Feast On This!

Are You a Raw Foodie?

I am both intrigued and scared by the raw food diet—mainly because I’m just not that familiar with it. Luckily, there are experienced raw foodists to come to the rescue! Eco Chef Bryan Au is a raw chef extraordinaire and his site, Raw in Ten Minutes offers recipes, an online store and access to downloading his $2 iphone app, Eco Chef 10 Minute Meals with  Bryan Au. The app, is actually #4 on itunes.com and I’m pretty impressed with it. The pictures and graphics are colorful, clear and easy to read. You’ll find over a 100 recipes that you can make in 10 minutes or less, like Eggplant Manicotti, pancakes, and onion rings. With an app like this, I’m definitely more inclined to try adding some raw meals to my repertoire.

Nachos (photo courtesy of Raw in Ten Minutes)

So, if you’re like me, and not in the loop regarding the raw diet, I found some information from where else? About.com:

“The raw food diet is a diet based on unprocessed and uncooked plant foods, such as fresh fruit and vegetables, sprouts, seeds, nuts, grains, beans, nuts, dried fruit, and seaweed. Heating food above 116 degrees F is believed to destroy enzymes in food that can assist in the digestion and absorption of food. Cooking is also thought to diminish the nutritional value and “life force” of food. Typically, at least 75% of the diet must be living or raw.”

What does a raw foodist eat?

Unprocessed, preferably organic, whole foods such as:

Fresh fruits and vegetables

Nuts

Seeds

Beans

Grains

Legumes

Seaweed

Unprocessed organic or natural foods

Freshly juiced fruit and vegetables

Purified water

Young coconut milk

It’s certainly important to do your homework when it comes to changing your diet like this, but I’m excited to incorporate 1-2 raw meals a week into our diet and hopefully still reap the benefits: more energy, better digestion, and weight loss. (Fortunately, just going vegan has done all that for us already).

So how about it? Would you go raw?

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Bringing the Veg Life to a College Near You

Today, more and more college students are becoming more aware of the vegan/vegetarian lifestyle and passing it along. Vegan Outreach has a program called Adopt A College where people can win prizes for handing out the most pamphlets—vegetarian pamphlets that educate folks on animal abuse. Most of the volunteers are actually not students. One volunteer handed out 52,835 leaflets at 100 schools in the Fall of 2009!

StAR (Students for Animal Rights) is a nationwide coalition of college students working towards stopping animal cruelty. Three years ago, they started College Veg Pledge, a movement calling on all college students to go vegan for the month of May. Check out an interview with Kenny Torella, StAR Outreach Coordinator, on VegNews.

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I don’t hold animals superior or even equal to humans. The whole case for behaving decently to animals rests on the fact that we are the superior species. We are the species uniquely capable of imagination, rationality, and moral choice – and that is precisely why we are under an obligation to recognize and respect the rights of animals.

-Bridgid Brophy