive fire," she says. These are the people who might be most drawn to raw food, she says, because it's a light way to eat and they intuit that eating lighter will ease their heaviness of digestion. "But they can't digest all these cold foods," she says. "They'll get terribly sick," possibly with increased constipation or diarrhea.

The person for whom raw foods are right is the one with "hot digestion," someone who is revved up and runs hot anyway. "For those people, the raw food diet is cleansing and detoxifying," Northage-Orr explains.

The proportion of raw food in a person's diet varies over a wide range. At the far upper end is Calabrese, so set against cooked foods that she won't even turn to hot soups in the coldest depths of winter. Instead, she puts a little cayenne pepper in her shoes as a way to increase her body heat. Wojtowich estimates that about 80 percent of her diet is raw foods. She'll eat a non-dairy fruit smoothie for breakfast and a salad for lunch, but living with her three children and a husband who eats vegetarian but not raw, she can't always do a raw dinner.

Smith, too, has difficulty staying raw, and not only because he's a big fan of vegetarian Mexican food. "It's expensive," he says. "I'm not wealthy enough to keep up an intense organic raw food diet." It's well known that organic produce is more expensive than conventionally grown produce and, in addition, a raw foods kitchen requires some equipment that a new convert to raw foods may not already own.

First comes the juicer, a super-vitalizing staple of a raw foods kitchen (and of some other healthful kitchens, of course), says Black. With a juicer and some sea salt, you're set up to make the green drinks -- or juices from celery, broccoli stems, carrots, beets, and other vegetables. Black advises starting with a $350 to $400 juicer. "You can get a juicer for less at Target but you'll be disappointed. As you get into the lifestyle, you'll end up trading up, so you might as well start with a good one." Two top brands she recommends are Green Star (available through her Organic Foods Network) and Champion (sold in many stores).

Next is the dehydrator, key to turning zucchini into noodles, kale into chips and other vegetables into substitutes for pizza crust, bread and other cooked standards. For a sturdy, reliable dehydrator, expect to start at about $200, Black says.

But starting out raw doesn't have to entail a sizable upfront investment. All it really takes is to "Just Eat an Apple," as the title of one Canadian raw-foods magazine suggests.

Dennis Rodkin is a Chicago-based writer and a 20-year vegetarian.

I Went to a "Garden" Part

by Robin Barcus

Christian White stepped out of O'Hare Airport into the blustering cold of a typical Chicago January, carrying four suitcases packed with organic produce. What would bring this young media producer out of his sunny Los Angeles home to the Windy City in the middle of winter?

He's on a mission: to spread his love of raw foods, creating a feast for 24 guests in the home of friends Mike Smith and Alyce Henson. For three years now, Smith and Henson have been hosting raw food parties in their sprawling West Loop loft space. I arrive a couple of hours before mealtime and am introduced to White, the friendly, shaggy-haired chef. He is surrounded by friends, chatting and chopping over a whirring food processor. The kitchen island is piled high with mounds of exotic edibles.

Everyone has their hands up to their wrists in mixing bowls. Getting your fingers messy seems part of the raw foods code. "There are over 20 different things in this salad," White says, tossing it with his hands. "Endive, dandelion greens, four different kinds of sprouts, basil, oregano, thyme, sage, edible flowers." White is vegan and eats raw, or living food, about half the time.

"It has a really amazing aesthetic about it," Smith muses. "The way it looks on the plate is just beautiful."

"Easy clean up, too," says Henson. "Just rinse the bowls out when you're done." Nothing is cooked or baked, so there are no pots and pans to scrub.

White breaks out some flat "bread" he has made with seeds, sprouted wheat berries, olives, herbs, and orange juice, pressed and dehydrated into flat brown sheets. It looks like textured cardboard, but I'm amazed by the complexity of its flavor: sweet, light, and nutty. "I could plant this and it would grow!" White declares.

The guests arrive and we take our seats. On the menu are an avocado and tomato mixture in a lettuce wrap, tangy "passion" soup, the "kitchen-sink" salad and "cheese" (ground nuts and herbs) on seed bread. For dessert, there are mango crepes with gouchi berries and carob-sprinkled date balls. The guests eat happily, commenting on the variety of tastes and textures present in each mouthful.

After the meal, I feel satiated, yet energized, with a total absence of the usual post-feast sluggishness. "I don't expect people to get into raw food right away," White says. "Just try to incorporate it little by little because you will feel better! You'll notice a difference and start to recognize the importance of the environment, and what you put into your system. But let me be clear about why we do these parties, it's all about fun! Just wait until you taste it; you'll be blown away."

Robin Barcus is a Chicago artist and freelance writer.

My Dinner At Roxanne'

By Jim Slama

A recent trip to California gave me the opportunity to sample food at America's premier raw food restaurant. Roxanne's has been written up in the New York Times, Metropolitan Home, Food and Wine, and Yoga Journal, and its chef, Roxanne Klein, was named by Forbes Magazine as one of the country's top 10 chefs. The restaurant itself is a vivid example of environmental design: utilizing sustainable harvested wood, organic fabrics, and nontoxic paints. Most of the food and some of the wine served is organic.

The Chicago connections were everywhere. I was joined for dinner by Campagnola chef/owner Michael Altenberg whose renown helped us get reservations on a Saturday night with less than a week's notice (a feat for this popular place). There was also the buzz about Roxanne's upcoming book co-written with Chicago chef, Charlie Trotter. Upon arrival at the restaurant we were greeted by general manager, Steven Lande, who formerly managed the dining room at Chicago's Ritz Carlton. When asked about his move, Lande was clear about his inspiration: "The food here is amazing and truly unique. When the meal is complete you feel really good about what you've just consumed."

We shared his sentiment. We began the meal with one of Roxanne's herbal potions, the Peaceful Mind, "a balanced blend of pineapple, almond, wild reishi mushroom, and American ginseng." For an appetizer, we enjoyed the "Four Corners of Thailand" which included the best tom yum soup I have ever had, and a barbecued portabella mushroom "cooked" to perfection. The "cooking" came from a long stint in a food warmer at about 108 degrees F. "Enough warmth to give the mushroom proper texture, while retaining all its vitamins and enzymes," said Lande.

My favorite dish was the perigord black truffle and mushroom crepe with cream sauce and chives. The intense flavor of the truffle blended flawlessly with a cashew cream sauce achieving impressive results. "This dish was exemplary of Roxanne's approach," said Altenberg. "It is revolutionary food -- bridging healthy, living food concepts with an evolving cuisine that is visually stimulating and very flavorful."

Where to Go for Raw

* Karyn's Fresh Corner is a lovely, tempting raw foods café (and a fine dining room that at press time had not yet opened) where you can sample Karyn Calabrese's raw food innovations such as dehydrated kale chips, a sour cream substitute made of fermented cashews, and lasagna made of sliced zucchini with hazelnut "cheese" and sundried tomatoes. In addition, there are packaged brownies, crackers, granola, and other goodies made on the premises or by other vegan and raw foods companies. There are also books, videos, and other materials on raw food for sale.

Karyn's Fresh Corner, 1901 N. Halsted St., Chicago, IL; 312-255-1590.

* Jenny Cornbleet teaches raw-foods preparation classes at Whole Foods stores in Evanston and Deerfield, IL, and other locations. She also acts as an in-home personal chef and will teach clients to prepare raw foods at home. For information on her classes and other programs, call 773-347-1215 or visit www.raw-foodcuisine.com.

* Laura Black's Organic Foods Network is a great socializing venue for west suburban devotees of healthy foods, not just raw foods. It holds monthly events, sometimes a guest speaker, sometimes an organic gardening seminar, and periodically a raw food potluck. Visit www.organicfoodnetwork.net for information events, or call 630-836-1864 to join ($35 for a lifetime membership).

* Vitality Natural Foods is Ralph Roberts' attempt at what he calls a Green Hen Pantry -- a quick-stop spot in downtown Wilmette for packaged raw and natural foods, with a juice bar café on one side. Books and magazines about raw foods are here along with packaged raw kimchee (pickled cabbage), raw almond butter, and other great food items. At the café are raw soups and smoothies, and sandwiches that can be had either raw (with a cabbage leaf or lettuce wrap) or conventional (with bread). The menu is not all raw, but "raw friendly," as Roberts puts it.

Vitality Natural Foods, 1100 Central Avenue, Wilmette, IL; 847-853-4200. -- DR

Getting Started

Try a few of these simple raw recipes for starters. Later, when you want to branch out into more elaborate dishes, sample some of the dishes in Charlie Trotter and Roxanne Klein's new recipe book, Raw Food (due out later this year).

* Fruit smoothie: Karen Wojtowich's breakfast favorite is a straightforward non-dairy blended fruit drink. She tosses a banana, half a dozen or so strawberries, and a whole peeled orange into the blender and churns up a creamy, fruity drink. Toss in some vitamin C powder, green foods powder, or any other powdered nutrient to give it a boost.

* Sunflower seed pate: Jenny Cornbleet relies all week on seed or nut-based pates she whips up early in the week. Sunflower seeds, readily available, are a great start, she says. Soak the seed meats overnight in water to make them easy to blend, then simply toss a cup of seeds into the blender and keep it going until it reaches a texture you like. For an Asian flavor, add a few pinches of ginger and soy sauce before blending. Roll a bit of the pate in a sheet of nori (dried seaweed), stuff it into half a bell pepper, or experiment with other ways to use it as a spread.

* Green drinks: "Green foods like broccoli stems, celery, or kale have a lot of chlorophyll and minerals and are very cleansing," nutritionist Black notes, "and it's probably what most people are missing most from their diet." If you don't like green leafy vegetables, juicing them is a fine alternative, she says: "With a juicer, you don't need any recipe and you don't need to measure; you just put in what you have and juice it." Neophyte juicers may find green juices too strong in taste; simply dilute with water and add a little salt to adjust the taste.

* Almond milk: This is Black's choice for an easy milk substitute. Soak several cups of almonds overnight, and in the morning discard the soaking water, which has leeched out the enzyme inhibitors in the nuts. Put the nuts, a small amount of pure water in a high-powered blender and whip it to a pulp. If you want sweet cinnamon, pour the milky pulp into a strainer to separate the milk from the pulp. Use the milk as a dairy replacement. If you have a dehydrator and did not sweeten with cinnamon, use it to convert the pulp into an almond flour. -- DR