12 Steps to Raw Foods
by Victoria Boutenko, Raw Family Publishing, Ashland, Oregon, 2001.
A Review by Jesse Schwartz, Ph. D.

The woman who wrote this book is a lover, she is in love with humankind. To celebrate her love, she has written a song, a song about aliveness. It is more necessary than ever because every aspect of our lives is becoming increasingly deadened. The air we breathe is shellacked with chemicals--just look at the brown ring on the horizon encircling every city. Tap water is a chemical soup replete with chlorine and fluoride, and flavored with residues. Immense tonnages of poisons called pesticides are dumped onto the land. Even the oceans are becoming fished out and dead. As I write this, newspaper headlines jump out at me at how tens of thousands of oak trees in California are dying of some mysterious disease. This is no wonder as the vitality of all living things is being weakened!

This deadness is reflected in the profound stasis in peoples lives. This often takes the form of sexual stasis. What a deluge of putrid garbage appears on the web each day. Where there is smoke, there is fire--there must be vast numbers of people who are so wallowing in loneliness that they pay to watch insipid filth.

In a world that has run out of possibilities, that is deeply mired in ÒwhatÕs mine is mine,Ó and Òwhat is yours is mine,Ó here is a book that comes to teach about choosing life. Now one of the discoveries that people have made in recent decades is that by following a live food diet one can enhance oneÕs health and well-being. They have made the astonishingly elemental discovery that there is simply no need to cook most vegetables. All the insults we inflect on carrots, cabbage, and so forth by steaming or stir frying are not only unnecessary, they diminish their vitality. I have amazed friends by peeling the husk from a corn and suggesting they simply partake. With some trepidation and misgivings, they did! They exclaimed that it was delicious! No need really, they agreed, to steam, bake, or broil it. The same goes for fruits--no need to bake an apple or for that matter, an apple pie. Rather just eat an apple! Or make a raw apple pie! The crust can be chopped almonds and walnuts bonded together by ground dates and honey. The filling might be apples and honey made into a sauce with a food processor. Pour into the crust and chill.

There is no doubt that here is a powerful gateway toward health and healing. Quite a few people have healed themselves of serious illness by going onto a live food diet. There are several healing centers in the U.S. and elsewhere that report good results in treating all manner of illness. What is more, not only is the particular condition alleviated but the patients feel as though they have renewed and regenerated themselves--they feel more alive and have more energy.

Now just what is it about raw food that gives it its healing qualities? The author answers that itÕs the enzymes in the food: ÒAs I said earlier, enzymes are life and energy. We are human beings and we are spiritual beings. We need energy so we move and work and also love, share, communicate, and be sensitive to each other. Every time we eat cooked food, we lose enzymes. In our bodies filled with cooked food, our enzymes are doing hard work. Because cooked food does not have enzymes, our bodies cannot use it. Therefore, the body treats cooked food as a toxin and is only concerned with getting rid of it.Ó1

Now this is based on an assumption: That the enzymes in raw food are of significant help in digesting the foods themselves. We need to bear in mind that the enzymes in an apple are there to ripen the apple and whether they appreciably help with human digestion is very much an open question.

We must make a clear distinction here between the enzymes in food and the enzymes in the body. As one live food savant recently said, Òthe enzymes that are in food are for the benefit of the food and not us. When they hit the the stomach, these enzymes (which are small protein molecules) are broken down into their amino acid components and do not act as enzymes. We secrete our own enzymes. Also, by the time they hit the small intestine, where most digestion takes place, they have been completely inactivated.Ó2

Unfortunately, Victoria makes no such distinction and simply celebrates enzymes. Furthermore, cooking certainly destroys enzymes in food. But it does not necessarily follow that this forces the body to produce more of its own digestive enzymes than would otherwise be necessary to digest the food. It can be argued that Òcooking sometimes alters the cell structure so that the nutrients become more accessible to our own bodyÕs digestive enzymes (such as by gelatinizing starch) or destroys anti-amylases or anti-proteases. Thus, in many cases, cooked food actually requires less enzymes for digestion than raw food.Ó3

It seems to me that VictoriaÕs attempt to justify a raw food diet on the basis of preserving food enzymes is weak at best. More cogent arguments can be made. LetÕs listen to what the late T. C. Fry, a leader in the live food movement, says:

Cooking is a process of food destruction from the moment heat is applied to the foodstuff. Long before dry ashes result, food values are totally destroyed. If you put your hand for just a moment into boiling water, or on a hot stove, that should forever persuade you just how destructive temperatures for perhaps half an hour or more are! What was living substance becomes totally dead very rapidly with exposure to heat!

Proteins begin coagulating and delaminating, as may plainly be seen in the case of eggs and cheese when their temperature reaches only 118 degrees. At temperatures commonly applied in cooking, they are completely devoid of nutritive values. Worse yet...

Cooked proteins are readily putrefied by bacteria in the digestive tract and give rise to some very potent poisons such as ptomaineÕs [sic], leukomaines, mercaptans, indoles, skatoles, ammonias, hydrogen sulfide, putrescine, cadaverine and yet more. These are absorbed into the portal blood and cause myriadÕs [sic] of disease conditions.

Cooking renders food toxic! The toxicity of the deranged debris of cooking is confirmed by the doubling and tripling of the white blood cells after the eating of a cooked food meal. The white blood cells are a first line of defense and are, collectively, popularly called Òthe immune system.Ó4

A strong case is made for raw food on the basis that cooking destroys its structure. No need to have recourse to enzymes.
Yet another approach is given by a leading teacher, David Judd:
LifeFOOD is food that has its life force. Other food, food that is cooked, de-natured, flesh foods, and many other presently eaten foods, are missing life force. What then is LifeFOOD? And what is life force? Life force is a mysterious and illusive [sic] property. It can be measured because it can cause things to move, it can reproduce itself, it can repair itself and it can be seen to produce various effects. For example, an orange, photographed with Kirlean field photography, reveals electromagnetic lightning storm pattern within and around the orange. This is the life force of the orange made visible by Kirlean field photography. Kirlean field photography photographs the aura, or life force, of any living thing. It photographs the light that the life force is.

As a food possesses this life force full-color spectrum rich in hues of every conceivable shape and pattern show up in crystallography and chromium spectrum analysis. Cooked food lacks this life force. Starchy hybridized vegetables posses a much lower vibration than the radiance of a vegetable grown in the wild.5

Here the author moves beyond the mundane physicality of food to its energetic structure. Again no need to resort to enzymes. Had Victoria made her case for live foods on the life force or energy in them, this would have opened for her gate after gate of discovery.
Ponder a blade of grass: What makes it stand upright intoning its little song to the heavens is its life force?
Contemplate a leaf of lettuce just harvested from the garden, why is it that we say it is alive? One can see it its crispness the vibrancy of its colors. Though not apparent at first glance, it is none the less real.
It is well known to traditional people. It forms the basis of a traditional system of healing called acupuncture. One can not but sense that Victoria knows all this very well. One finds a hint, for example, when she mentions the benefits of sleeping outdoors. One finds further that she is well aware of the benefits of exercise and being in nature. She recounts how she and her family hiked the entire length of the Pacific Crest Trail on a raw food diet. Some sections of the trail, let us note, are well over 9,000 feet.
There can be no doubt that Victoria has raised her spiritual sensitivity to a level where instinctively, she can sense the life energy in fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds.
Yes, Victoria knows this very well. Consider for example how she views fever as a part of the wholistic functioning of the body:
To hasten the removal of toxins the body creates fever. Fever is not just a high temperature of the body. ...In order to create a fever, the body has to work hard. The heart has to pump 20 to 30 heartbeats faster per minute than normal. All the hormonal glands have to do extra work. That is why we feel tired. To conserve the energy used to digest food, the body creates a no-appetite condition. The tongue is coated with a thick layer of mucus so we cannot feel the taste; the nose is stuffed so we cannot be tempted by the smell of food; the tonsils are swollen so it is hard to swallow. What happens when the body has a fever? The body goes into a sweat so that the mucus can come out through the pores. Do you remember that particular sticky and smelly sweat that happens during high fever? The mucus became more liquefied and we get very runny noses.6

Her unitary approach here must spring from a deep sense of a unitary energy. But for whatever reason, she chooses to base her argument for eating live foods on enzymes. Hence, she limits herself unnecessarily. Should she have gone on to life energy, she would have been able to connect the vitality in food to the energetic metabolism of the body. She would have been able to make a bridge (which has never really been done before) from food to the psyche. Most important to a modern world profoundly confused about sexuality, she would have been able to make a connection, as Arnold Ehret did nearly a century ago, with vital food and feelings of love. Life energy would have been the common thread. It would furthermore connect to things outside the body. It would connect each person to animals, plants, flowers and trees. Beyond that, it would link the life force in an apple to that in the spiral nebulae.
Perhaps the reason she does not mention life energy is that the book, after all, is written for people who are on ordinary diets and are just starting out on a voyage of discovery. It has a powerful premise namely that cooked food is addictive. From this it goes on to outline a Ò12 Step programÓ very much like that used to help people who are addicted to alcohol or other drugs. Now proclaiming that cooked food is addictive is a trumpet blast. It proclaims life amidst the mass of junk that people consume in cans and bottles and frozen packets. It hurls a tomato at the colas, the french fries, and potato chips. In the face of fast food, it proclaims Òlife!Ó For this we are indebted to her; the book will be a classic in humanityÕs striving against estrangement in our breakfast bowls!
However, if one searches to the ends of the earth--Asia, Africa, Australia, the Amazon, or islands in the the South Pacific--nowhere is one going to find a people on a wholly vegetarian diet, let alone raw food. They all eat meat or fish in some form or another--some even eat moles, gophers, insects and grubs. True, a band of people in a remote part of the Philippines were discovered recently who were vegetarian--but they are by far and away the exception. The overwhelming majority of people living close to a state of nature eat meat. Furthermore, the meat is cooked along with poultry, fish and vegetables.
Now, Robert Miller is a zealous advocate of a raw food diet. He is also a world traveler. He leads groups of people to remote and exotic places and where he gives seminars. I asked him, if ever in his travels, he had come upon a traditional or native people eating raw fruits and vegetables exclusively. Here is what he said,
Actually, I am glad you brought that up about what people or culture have been raw vegans. As far as my studies go, NONE! How about that. Where is the precedent for eating all raw vegan diet in ÒindigenousÓ, ÒnativeÓ or ÒprimitiveÓ cultures? As far as I have been able to find out, NONE!

I would like to know. I really would but have never been able to find out about a ÒtribeÓ of people who were raw vegans[.] I did meet a woman from Alabama who ÒheardÓ of some people in the Phillipines. But no substantiation.

But it only makes sense to me that humans before recorded history, perhaps tens of thousands of years before recorded history must have been eaten all unfired foods, whole from the Earth just as all animals do. And they must have lived just as healthily.

But these peoples are unknown to use [sic]. Just bone fragments and suppositions by ÒscientistsÓ who base their speculations on cooked knowledge.

And despite my thorough raw veganism, I doubt that those ancient humans ate a totally vegan diet. It is much more likely that they ate what they could grasp with their hands, and that could have included insects and small animals or fish as a minor addition to fruits, vegetables and nuts.7

Barbecued yellowjackets
Furthermore, Victoria would have to explain why people such as the Ohlone Indians who lived right here in Berkeley had a diet of cooked acorn meal, which they supplemented with cooked meat of mostly any sort of animal that they could catch. LetÕs listen as Malcolm Margolin, a profound student of the California native peoples describes their diet:
Like most other California Indians, the Ohlones followed the most ancient of all subsistence patterns--hunting and gathering. They ate insects, lizards, snakes, moles, mice, gophers, ground squirrels, wood rats, quail, doves, song birds, rabbits, raccoons, foxes, deer, elk, antelopes--indeed, the widest conceivable variety of both small and large game. Only a few animals (eagles, buzzards, ravens, owls, and frogs) were ÔtabooÓ for religious reasons.

There is nothing unusual about the scope of the Ohlone diet. In fact, only in recent times (astonishingly recent times when one considers the entire sweep of human existence) have people narrowed their preferences to a few major species such as cows, goats, pigs, sheep, and chickens, while almost completely excluding the rest of the animal kingdom. Before the recent widespread dependence on domesticated animals, for untold tens of thousands of years, human societies everywhere lived on insects, reptiles, and rodents as well as larger game animals. [our italics]

So it was with the Ohlones. They ate insects, not as a last-resort starvation food, but as a regular and enjoyable article of diet. They casually picked lice from their own robes and hair of others (lice, too, were an almost universal part of the human condition), and popped them into their mouths with scarcely a thought--a practice which disgusted early European visitors no end... Grasshoppers were another common food. In the late spring, Ohlones went out into the meadows to gather great numbers of them. The mood was festive. Men, women, and children laughed and joked as they beat the tall grass with sticks and drove clouds of grasshoppers into specially dug pits. Even the youngest members of the village, the grass waving high above their heads, took part in this event.

Yellowjacket grubs were also favored. When the people discovered an underground yellowjacket nest, they lit a fire and drove smoke into it with hawk feathers to numb the wasps within. Then they dug the nest out with digging sticks and quickly gathered the larvae. They were either boiled together in a cooking basket or roasted on tiny spits over a fire.

In addition to insects, the Ohlones rarely passed by a fat lizard or a snake without trying to catch it. Moles were trapped in their tunnels, ground squirrels were driven out of their holes by smoke, and wood rats were caught by burning their stick nests to the ground. The Ohlones also caught mice and other rodents in deadfall traps.8

Acorn Mush
Not only have native peoples always eaten meat, they have gone to considerable trouble and effort to cook their food. Consider again the Ohlones: Acorns were a very significant part of their diet. They were ground in a stone mortar. The flour was then leached with water. This removed the bitterness.
After the leaching came the cooking. A woman placed the flour and some water into still another kind of basket--one so skillfully made that it was completely watertight. Since she could not place the basket directly onto the flames, she heated some round stones in the fire. When a stone was hot, she removed it from the fire with two sticks, dipped it quickly into some water to wash off the ashes, and dropped it into the acorn mush. She stirred constantly with a looped stick or wooden paddle to keep the hot stone from burning a hole in the basket. She then added more stones until the basket was perhaps one quarter filled with stones, and and she kept them all moving and rolling until--after only a few minutes--the mush was boiling. In Bayshore villages that were built on alluvial soil, stones had to be carried in form far away; and good cooking stones--ones that would not crack when heated--were highly valued.

When the mush was fully cooked, the woman served it, sometimes in a watery form as a soup, often as a thick porridge. If she wanted to make acorn bread, she boiled the mush longer and then placed the batter into an earthen oven or on top of a hot slab of rock. Acorn bread (described as Òdeliciously rich and oilyÓ by early explorers) was a favorite Ohlone food--a food to be taken on trips or to be shared at the many feasts and festivals throughout the year.9

We have dwelt at some length on the diet of the Ohlones because no one will deny that they lived in profound communion with nature. Their diet exemplifies that of traditional peoples throughout the world.
The Original Diet

Was there then at one time people who did follow a wholly live food diet? Yes, such a diet is to be found in the Bible. It is the diet of Adam and Eve, the progenitors of mankind.
If we look at the account of Creation in Genesis, we find that on the sixth day, there is the commandment,
Behold, I have given you every seedbearing plant on the face of the earth, and every tree that has seedbearing fruit. It shall be to you for food. For every beast of the field, every bird of the sky and everything that walks the land, that has in it a living soul, all plant vegetation shall be food. (Genesis 1:29-30)

Here you have it. Animals were to eat plants. Man was originally to eat fruit and nuts and seeds.
Man was not to kill any creature and eat its flesh and animals were not to eat one another. Their food was not the same. Animals were to eat plants. But fruit, nuts, and seeds were reserved for humans.
Scripture concludes the description of the work of the sixth day with the words, Òand behold it was very good.Ó One imagines the seeds of herbs to include sunflower and pumpkin seeds and various grains including wheat, barley, and beans. Now there was no reason surely to cook the fruit and nuts--as to the seeds, say of wheat, barley, and oats--were these grains simply eaten or were they ground and made into flour and then bread? Since there is no mention of cooking, my conjecture is that fruit, nuts, and seeds were eaten just as they were. One can only speculate on the colors, textures, and aromas of these foods, at the dawn of creation, in an utterly pristine world.
Only later after the Expulsion, were they permitted to eat Òthe herb of the fieldÓ namely vegetables and only much later, after the Flood, was humankind permitted to eat meat.10
In this sense, VictoriaÕs book is a call to return to an aliveness far beyond anything we can imagine today. She is helping us take some steps back toward Eden. She does this in a gracious and charming way. There is, for example, a magnificent chapter on recipes including Un-Chicken Noodle Soup, Gazpacho, ValyaÕs Raw Bread, Live Gardenburgers, Live Pizza, and many more culinary celebrations.
She travels widely and gives workshops which are very much in demand. She recounts some of her dialogues with her students. It is apparent that these are no mere cooking classes but really group therapy sessions, if you will. People have come ostensibly because they are dissatisfied with their diets and want to change. But it soon becomes apparent that their dependence on heavily processed cooked food is a part of a way of living that is both deeply stuck and estranged from nature. Victoria helps them to stand back and look at their deeply ingrained habits, to objectify them, so to speak. Once seen in the mirror of aliveness, of what can be, the habits may start to soften and eventually disappear. Victoria helps her students come to such a realization and she does so with a graceful and humorous way. Her classes sparkle with exuberance--they are so much fun!
This is a breakthrough. What started out as the old and rather boring debate of raw versus cooked food has now become an inquiry into how we can liberate ourselves from rigid and mechanistic ways of living and not just as regards diet. By bringing things to the level of psychology and turning her cooking sessions into group therapy, Victoria is leading us from our bellies to our souls.
Victoria Boutenko is a lover, she is in love with humankind and her book is a song, a song about aliveness.

Jesse Schwartz, Ph. D.
President
Living Tree Community Foods
Berkeley, California
January 2002

To Place An Order For a 12 Steps to Raw Food book,
please send a check or money order for $15.95 to:

Victoria Boutenko
2253 Hwy 99N, #58
Ashland, OR 97520

We will pay for media rate postage. If you would like us to ship Priority please add $3.50. If you have questions please email Victoria at: victoria@rawfamily.com

References

1) Boutenko, Victoria. 12 Steps to Raw Foods: How to End Your Addiction to Cooked Food, Raw Family Publishing, Ashland, Oregon. 2001. p. 7.

2) Graham, Blake. The Importance of Food Combining, posted to rawimmortal@yahoogroups.com, January 19, 2002. BlakeÕs posting was originally posted by Jeff Novick, a long-time raw food nutritionist from Florida. See http://www.rawfoodsupport.com

3) ÒBeyond Vegetarianism, Transcending Outdated DogmasÓ. http://www.beyondveg.com. 2001.

4) Fry, T. C.. How Could Cooked Food Be So Bad If Everyone Is Doing It? reprinted in Online Health and Nutrition Newsletter, Vol 5, Issue 12e. ÒSpirit of Health: A Live Food/High Energy Diet - Part IÓ. 2001.

5) Judd, David. ÒLifeFOOD Nutrition is...Ó. http://www.lifefood.com. 2001.

6) Boutenko, Victoria. ibid. p. 37

7) Miller, Robert. email to Jesse Schwartz. 2001.

8) Margolin, Malcolm. The Ohlone Way: Indian Life in the San Francisco-- Monterey Bay Area. Heyday Books, Berkeley, California 94709. pp. 24-5.

9) Margolin, Malcom. ibid. p.

10) Those wishing to look further into the Original Diet should see the commentary by Rabbi Moshe Ben Nachman. Known as the Ramban, he is one of the mightiest Biblical scholars, a man in command of the entire Hebrew tradition. His exegesis of these verses appears, in English, in Ramban: Commentary on the Torah; Genesis. Translated and annotated by Rabbi Dr. Charles B. Chavel, Shilo Publishing House, New York, N.Y.. 1971. p. 56-8.