When I think of Pure Food and Wine, there's a single image that comes to mind more than any other.
Rows upon rows, stacks aside stacks of these.
And one that looked kind of like this.
Except that it was human sized. And was always dehydrating nothing but almonds.
Before I continue with the human element of this story, I should explain the theory behind raw foods a little more.
Raw food's essential premise is that cooking foods destroys their enzymes - the main component within foods that helps our bodies digest them. The necessity of keeping enzymes intact is what the entire diet hinges upon. But few people want to eat nothing but room temperature raw fruits and vegetables. So by dehydrating food instead of cooking it, you can heat it to the point just below where enzymes are killed (allegedy 118 degrees), thus permitting the preparation of fancy, creative dishes that are warm and kind of cooked, yet still possible to digest.
Dehydration is a brilliant countermove against nature if it's true that food enzymes are so vital for digestion. "Ha! I'll let them discover fire but punish them with indigestion and early obliteration if they try to use it on the fruits of the earth," God must have laughed to himself when he created this world. Little did he realize that hundreds of years later, we'd pull one over on Him... with the Dehydrator!
The Raw Food diet is a complete fraud, though, if food enzymes immediately get destroyed in our bodies and serve no purpose in human digestion. Which is what some studies have shown (though most recommend a diet of cooked and raw foods), and would make a room full of dehydrators whirring away at 116 degrees seem mighty absurd.
Veggie burgers and hotdogs are one thing. Those are basically convenient foods for staying vegan at a BBQ; they taste a lot like their animal counterparts, are filling, and easy to heat up. Raw food goes well beyond this to the realm of lasagna with marinated eggplant noodles and cheese made out of a thousand different nuts, "bread" made out of flaxseed that takes 24 hours to dehydrate, sushi rice made out of jicama and pinenuts, and ravioli wrappers made from squished dehydrated coconut. The "tacos" at Pure Food and Wine look more like those Choco Tacos you get from the ice cream man than a normal taco, or even a veggie taco with soy meat in it.
As far as I knew, nobody at Pure Food and Wine was purely raw, and the one real raw foodist I've known (if you'll remember Robin from my alpaca days) would have to abstain from dinner gatherings if there was no fruit, but then would have cheese and steak binges on full moons and holidays. From my experience, Raw Foodism hardly seems like a viable lifestyle.
The first time I saw the giant man-sized dehydrator was on a preliminary tour of Pure Food and Wine, when I was first considering working there. Rebecca took us to the back kitchen, and there there it stood, sucking the water out of hundreds of almonds. Joe was the first to notice the temperature of the oven... 119 degrees. "Don't enzymes die at 118 degrees," Joe asked innocently.
Rebecca ran to the dehydrator and frantically turned it down three degrees.
No more was said, but the obvious fact hung in the air. Wasn't turning the dehydrator down at this point all for appearances? Every almond in there was now already a dead almond. The vitality that had existed in that almond at 116 degrees was utterly wiped out three degrees later. Enzmes? Gone. Vitamins? A memory. Minerals? Nowhere within a hundred feet. Digestabilty? Nil.
If Rebecca believed in Raw Foods, and the Pure Food and Wine philosophy, wouldn't she have thrown out the whole batch?
I don't know, but there the almonds remained, with the temperature reading a raw-friendly 116 degrees, the secret safe with us. "A few dead almonds aren't going to hurt anybody, are they?" I rationalized.
It was only later that I learned through the grapevine that the dehydrators at Pure Food and Wine would regularly go above the 116 safety cut-off. Seems I wasn't the only raw food skeptic at Pure Food afterall.
Stay tuned tomorrow... for Part 3.
wheres part three already??
Posted by: rachel | March 05, 2006 at 05:55 PM