Food: Adventures in the Raw

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It wasn't until I ordered a week of raw meals that I realized just how lazy I am: I not only don't cook for myself, I don't not cook for myself. But the raw-food movement--whose full-time practitioners believe cooking saps ingredients of nutrition--actually requires a lot of equipment: dehydrators, blenders, food processors. It's not exactly as if I'm going to make an uncooked nut loaf with barbecue sauce myself.

With restaurants that don't even own a stove opening around the country, and delivery services in New York City, Atlanta and Los Angeles, I decided to eat nothing but raw food for a week. This didn't quite work out, since most of the food I'm offered is cooked and I'm not very good at turning down a free meal. But I made it for almost three days, during which I ate some surprisingly awesome stuff and felt pretty good, if often hungry. Plus, I saved a lot of time because I could shop in only one supermarket aisle. And to put it delicately, I did not waste many minutes in the bathroom.

When I first tried to decide what to eat on my new raw diet, I quickly discovered that I had no idea how most food is made. Is yogurt raw? Peanut butter? Oil-and-vinegar salad dressing? Like most raw-foodists--who are predominantly vegan and believe that cooking robs food of most of its nutrition--I wound up eating only fruit, vegetables, nuts and seeds. I was living exclusively on the bottom of the new nutritional pyramid.

To make things easier, I ordered a week's worth of meals from Matt Amsden's RAWvolution, which makes home deliveries in the L.A. area. Even so, it took me a while to adjust to the whole raw idea. When I opened the container of onion soup, I spent some time trying to figure out if I should heat it up in a pot or in the microwave before I remembered that I was supposed to pour the stuff cold into a bowl.

The soup wasn't bad, if a little intense and sharp. In fact, a lot of the food--especially mushy stuff like the no-bean hummus and the pecan crumble--had a biting, rough quality. But some of it--like the mandoline-thin zucchini that served as pasta in the vegetable lasagna or the marinated shiitake sandwich made with thin layers of dehydrated soft crackers--was bright, fresh and fun. For dinner one night at a raw-food restaurant in L.A. I had clever little vegetable "pizzas" and a bowl of squash shaved into a linguine shape, bathed in curry and topped with vegetables. It turns out there are a lot of ways to eat a salad.

But what shocked me most was how much uncooked, healthy food I had to eat to get even close to full. Raw-foodists are not heavyset, and many of them have an anticonsumerist philosophy that fits in nicely with small portions. I do not have such a philosophy. The $100 RAWvolution delivery that was supposed to last five days was half gone by the end of the first. I resorted to carrying around a lot of nuts, apples and bananas in my car for the three days I lasted on the diet. They didn't fill me up--or make my car smell good.