Greetings from the Golden State!

I will never forget my first encounter with the raw food movement – I was perusing the isles of a bookstore in a desperate attempt to walk off the pounds of greasy Asian food I had eaten for dinner just an hour before.  I felt bloated and tired, as one often does after such a meal, and I could barely keep my eyes open as I searched for an interesting title.  I have no idea what brought me to the cookbook section; after all, who could think of food in such an engorged state?  Yet there I was, and there staring at me from atop a high shelf, sat a beautiful glossy book.

It was Juliano Brotman’s RAW: the UNcook Book.  I was intrigued by the cover’s paper-bag façade, colorful veggie lettering, and wildly exotic recipes and ingredients found inside.  What truly fascinated me however, and left me haunted for weeks, was the idea of raw food itself.  Never before had it occurred to me that raw food was even an option – I grew up cooking food and that’s just the way it was.

I didn’t end up  purchasing Juliano’s book that night, though I later would.  Instead, two weeks of not being able to get the concept off my mind finally lead me to purchase my other favorite raw book, Ani’s Raw Food Kitchen, by Ani Phyo.  Her book was much less flashy and way less gourmet, but that’s what made it perfect for a raw greenhorn like me.  I started with the easy stuff: salads, soups, and shakes, and slowly built my repertoire from there.  It took me several paychecks and a great deal of organization before I could tackle the serious dishes like “breads” and “meats”, but before I knew it I was altering recipes and making my own raw concoctions.

Yet it wasn’t until I had amassed a large raw cookbook collection that I realized I should write my own.  I was altering so many recipes – too many – in order to make them more palatable or more realistic for the average person’s cooking skills.  Moreover, I had a story to share through my food that the others did not.  What had been almost an entire decade of struggling with my weight ended up a victory speech, which I feel would not have been possible without my passion for raw food.  What’s more, my concerns about the inhumane and ecologically unsound practices associated with factory-farming vanished, as I was no longer consuming animal products.  My lifestyle didn’t change overnight, and I’m still not 100% raw, but what raw food did for me was open a door to a better, healthier, happier world.