First of all: This is not about trying to discredit raw food, the raw food fanboys are making an excellent job at that themselves with their hysterical, obsessive demeanor and fact twisting manipulations and distortions, spurious claims, straight lies and ring-citations of scientific fallacies by people who go to India for two weeks and come back with a "PhD". Please.

Secondly, I believe raw food, if done sanely, can be healthy, especially if grains and nuts are integrated (which are often rejected), as well as B12 and eventually Vitamin D for those who live in latitudes North of 37° or the equivalent of the Southern hemisphere or who generally live an outdoor deficient lifestyle .

This text is also not about a list of refuting spurious raw food claims in detail, it is addressing the raw food "thing" as the phenomenon, and why it is so annoying for vegans having to deal with it. I think most, if not all raw food claims - even the not so silly ones - have been refuted or at least been disregarded as irrelevant. One example: Cooking destroys food. No, the exact opposite is true most of the time. Cooking renders many nutrients available in a much denser form and sometimes is absolutely required to even make a food palatable as it is toxic in it's raw state like some beans. In fact digestion destroys food, our entire digestion system is one big food-destruction machine which has evolved to split food into tiny particles so the body can reassemble them as it sees fit. Also, since through cooking nutrients are available in a more palatable, denser form, less quantities of food need to be consumed and most importantly, less time needs to be spent on eating itself, freeing up time to develop things like complicated social interaction, culture and so on. There is a reason why vegan relatives of humans spend up to 16 hours a day eating... So cooking is a perfect addition to the already brilliant system of digestion. The discovery of cooking may very well be the precondition which was necessary for human culture to evolve because cooking was the first efficiency measure invented in a context of human economics, freeing up an enormous amount of time and resources that could be spent otherwise, like developing culture. Veganism is a consequence of that cultural evolution, without culture, no ethics that goes beyond the consideration of your closest genetic group would ever exist. And the vegan community is the first human community to have extended ethical consideration beyond the species barrier in a practical approach. In a way we're revolutionary social pioneers set to define a new Status Quo in human civilization.

However, the vegan community is actually not a community, that's what makes it so new and unique. It's just a bunch of people globally, mostly Western still but popping up everywhere lately, who've recognized and integrated a simple set of ethical principles and as a consequence, vegans appear as a community. Slowly, a sense of identity is developing as well, but it is still fragile and vulnerable. Amazingly though, many different other movements, ideologies or interest groups are constantly seeking to destroy, colonize or otherwise form and bend this "community".

It used to be just people who abuse individuals from other species - or who benefit from such activity who used to launch aggressive and demeaning attacks against vegans - to no avail. The vegan lifestyle rests on coherent reasoning, it's not the answer to all problems, but necessary and logically sound.

As attention on vegans increases, as veganism is beginning to be considered a mainstream option, other groups have taken notice - as absurd as the fascist right, Marxist left, totalitarian religious sects, deep earth environmental fundamentalists, animal welfarists ect.pp. These groups however have adopted or supported a very stripped or/and distorted interpretation of veganism and used the remains as a sort of decorative element for their own ideology. Very apparent in all of them is the profound element of ethics which is lacking and the logical inconsistencies that follow because that. Just to give you one example of what I mean here: An extreme right winger would say "the vegan lifestyle fits in very nicely with the concept of national socialism". What they're ignoring of course, is that humans are animals, and therefore, a racist construct can only be unvegan. They are not understanding that vegan principles are hollowing out concepts which are designed to create a value hierarchy of privileges where those that climb to the narcissistic top, are kicking those below them in the face.

The raw food movement is different from these other antivegan movements in the sense that they present themselves as the new and improved vegans, the better vegans, the more enlightened and progressive vegans. The irony being of course, that raw foodists are not vegans at all, given that at the base of veganism is a set of ethical principles which were, in modern times, defined by late Donald Watson. The base of raw food however, is "optimum health" as defined by raw foodists. Some people would argue that veganism not necessarily involves ethics and that apart from altruistic motivation, an egocentric motivation (like health) may be enough, but these people strictly speaking are vegan dieters and not vegans.

Now the reason why I have taken a tough stance against raw foodists (note I'm saying raw foodists, not raw food), is because no other group has been more damaging to the vegan movement. The sheer volume of misinformation, distortions, deliberate misinterpretion and wrong associations - as well as bluntly put - a lot of dead kids has been exhausting. Yes, dead kids. Most of times when I researched media claims that "vegans have staved children", it turned out to be not vegans but more or less obscure and dubious variants of raw food diet adherents whose total loss of common sense and reality eventually lead to a death of a child.

The problem here is that everything that's bad about the raw food movement gets subsumed as vegan, because most people do not have the information to differentiate. High volume antivegan websites as beyondvegetarianism.com actively built upon this by using an almost exclusively raw food dogma to seek to discredit vegans and veganism. Raw foodists also hinder a rational approach on nutrition in vegans. More and more, raw foodist catch phrases are appearing in vegan contexts, e. g. "denatured", or supplemental vitamins which could otherwise only be obtained by either killing or exploiting someone or drinking dirty water, or eating feces are dismissed as "unnatural" with measurable consequences. The German vegetarian study concluded with skyrocket-high homocystein values of the vegans, that "the vegetarian diet which occasionally includes meat is best."

Addressing the psychotic constructs of "naturality" created by the raw food scene would probably fill social science books, as well as the prevalent obsessive compulsive and manic tendencies. The absence of common sense and the willingness to place theorem above truth is what for me has become the synonym of the raw food movement.

Some interesting food for thought here, and I notice 'ha' hasn't responded to it yet...

BRAVO!!

Gold stars for Ava - very well said. =)

Wow! I didn't know that raw vegans were so evil-killing and starving their children no less-and what's worse "discrediting" the vegan movement. Shame on them...

And cooking food has led to the evolution of ethical, moral thinking that only us humans possess and practice. An impressive accomplishment...

Perhaps too many slippery assumptions in order "to hear what you want to hear" and justify habits that don't add up...

some valid points, but i would never paint all raw vegans with same brush - much like not all vegans are alike (with different motivations, ethics, politics, dietary habits, behaviour and so on).

Some vegans are nuts, some aren't, some raw vegans are nuts, some aren't.

There are many raw vegans or near raw vegans whose opinions and knowledge I have loads of time for like Oak, or Pat Reeves. Raw veganism is clearly a valid and healthy way of eating for some people.

Personally I think your dietary choices are yours to make and the only issue I have (and which is why i take part in discussions about these issues) is what I see as a dangerous and/or unfounded advice about something so crucial to our health than b12, or things like fasting.

To call on natural or unnatural these days, within mankind, is ..well...absurd at least. What's natural these days?
I'm being vegan for more than 10 years, and few years ago I started to feel some of the symptoms of B12 deficiency, as I didn't pay attention to supplementing it (unfortunately, still not paying enough attention). We need to be responsible for ourselves and with information and example we're giving for others. Humans evolve in "urban" direction, so there is no natural order.

I tend to agree with JP. When you're doing something unorthodox, like raw food-ing, you get unjustified flak (and maybe some justified), it can make you insular and single minded and can lead to being dogmatic to the point of harming yourself or even your kids. I think this is why reasonable discussion and assesment breaks down.

I saw a friend go this way, it was almost like watching an addict trying to push his diet and lifestyle that bit more - then it became clear it was doing him harm. On the other hand there's people doing great on it. We can't put everyone in the same box.

Looking at the vast majority of diets, increasing the amount of raw intake is probably a good idea, and I freely admit the reason I don't do more is because I enjoy bread, cooked rice and other cooked food and I find it easy and convenient. I think my conclusion is that it's not an issue that's black and white.

I'm with JP and with xbojanx on this one.

Good post, Ava. I tend to agree with your analysis, even if I'm much more measured in my fervor.

And as amazingly weird as I find Ha posts to be he seems to be doing very well on the raw food thing... Whatever floats your boat I suppose if it works for you and you want to sacrifice tasty food for fitness then thats cool. I just love the nice vegan meals I eat

yeah, if his claims are accurate he is indeed a very succesful athlete. but the question isn't perhaps how good you are but how good you could be in the long run. just because you're good doesn't mean you're the best you could be.

and FPC, could you please chose a non-moving avatar, I'm getting slightly dizzy from all the movement... animated images should be forbidden

First, i think there's a distinction between 'raw foodists' and 'vegans who eat raw-only' that needs to be understood...

I dunno what your experience of rawfooders is like JP, but after sitting in a room with one 'leader' amongst nodding raw foodists telling them that 'humans and animals have an unspoken agreement and it's okay to eat them' i'm done with that gang of idiots.

I don't think eating raw is necessarily bad, but it definitely seems to attract some awfully thoughtless people...and when it gets attached to veganism, we've got a serious problem....imo at least.

Now this sounds like a story worth hearing. Please, do tell.

Well, that's pretty much the story! It's an 'unspoken agreement', and that it's okay to eat animal products!!

He was also talking about how we will be able to live 'forever', etc.. Absolute nonsense.

No, give me details (probably in another thread however) of how you came to be there. Who were these people? Of course, you don't have to be specific to the point of revealing identities.

I just get this funny picture of you in your racing gear sitting amongst cult individuals chanting, burning candles etc.

I was going to ask if all raw foodists are vegan, as taken literally, raw food could include milk, eggs and even meat. I didn't because I thought it was a stupid question. It turns out now it wouldn't have been. Raw meat, bleurgh !

Anyway, aren't all "agreements" between humans and animals unspoken ?