Raw-some?

I am sitting in a raw, vegan cafe right now where things like RAW chocolate smoothies made of cacao powder and raw nut milks are concocted for the handsome price tag of $5.95 a glass. Raw, living food, they call it.

As I'm sipping on my green smoothie that's reminiscent of the Odwalla Superfood and is chock full of greens AND algae (yes spirulina and chlorella), I'm apt to find this type of haute-cuisine quite intriguing, but also just a lil plain strange.

How does one survive off of purely raw foods (foods that haven't been processed over 104 F) and not become starved and silly? Upon further research and exploration, I found that the raw foodists are actually pretty clever and definitely very creative. They've taken the simplest elements of the most basic foods and made them to mimic their conventional cooked counterparts -- raw bread from sprouted grains, nuts and pastes from plant parts to make even things like burritos and "burgres". It's the cuisine of the romanticized caveman, where nuts, seeds and berries made up the staples of the diet.

A friend of mine has been living that lifestyle successfully for already 6 years! She is what I call a sucessful "hippie." Someone who hasn't just bought into a phase of life that lasts only during those cataclysmic college years, but has made it last and worthwhile up to her happy 40's. I have to give her props for that because a life without fresh baked bread and steamed rice is... well ... not a life I can live =)


Amber