>Hi Kirt!

>Also, it would seem that it would be more healthful to
>eat, say raw cheese (which does not sound yucky), than cooked foods of any
>kind.   What's your opinion?

Clearly, in my experience, RAF is very very important. If it were a choice
of RAF vs, say, cooked grains, RAF would win hands down (health-wise for
sure; philosophy-wise, to each her own). But as you no doubt noticed in
Price's book, all of those cultures were cooking some of their food.
Perhaps they would've been better off without it, but... There is no clear
date as to when our ancestors were cooking, but it seems entirely possible
that they were cooking before the final(sic) touches of human evolution
occured. Does that mean we are better off with some cooked foods? I would
love to test such a hypothesis out on myself but have no idea how to
approach it? What cooked food would I eat? Animal foods? Jeez, I have
trouble enough finding enough raw animal foods to eat. Veggies? Some
steamed veggies sound OK. Fruit? No, I probably eat too much fruit the way
it is. Grains? Cooking a food which tastes bad raw can't be a very good
idea, can it? Besides, how could our metabolism evolve to deal PROPERLY
with cooked foods, since there is such a huge variety of foods and cooking
methods producing such a huge variety of new molecules.

I am curious about what cooked foods folks have "succeeded" in eating after
a time on an (unsucessful, I assume) all-raw regime. Which cooked foods do
folks on this list think are OK, or the least toxic, or whatever? Please
share what has worked for you.

I suspect that I will experiment with cooked foods years down the line, but
have other fine-tunings to try first on all-raw. Sometime soon I may try
eliminating fruit entirely and eating instincto with RAF and veggies for
several months. I just did 10 days with minimal fruit (three >lb fruit
meals during the 10 days) and it was very interesting. Unfortunately, fruit
is one heck of a lot easier to obtain than RAF. Who knows? I just mean to
say that while raw foods are a good IDEA I don't see why a certain amount
of "intellegently" cooked foods might not be useful (or at least not
harmful). Again, I doubt it, but will never know until I try it.

In all, Sandy, I suspect you can still enjoy the fruits of a vegan
philosophy while admitting that you need some RAF to be balanced or all-raw
or both--just a necessary evil foisted upon you by our evolutionary
heritage, one that might be minimized in the pursuit of a higher good, but
perhaps not completely ignored since the health costs can be serious. As
Zephyr has posted, one can still be very "environmentally-friendly" while
eating RAF. Looking at the variety of packaged crap sold in the average
health food store to a huge clientele of vegetarians, I would add that it's
may be more "what you eat" that is important, as opposed to "what you don't
eat" :/

Instinctos can fall into the trap of "dairy/grains are the root of all
human evil", as vegans can "killing animals is the root of all human evil".
I tend towards the "too big a brain is the root of all human evil" argument
myself, but am too hypocritical to get a lobotomy ;) Maybe if all the
veg-rawers I have offended would chip in...

Cheers,
Kirt