The San Francisco Chronicle just published an article highlighting raw food "cooking" and Cherie Soria. Excerpt below…

Cooking School in the Raw
by Olivia Wu, Chronicle Staff Writer

Like all canny cooks, Cherie Soria knows how to hook her audience: with desserts. But Soria doesn't pull out the stops with butter, sugar, eggs and flour, baking them into fluffy confections. She makes her magic with avocado and agave syrup — and no baking at all. By the time her students taste her creations, they don't mind that those unexpected ingredients are the major components of their chocolate mousse. As Soria would say, "If you can make a raw vegan cheesecake better than regular cheesecake, why would you eat regular cheesecake?"

In no time, she has her students dipping into a layered pesto torta that relies on a cheese made from almonds to replace the usual ricotta, and digging into a lasagna-type dish with a noodle-like layer of pureed cashew nuts stretched over mushrooms, spinach and a killer marinara sauce. Soria is the pre-eminent teacher of gourmet raw food preparation, and founder of Living Light Culinary Arts Institute in Mendocino County. Now, she's established the country's first cooking school devoted to teaching raw and vegan cooking to home cooks and professional chefs.

A Place of Their Own

After nearly a decade of giving classes on the fly, in whatever facilities she could find, to some 800 students, she and her husband, co-director Dan Ladermann, have a place to call their own. The school is now housed in the 6,000-square-foot Company Store on Main Street in Fort Bragg. With the school, Soria and Ladermann aim to take raw cuisine mainstream. Classes are both demonstration and hands-on; the business also includes a production kitchen and takeout deli. There are no stoves or ovens; instead, dehydrators, high-speed blenders and special climate-controlled rooms for growing sprouts signal this is a raw-food operation.

Power Point presentations are part of the lectures and demonstrations, and six fully equipped stations are set up for hands-on classes. Roxanne Klein, whose eponymous, exclusively raw restaurant in Larkspur opened to critical acclaim in 2002 is Soria's most famous student. Klein's restaurant and takeout deli closed in 2004, but restaurants such as Cafe Gratitude in San Francisco and Berkeley, and Alive in San Francisco, are continuing the trend. Raw foodists believe that the greatest nourishment comes from food that is not heated beyond 115 degrees.

One reason, they believe, is that antioxidants and phyto-chemicals remain intact. They also believe that heat can transform some ingredients, notably oil and salt, into toxins. While these claims are controversial, Soria, 58, a radiant, small-framed woman who looks much younger than her years, may be the best advertisement for the cuisine and lifestyle. She has been cooking and living the raw food diet for 14 years, teaching classes at retreats such as Harbin Hot Springs in Lake County, and traveling the circuit of vegetarian and vegan national conferences.

When she began Living Light nine years ago, she kicked off with conventional raw dishes. "I taught raw without saying so by making gazpacho and olive tapenade," she says. Those dishes, followed by raw desserts, she says, won people over. The menu board of Living Light Cuisine ToGo, downstairs from the school, shows what draws: banana ice cream, carrot apple kuchen, chocolate mousse cup, chocolate cheesecake and frozen fudge bites. Juices and smoothies are listed, but so are entrees such as nori rolls, green burrito, zucchini angel hair pasta and a boxed mezze meal. All of them are made with 95 percent organic and 98 percent raw foods.

At the school, students begin with a required fundamentals class, then advance to associate chef and instructor training levels for professionals. As the classes progress, the format moves from a demonstration to hands-on format. In the past year, most of her fundamental classes have been at the capacity enrollment of 30 students. The hands-on classes are usually full, with 24 to 30 students per class. Soria says the school enrolls students from an international field, including Lebanon, South Africa, the Philippines, Thailand, Europe and South America.

Raw food techniques are different enough from standard cooking that even chefs — many of them private chefs for Bay Area families — take her classes, says Soria. Google, the Internet giant in Mountain View, recently hired a chef who graduated from Living Light. Soria knows what it feels like to be labeled a cultist. "I went from the standard American diet to vegetarian to vegan to raw," she says. When she began a vegetarian diet in the carnivorous '60s, "people thought I was going to die."

She was a vegetarian for 19 years before she attended a workshop in 1992 at the clinics of Anne Wigmore, founder of the Hippocrates Health Institute in Boston, a wheatgrass and raw food discipline with an emphasis on using foods to rid the body of toxins. Wigmore's regime failed in one respect, Soria says — "Her food had no flavor." Clients might feel better after a regime of juices, wheatgrass, salads and sprouts, but "they go back home and are bored" with the diet, Soria says.

A Mind at Work

Soria set her culinary intelligence to work. She based her cuisine on raw vegan "cheeses," and began — as she did by teaching desserts — naming her dishes after mainstream comfort foods, and making them look like lasagna, pizza and sandwiches. She created raw dishes with cooked textures, such as her "stir, not-fried" vegetables. She searched for sophisticated cutting gadgets such as a spiral slicer to create long pastas such as angel hair and linguine out of zucchini, and used high-powered blenders to make smooth and creamy textures, such as vegan mayonnaise and aioli.

Nuts and seeds are sprouted, because a tenet of the raw food movement says that eating "living" food is the source of energy. By sprouting nuts and seeds, the living components are activated. Soria ferments pureed nut milks with beneficial intestinal flora such as probiotic and vegan acidophilus cultures and Wigmore's invention–Revjuvelac, fermented wheat and rye juice. All this adds flavor and nourishment, Soria says, which helps people feel fuller quicker. During the course of a weeklong class, Soria says, students feel sated and still lose an average of 10 pounds.

Jean-Marie Fayat is such a person — he had tried everything to lose weight. Fayat is executive pastry chef at Draeger's Market in San Mateo. A chef who came up the ranks of professional trade school in France, he came to the United States in 1976. Like many chefs, he had gained quite a bit of weight. He tried a three-day raw foods workshop and found "those foods were very appetizing." Like other individuals and some private chefs in the Bay Area, he learned that with raw food, "You can make a great, excellent meal." And, he says, "I lost 22 pounds in three weeks. It was very dramatic for me. I'm a French chef, and I like my cheese and wine."

Obesity Strategy?

Like Soria, Fayat predicts that raw food will become mainstream because it addresses obesity and tastes good. Soria admits that a raw diet can be challenging: It's ideal to eat 80 percent raw, but she says that most people will benefit from 50 percent raw. Many of her students, she says, strive to maintain a close-to-100 percent raw diet, but will drink hot tea, and revert to the occasional mashed potatoes.

Trying not to sound extreme, Soria says she and Ladermann do eat out, perhaps once a week, and when they do, they have "a nice vegetarian meal" at a local conventional cooked-food restaurant.

Living Light Culinary Arts Institute
301-B North Main St., Fort Bragg
(800) 816-2319 or (707) 964-2420
Raw Food Chef

The excerpt below was originally published at Raw Food Info.

Cooked Food Versus Raw: Some of the Known Differences

Cooked foods cannot create true health because they are missing some very vital elements needed by the body for its optimal functioning; things like enzymes, oxygen, hormones, phytochemicals, bio-electrical energy and life-force. When foods are heated above 105 degrees Farenheit they begin to lose all of these. By 118 degrees Farenheit, most food is dead. Yes, the vitamins, minerals, carbohydrates, fats and proteins are still there, but in a greatly altered state — not at all what nature provided.

Each cell of the body is like a tiny battery, and raw and living foods supply the bio-electricity which charges these batteries. The bio-electrical energy of raw food can be clearly seen in Kirlian photographs of the food. This photographic process shows electrical discharges that naturally emanate from all living things as luminescent, aura-like flares surrounding the subject. The glow is bright and radiant in raw foods, yet almost totally absent in Kirlian photographs of comparable cooked foods.

To me "life-force" means "the energy that is able to create life." The sprouting ability of raw foods demonstrates the presence of the life-force within them. All grains, legumes, beans and seeds sprout. Nuts in the shell sprout. Potatoes sprout and create new potato plants. (Do not eat potato sprouts as they are poisonous.) If you stick the top part of a pineapple into water, it will sprout roots. Apple seeds create apple trees. Avocado pits and mango pits sprout. Now, take cooked versions of all the above, put them into soil and see if a plant will grow. Cooked food rots, rather than sprouts, and a new plant does not come forth. Through observation, you can easily demonstrate for yourself what you are losing by eating cooked foods. A food that is cooked cannot create life and cannot maintain the life-force energy in our bodies.

Cooking food disrupts its molecular structure and kills all the enzymes too. Enzymes are the indispensable catalysts which enable the body to utilize vitamins and minerals. (Think of enzymes as the workmen and vitamins and minerals as the bricks and mortar. Without the workmen, the bricks and mortar don't get put into place.) Enzymes are extremely heat-sensitive and thus do not survive in cooked foods. The vitamins and phytochemicals also are injured, greatly diminished, and left in an altered molecular state. The minerals are made less soluble.

The fats have turned from life enhancing fatty acids to trans-fatty acids, which create damaging free radicals in the body. Trans-fatty acids also interfere with respiration of the cells. The proteins (including vegetable proteins), become denatured; they then coagulate (like the white of an egg) and are very difficult to digest. Some researchers report that unmetabolized protein particles in the bloodstream are a possible cause of allergies.

When you eat cooked (enzymeless) foods, you put a heavy burden on your body, which then has to produce the enzymes missing in the food. One of the reasons you feel lethargic or sleepy after a cooked meal is because the body is diverting its energy to replacing the enzymes that were not supplied. By comparison, a raw food meal leaves you feeling light and full of energy. You can judge this for yourself. Uncooked foods digest in 1/3 to 1/2 the time of cooked foods. The stress of creating and replacing enzymes, meal after meal, day after day, year after year, greatly contributes to accelerated aging.

Ingesting cooked food also causes the body to produce a surge of white blood cells (leukocytosis). These cells normally defend against disease, infection and injury to the body, but their production is a routine effect of ingesting cooked foods (as if the body considers such food a threat or danger). Because leukocytes carry a variety of enzymes, there is another possible explanation for the increase in white blood cells. The leukocytes may be delivering the missing enzymes so that digestion can proceed unhindered.

Leukocytosis does not occur when raw, unheated foods are eaten. According to Viktoras Kulvinskas, "in any pathological condition, including the intoxification of the digestive system with cooked food or other toxic materials, these white cells increase from 5 or 6 thousand per cubic millimetre to 7, 8 or 9 thousand per cu.m.m." Leukocytosis also occurs when additives, pesticides and chemically based supplements are ingested. And, of course, producing these cells creates an additional stress upon the body.

Raw foods are full of oxygen, especially green leafy vegetables which contain an abundance of chlorophyll. The chemical structure of chlorophyll is almost identical to the hemoglobin in our red blood cells. The only difference is that the hemoglobin molecule has iron in its nucleus and the chlorophyll molecule has magnesium. Chlorophyll detoxifies the bloodstream and every other part of the body better than anything else you could eat. When you eat raw green chlorophyll foods, you oxygenate the blood. The bloodstream, through its capillary system, then delivers this oxygen to every cell in your body. And when you eat greens in blended form, such as juicing this process is even more efficient.

Sprouted seeds contain vital elements which nourish our glands, nerves and brain. The hormones needed by the body are created out of the natural fat and other essential principles found in seeds. Think about how few seeds are found in the average diet. The plant breeders are hybridizing most of the seeds out of our foods. Now we can get seedless watermelons, seedless grapes, seedless citrus, and the list goes on. Even if we did find a seed, most of us don't understand the value of eating it and thus, it would be discarded.

When you eat cooked starch, the body absorbs more than it needs. Getting rid of the excess starch then becomes another burden to the body. Those who favour cooked foods often make the point that since the body cannot absorb raw starch, this is a sign the food should be cooked. Another way to look at it, however, is that the body absorbs just enough of the raw starch for its needs and then passes out the rest. (When pig farmers feed their pigs raw potatoes, the pigs stay slender. Since farmers sell their pigs by the pound, they have learned to feed them cooked potatoes, which fattens them up.)

Cellulose — the woody, fibrous part of food — was previously believed to be unnecessary to the body because the body did not absorb it so it was deemed unimportant. Now we know that this fibre is what keeps things moving through our body so that we don't become constipated. Nature is vindicated again! I believe, in addition, that raw fibre has the ability to act as a broom which sweeps the intestinal tract and keeps it clean. Cooked fibre has lost the ability to do this for us. Enemas and colonics serve their purpose, but they are a poor substitute for what nature, by putting (raw) fibre into foods, has provided.

Raw and live foods nourish and improve the body's inner environment. Raw and live foods enable the body to dislodge and expel accumulated wastes. A member of my family had a tiny sliver of metal lodged in his hand as a result of an accident. For two years he tried to get it out by squeezing, pushing, and probing with sterilized needles, etc., but it wouldn't budge. He went to the Optimum Health Institute (to learn about live foods) for a week and, when he returned home, decided he would continue on raw foods. Four weeks later, a bubble formed on his hand and inside the bubble was the sliver of metal. The bubble then burst and the sliver came out. This is an example of what raw and live foods do. If something is not supposed to be in your body, it will be expelled.

Eating cooked food prevents the immune system from working on what is really important in keeping us superbly healthy and young in body, mind and soul. We exhaust and dissipate the body's strength by using the immune system to combat the unnatural cooked foods, chemically based supplements, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, hormones (in meats, poultry, fish and dairy) and numerous other toxins we ingest, breathe in or absorb through our skin. When we really need the immune system to support us (as when a disease or infection develops or an injury occurs), it then lacks the strength to defend us properly.

Eating healthy means giving your body power foods it can easily assimilate and use for regeneration and rejuvenation. Life comes from life. So the more foods you eat which are organic and straight from nature's raw garden, the better you are going to feel.

Excerpts from a raw food news article published in The Kennebec Journal (a local newspaper in Maine)…

Enthusiasts Flock to Raw Food, Saying It Contains Health Benefits
by Mechele Cooper

A cool breeze floated in through the windows as the group of food enthusiasts sat down to a gourmet meal.The breeze was welcome, but not because these food groupies had been slaving over a hot stove. This group — gathered as part of Northern Botanicals Lifestyle Center's wellness retreat — were enthusiasts of raw food. A raw-food diet consists of uncooked vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, sprouted grains, and cereals. None of the food is cooked, processed or animal-based. No sushi here. No steak tartare, either. Going raw, when it comes to food, is a growing trend in the United States, but it's relatively new to Maine, according to Bob and Pat Manning, owners of the lifestyle center on Cobbossee Stream.

Raw-food advocates say heating foods destroys the enzymes that aid in digestion and diminishes the food's nutritional value. They claim that raw foods help "detoxify" the body, prevent cancer and fight obesity. But detractors, including some nutritionists, say those who subscribe to a steady diet of raw vegetables and fruits miss out on essential proteins and minerals. And they don't buy the argument that cooking destroy's food's essential value. For some, the diet is no mere lifestyle choice. "I have a health condition, growths growing in my brain and right eye, and I'm hoping to shrink them down," Loran Griffin, 47, of Manchester said.

THE RETREAT

As the West Gardiner table was set and covered in a white linen tablecloth, glass serving bowls were set out, showing off the contrasting colors of the raw concoctions. The menu: apple, carrot and celery juice in stemmed wine glasses; zucchini and yellow squash spaghetti; pesto; fresh tomato marinara sauce; cashew pimento cheese; flax chips; and a mixed romaine salad with alfalfa sprouts, cucumber and red cabbage. For dessert, we can have banana-and-strawberry ice cream topped with a raw sweetener made from the agave cactus, and we have some dehydrated fruit cookies," said Pat Manning, who sat at the head of the table next to her husband.

The ice cream was made from frozen chunked fruit run through a Champion juicer with the solid slide in place. Equipment deemed essential for eating a raw food diet includes a Vita-Mix blender, a juicer and a food dehydrator. All the preparations share a key fascination: Preserve the enzymes. "Enzymes are like the spark that get all the other metabolic actions going," Pat Manning said. "(Eating raw food) helps you lose weight and have more energy. People who go through this program say they have so much more energy."

Besides five-day retreats, the Mannings also open their home once a month to an average of 40 raw foodists from as far away as Massachusetts. For $10, they serve up a raw-food gourmet meal that would command five times the price in a major metropolitan area.

INTEREST FROM AWAY

Friends told Carol Shain, 59, of Haverhill, Mass., about the program. "I used to be a vegetarian and wanted to get back into it," Shain said. "I know this is the way to live, even if I don't do it all the time." Pat Caggiano of Veazie and her 22-year-old son, Brian, a New England Culinary Institute student, came to the retreat together. Caggiano, a registered nurse, thought she could share what she learned with students in the healthy lifestyle classes she teaches in Bangor. "People want to feel better and lose weight," Caggiano said.

"There's a whole phenomenon with vegetables and raw foods that's happening in other states, and I think before long it will catch up here. We do have a high rate of illnesses in Maine,"she said. Raw-food enthusiasts point out that studies in rural China support the benefits of plant-based diets. Christopher Maloney, an Augusta naturopathic physician, said studies of Chinese diets also show proper nutrition could have a dramatic effect on reducing and reversing heart disease, diabetes, cancer and obesity. He said a raw food diet can decrease calories, lower cholesterol levels and improve rheumatoid arthritis symptoms significantly.

"Eating raw foods shows longtime anti-cancer effects and really counter balances the obesity epidemic in America," Maloney said.

–End excerpt–

From News 14 Carolina…

Raw Food Detox Diet

Are you sick of counting carbs? There's a new diet trend on the market — it's called a raw food diet. It consists of eating foods that are close to nature and mainly raw. But can you stick to it? One nutritionist says it's easy and you can even have dessert. Ice cream, dark chocolate, and cookies� You can eat them and still lose weight? Sure, but they have to be raw. It's part of a diet designed by nutritionist Natalia Rose.

"Like most women, I had my own body battles, and I was determined not to have to spend the rest of my life on a stairmaster or counting calories." The Raw Food Detox Diet is about eating close to nature with the belief that easily digested foods are eliminated more quickly. Rose says: "Fruit is one of the easiest things that moves through the body. It only takes 15 minutes in the stomach to digest fruit." Rose says beginners to the diet should start out slowly — eat 75-percent raw foods.

"You can eat avocadoes, you can eat whole grain pasta, you can eat sprouted grain breads — which means breads have been sprouted to become easily digestible." Like many people, Danielle Reda had a hard time losing weight — until she tried the raw food diet. She says: "I lost weight rapidly. I lost about 15 pounds in three weeks. That kept me going. I had a lot more energy. I felt vibrant."

Skeptics say raw food diets may be deficient in certain minerals, but Rose says you can do raw done right. She says juice raw vegetables to get enough calcium. You can also have goat cheese, nuts, and almond milk. "It's easy to stick to because you're satisfied. If you love what you're eating and losing weight, it's a win-win scenario." And many grocery stores carry raw foods in the organic section. Although Rose says this diet is for everyone, you should always check with your doctor first before starting a new diet program. Rose says Reda's weight loss is not typical. It's usually more gradual.

For more information, contact:

Natalia Rose
The Rose Program
natalia@therawfooddetoxdiet.com
Raw Food Detox Diet

If you're living in Australia, you should sign up for Raw-Pleasure's recipe testing program, where you get to try out new raw food recipes. The text of the press release from kntimes.com. is below…

Raw Food Diet Explodes Across Australia with Startling Health & Weight Loss Results

After a barrage of short term diets aimed more at boosting revenues than improving health, the raw food diet — or living foods as its often known — is a nutritional breath of fresh air. At last, pills, potions and protein powders have been dropped in favour of foods that doctors, nutritionists and common sense have been clamoring to be increased for years: fresh, unprocessed, fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds.

Living foods has taken this age old advice for improved health and taken it to the next level; famous chefs like Charlie Trotter, Roxanne Klein and Cherie Soria create sumptuous, varied feasts entirely from these ingredients -– no cooking required. Ordinary people all over Australia and the world have discovered the flavours and ease of living foods, often reporting a wide range of dramatic health benefits such as weight loss, disease remissions, increased immunity and improved complexions.

Sheryl and Piers Duruz, co-founders of Australia’s leading raw food education website Raw-Pleasure dropped 32 kg (that’s 70 pounds) and halved body fat from 21% to 9.6%, respectively, by changing their way of eating. “The weight loss was a wonderful surprise,” Piers relates “but feeling alive, energetic and alert enough to see the world as a wonderful place instead of tired and negative is worth more than I ever could have imagined before. It’s a truly hidden gift of life. Raw-Pleasure.com is our gift back to say thank you and help make it easy for others.”

Subscribers to Raw-Pleasure.com’s free Taste Tester recipe testing program regularly receive recipes such as curries, cakes, biscuits, sandwiches, cookies, snacks and more and are quickly developing a country-wide support network on their forums with a uniquely Australian flavour. Many doctors, such as Dr Doug Graham, are giving living foods the thumbs up. Dr Graham has trained many sports legends such as tennis Player Martina Navratilova, NBA pro basketball player Ronnie Grandison, track Olympic sprinter Doug Dickinson, as well as the United States Olympic Diving team and the Norwegian National Bicycling team.

Dr Graham states that “People thrive on the raw diet, often telling others how it has improved their health and their lives. Fruits, vegetables, and leafy greens not only contain sustainable amounts of carbohydrates, protein and fat, they have them in the percentages, ratios, and quality that are optimum for human health. When people integrate a proper raw diet with other healthful living practices, they rarely, if ever, develop weight control problems, chronic or even short-term illnesses.” Even conservative groups such as the US governments National Cancer Institute concur with living foods, such as fruit and vegetables, anti cancer properties stating “Fruit and vegetable consumption have generally been found in epidemiologic studies to be associated with reduced risk for a number of different cancers”.

“All I know is that it’s the most delicious, time proven way of eating out there… and we feel great!” says Piers. Maybe we would all benefit from taking another bite at nature’s original fare.