What’s Wrong with Cooked Food?
How it all starts…
Babies love their mother’s milk, and, when they get older, are often willing to eat a little mashed banana. When cooked food such as ‘baby rice’ is introduced, there is resistance – babies don’t seem to want cooked foods!
We love our children desperately and have been persuaded ourselves that cooking of food is an integral part of the nurturing process. We are keen to have our babies eating ‘grown-up’ (cooked) food and are willing to cajole, coax and reward our children into accepting cooked food. They want to please us and our evident pleasure and approval of them when they do leads to an association of happy feelings with cooked food. When they get older still, and have a few teeth to bite with, they are still attracted to raw carrots, raw peas, and will happily eat raw cabbage from the pan. But, eventually, and so sadly, the extent depending on how much cooked and processed food their parents give them, cooked food in general starts to look, smell and taste attractive to children; their psyches and taste buds have been deceived into preferring the altered and damaged to the natural and pure.
‘But people have always cooked food!’
We who question the cooking of food are sometimes looked at as if we are quite mad. We are told that cooking of food is ‘natural’, because people all over the world have cooked food, and that they have done so for thousands of years. It is true that we have traditions of hundreds of years of cooking, great chefs, millions of cookbooks, food magazines, TV programmes…multinational companies have formed on the back of cooked food. Sure, a few human beings a few thousand years ago started heating their food, which changed the flavours and nutritional properties (as I shall explain) of the foods that were made for us, and the idea spread. Raw fooders believe we took a wrong turn.
If we question a process that daily damages and destroys precious substances in our food, that creates poisons that harm our bodies - a process where, in many cases, we remove the real flavour of food, and then replace it with butter, salt and spices, we are told not be ‘killjoys’. We are accused of being ‘boring’, ‘health freaks’, and even ‘obsessing about food.’ The irony of that is that it is cooked-food eaters who often live to eat, and raw fooders who eat to live.