Fruit and trying 80/10/10

Many healthy eating regimens are anti fruit to some degree. The Brian Clement/Hippocrates approach is against the runaway sugars of hybridized fructose. Macrobiotics suggests only a little fruit as it's generally very Yin. The GI/GL dietary approach is anti-fruit as most are quickly burned-up by the body unlike slower burn complex carbs - some exceptions are apples, pears and berries.

So when someone comes along and advocates near-fruitarianism, as with Dr Douglas Graham's 80/10/10 diet, it instinctively feels wrong to me. I'm someone who likes the feeling of not having wildly fluctuating blood sugars and the highs and low in moods that can bring.

However, the raw low/non-fruit idea can present problems when following a hectic daily lifestyle. It's not always possible to have enough calories on hand. Thus, instead of the highs and lows of fluctuating blood sugars caused by refined sugars in the standard western diet (or by too much fruit according to many healthy eating advocates) you are left with frequent hunger, cravings and a constantly lowish blood sugar. This can leave you wan, listless, lacking get-up-and go. Too little gloucose and brain function is impaired and it becomes hard to organise one's thoughts. Beyond that, one can get a bit woosy.

80/10/10 has some very vocal advocates in the raw food movement singing its praises to the rafters. To be honest, far fewer people are so vocal in their praise of the no-fruit Hippocrates appraoch with its seemingly complex time-consuming sprouting, raw grain breads, green juices, wheatgrass, sunflower greens, algaes, etc. The mega-greens, mega-sprouts, approach might be good if you can make food prep a full-time job.

Doug Graham's 80/10/10 shuns superfoods, shuns sprouting, shuns all grains (even sprouted ones), all supplementation, doesn't even prescribe organic produce as a must. The fairly simple concept, backed up by various bits of nutritional science, is that 80% of our calories should be in the form of fruit and vegetables (mostly fruit), 10% should be protien (again coming from fruit and veg) and 10% fat (from limited intake of things like avocado and coconut). Low protein, low fat is now accepted by many healthy eaters, not just raw ones and is the basic conclusions of health masterwork, The China Study. It's the high-fructose content that raises eyebrows with the 80/10/10 approach.

Put simply, Graham suggests that the body needs to work less hard to convert the simple sugars, the simple carbs, in fruits to useful energy in the body. He's anti the complex carbs that most of us get from grains, which is in stark contrast to the Hippocrates approach or the slow-burn-is-good GI/GL theory. Many people might eat fruit if they need fast, easy energy for, say, sports but Graham suggests eating loads of fruit every day. Basically, it means a big fruity brekkie, a fruity lunch and a big greens and veggie salad in the evening.

Still, you can't ignore all the voices of those who didn't feel like they'd 'cracked' the raw diet until they went 80/10/10 so I decided to give it a go. I've decided to give it a month, which is a reasonable timeframe, and see what happens. At the time of writing I'm five days in to the regimen and I'm following it pretty close to what Graham's book suggests to give it a fair go. It's a lot of fruit!

What have I noticed so far? Well, let's start with the positives. Remember, I'm just a few days in to this way of eating.

I feel quite energetic with the extra fast-burn energy food inside me - you do have to eat a lot of fruit, mind you. With a big fruit breakfast and a fruit lunch, hunger's been pretty minimal and if any hunger at all has been seen I've just had a little piece of fruit and that sorted me out without further cravings. The added simple sugars has given me rather more mental clarity and I haven't had any of the mental listlessness I'd get if I knew I simply hadn't eaten enough calories on no-fruit raw. Following the 80/10/10 diet is very easy - you just have to buy a bunch of fruit and veggies and it's easy to eat what the diet suggests. There's no worries that I forgot to sprout something in time to make this or that or where the wheatgrass is at. It's really, really easy to eat. I still drink very minor amounts of coffee in my very-high-raw life but the 80/10/10 diet seems to supress caffiene cravings very well. In fact, I haven't craved anything on it so far.

What are the downsides, then?

Well, I'm not sure I really like the sweetness of much of the fruit I've been eating. In nature, here in England at least, wild fruits are seldom as sweet as what you buy in the shops, organic or not. I'm eating pears, apples, peaches, nectarines, bananas, etc. that taste positively syrupy. This syrupy taste hangs around in the mouth for ages. I'm just not used to it. I've eaten some wild English blackberries and mulberries recently - they are either mild and subtle in flavour or slighty tart, nothing like cultivated fruit. Am I being bona fide natural eating all this bred-for-sweetness hybridised fruit? Is the energy I've seen nothing more than a big sugar buzz, a phoney energy, that can't possibly be sustained over any length of time? We shall see.
Also, I seem to need to urinate at least twice as often on so much fruit. Of course, most of it has a high water content but can that really be good?

Just a few days in, all I can offer are first impressions. Unless the diet makes me feel obviously bad I'll continue with 80/10/10 for a month.

Big shock! Aussies say Red Bull is bad for you.

Crazy as it may sound, sugar and stimulent slop Red Bull is bad for you. That's bad for you as in, 'can kill you'.

The results showed "normal people develop symptoms normally associated with cardiovascular disease" after consuming the drink, created in the 1980s by Austrian entrepreneur Dietrich Mateschitz based on a similar Thai energy drink.
Red Bull is banned in Norway, Uruguay and Denmark because of health risks listed on its cans, but the company last year sold 3.5 billion cans in 143 countries. One can contains 80 mg of caffeine, around the same as a normal cup of brewed coffee.
The Austria-based company, whose marketing says "Red Bull gives you wings," sponsors Formula 1 race cars and extreme sport events around the world, but warns consumers not to drink more than two cans a day.
Rychter said Red Bull could only have such global sales because health authorities across the world had concluded the drink was safe to consume.
But Willoughby said Red Bull could be deadly when combined with stress or high blood pressure, impairing proper blood vessel function and possibly lifting the risk of blood clotting.
"If you have any predisposition to cardiovascular disease, I'd think twice about drinking it," he said.

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/rtrs/20080815/twl-life-australia-redbull-dc-9020220.html

If you look at the Great Apes they share most of our DNA, have reasonably similar GI tracts, reasonably similar dentition.

They eat a completely unrefined diet of mostly green plants, some fruits, a few incects and some eat a small amount of raw meat in certain circumstances.

Even at the zoo, chimp food's green plants and a bucket of fruit. It would be 'wrong' to feed them human staple foods like rice and grains.

What do you suppose would happen if you fed apes at the zoo...

Vodka and red bull
Fry upsRefined sucrose in large amounts
A few coffees a day
A few healthy glasses of red wine a week
Aspertame diet drinksPastuerized dairy from alien species
Cooked stodgy dinners
Topps PizzaMassive amount of refined grains and cereals
McDonalds

How many fat diabetes-ridden apes with cancer, strokes and heart attacks would you have?

Even if you left off the obvious junk food it would be a dire diet by natural standards.

I could have told you Red Bull was a killer for a glass of green juice.

Raw food cafe or restaurant Bristol?

Long before getting into raw food I always had some dream opening a cafe bar. It wouldn't just serve wholesome real food but would offer a space for music, art, poetry - something along the lines of the literary cafe, or the stateside bohemian joint.

Since I first held that vague, fleeting ambition - I was probably still in my teens - the big coffee chains have opened everywhere. In less cloney towns, there's been an explosion of indies too, displacing the old British greasy spoon experience. However, some of the indies seem worryingly modelled on Starbucks, a me-too entry to the market.

There's no shortage of struggling samey cafes up for sale and many would be ripe for conversion into something more specialist. A bona fide raw foods, powerfoods, superfoods outfit would be more of a destination shop for raw foodists and health-seekers and, if the food was interesting enough in and of itself, curious experience-seekers as well. With the music, the art, the talks it would be well known.

Bristol has a relative wealth of organic stuff, wholefoods stuff, veggie and vegan stuff, not to mention a big green and alternative seen. Among that, a raw food cafe could be a great addition to the mix. Given the right team of shared-vision people, it could happen. If it seemed like a goer, I'd be up for it.

Olympic nosh musings

I find the Olympics very boring. All the media hype about posh Britons winning medals in sports with fairly small global playing populations, hype about pumped up sprinters running at high speed and then being revealed somewhere down the line as being drugs cheats.

One thing the media really hyped this time is the unhealhty or junk food diets of Michael Phelps (huge fry-ups and refined carbs galore) and Usain Bolt (chicken nuggets). The producers of low-grade food must love it and also those on poor diets growin obsese and shortening their lives.

'See, I knew all that healthy eating was nonsense! My diet's the same as top athletes!'.

It's not just Olympians that superficially thrive on bad food. Many people eat stellar diets and constantly battle their low energy levels. Quite often stress or mental outlook is a factor. A thoughtful, sensitive person in a boring job they don't enjoy, or carrying - to use that horrible word - 'issues' may be more lethargic than the paunchy sales rep high on sugary coffee, Mars bars and junk who basically likes the thrill of sealing a good deal and any stress can be dealt with by a round of golf or an episode of Top Gear. He's happy until the heart attack, the cancer scare, the diabetes. Meanwhile the person with an enviable 'great career job' might feel thoroughly miserable, feel stressed and worn out just at the thought of a job they don't enjoy to any degree, and no amount of healthy food or yoga can fix the fact they can't stand their life as it stands. They dream of escape.

Michael Phelps has a young, powerful body and a single-minded determination to succeed in his present career. He's got the mind and the spirit in the bag and - presently - the body. But for how long? Will he be swimming the the top level when he's 45 or 55? What's his health going to look like then if he keeps eating rubbish?

Kids and young adults, like the seeds of plants, are supposed to be hardy and have a fighting chance at growth and survival. Although I always liked fruit and veg and wholegrain bread as a kid I didn't half eat a lot of utter garbage including aspertame lemonade and day-glo sweets with who knows what in them. If I ate the diet did when I was 12 for a week or two now, I'm sure I'd be very sick, very fast.

Bad food choices can be cumulative and show up years down the line, although now even hardy kids are coming down with middle-age lifestyle disease like Type 2 diabetes. Young people tough, but they're not that tough. How much can a body take over time?

Funky Raw 2008

My wife and I camped at the Funky Raw Space of love festical over the weekend. We enjoyed pottering about, chatting, meeting people, dropping in on workshops. It was a small festival with, we were told, around 150 people. The atmosphere was something of a retreat-cum-festival and I felt more relaxed that I had in a while. We’ve both been quite busy and my day job keeps be coupe up in a fluo-lit office, often gawping at the computer, with a constant rumbling, quite loud background noise. A weekend of peace and raw food went was just what we both needed.

Brighton’s Raw Food Cafe ran the on-site cafe, producing a couple of different dishes each day. As we’re still fairly new to experiencing other people takes on raw cuisine we ate at the cafe for most meals. Most meals consisted of a light green salad, a tasty dressing and something dehydrated like crackers, or ‘neatballs’ or sunburgers. Aside from the crisp crackers these, you could say, we’re only lightly dehydrated and they’re weren’t too heavy like some gourmet dehydrator recipes.

My favourite dish was the ‘sea spaghetti with pesto’, made with seaweed. That was lush to the extreme and must’ve been packed with goodness.

Shell and Lara of the Raw Kitchen held a food prep session on the Sunday, impressing the audience with a superfood-packed raw chocolate cake. It was the food prep workshop’s we enjoyed the most, especially one on oriental styles.

Despite the washout forecast, the weather was as good on Friday and Saturday, even warm and sunny at times.

Excitement

I will pack tonight for the Space of Love Funky Raw fest. We'll set off fairly early in the morning and I hate stressing about at the last minute and climbing into the driver's seat feeling tense.

We may well document our experiences on a camcorders and, if we don't look like complete prats, upload to Youtube.com.

The organisers sent us a big Excel spreadsheet detailing all the talks, treatments, yoga sessions and so forth on offfer and I'm pretty clear on what I like the sound of. Still, at these things it's best to just get there and see how the mood takes you.

Angela Stokes who's a bit of a Brit raw food legend with her website and loadsa-hits videos on YouTube.com will be holding a session but I think that clashed with something else.

Good, cheap nut-milk bags

Many raw recipe books talk about nut milk bags. These are rarely found in UK kitchen retailers and some online prices from the specialist raw food outfits are a little steep.

I found a superb seller on ebay.co.uk with nut bags for £1.99 plus postage, which is a great deal.
Even though nut milk bags are strong and should last a while I suggest buying several.

As well as using them for straining nutmilks they are also useful for making bulk juice quickly with a power blender.

A must have...

http://stores.ebay.co.uk/compassion-at-the-plate_Nut-Milk-Bags_W0QQcolZ4QQdirZ1QQfsubZ178868519QQftidZ2QQtZkm

Tickets purchased for Space of Love Funky Raw Festival

Well, finally off to my first festival of the year. Actually, it's my first festival in quite a few years. It's the first festival I been to with my wife.


Funky Raw Space of Love has a great-looking line-up and it's the first specifically raw event I will attend, although there was a growing raw presence at this year's Bristol Vegan Fayre. They've got live Music, Bhajans and Drumming around the Fire. They've got elicious and nourishing raw and living food café and demonstrations. They've got Yoga, Massage, Healing, Sweatlodge and Temple Space.

It runs from Friday through to Monday morning but sadly, due to the dreaded work committments, will have to scoot off Sunday night.

When we've done any camping recently, we've either scrounged gear from friends so we were a bit low on stuff - no tent, only one sleeping bag, no ground mats. We took a trip to Clarks Village outlet centre as it's near my parents and they usually have a display of tents on the grass in Summer.

After a bit of discussion, we settled on a four man tent as it was still quite portable and much more airy. You can now get these tents that just spring up all my themselves, a bit like a big Lastolite photographic reflector. The downside is that they fold down to an awkward big disc that's not so easy to carry or stuff into a little car.

We are now kitted out.

Another batch of raw crackers and breads

Here's a snap of the Excalibur Dehydrator in action. You can just about see the Pringles-like flax crisps I'm finishing off together with some onion breads that still have many hours of drying ahead of them.

This time, I've planned ahead and maxed-out the dehydrator so as to not waste power drying empty shelves.

The crackers and breads can be a useful packed lunch or easy snack but dehydrated foods are only a mini part of my raw kitchen.

Raw Apple Pie Experiment

Today I experimented with a raw apple pie.

The pie base was made from 4 pitted dates, 1 1/2 cups of soaked walnuts and a cup of ground sunflower seeds.

the filling was finely chopped English apples in a marinade of blended apple, cinnamon, dates and lime with a new cranberries and gojis tossed in for good measure. I let the apple mixture marinate for a couple of hours then added it to the base, which had been placed in a flan dish and popped in the fridge for a while.

The mango custard topping was just blended mango.

Sorry for the snapshotty photos.

Sprouting in the raw kitchen

I'm a total sprout addict. I think I could easily live on the things. They are 'live food' taken to the ultimate. Every sprout is packed full out daft amounts of goodness and a well-grown sprout gives a refreshing crunch when eaten.

My only problem is getting enough sprout growing capacity. I use three sprouters to yield me regularly crops. My most-grown sprouts are lentils (puy, brown, green), broccoli, radish, alfalfa and quinoa.

To sprout well it's all about keeping he little blighters well rinsed, watered and aired. Do it wrong and you get a rotten smell or mould. Urgh. So don't be a lazy grower - do the work.

The first sprouter I use is three sprouting jars that live in a custom-made rack with a pottery tray beneath to catch the drips of water as the crops drain. This system is wonderful for easy rinsing, although if you overload the jars with seeds (more than a about a table-spoon and a half) there won't be enough room for the sprouts to breathe and they'll soon smell a bit off. In fact, they'll sometimes smell a bit off with this sprouter anyhow and I tend to use this system for sprouts that are ready for harvest in a couple of days rather than 5 or 6.

The next sprouter I use is a small, cheap multi-tray device that I got a while back from the Harvest wholefoods shop in Bristol. I think it was £7.50. Three trays offer good space for growing and easy watering. I regularly swap the trays around if growing a single crop (rather than one built-up tray-by-tray over several days) to make sure the sprouts get plenty of air and don't go off. This sprouter, with care, generally keeps the crop fresh as a daisy.

I also have a big Vogel sprouting mini greenhouse, which cost £17.99 from a healthfood shop in Glastonbury. This is a slightly fancier multi-level sprouter. You need to use fleece sheets for very small seeds like broccoli. One advantage is that you can't rinse the whole unit under the tap for easy watering, then just drain off via holes in the side - a boon if you're late for work and don't have much time for tending the crop.

For green sprouts it's best to get them near a window for the last day or growing to get the to 'green up' and fill with lovely chlorophyll, especially if they're looking a touch anaemic and yellow.

When they're gone I give them a final good rinse in a colander and they're ready to rock salads, get tossed into raw soups, get stuffed into nori rolls, or just used as snacks. They keep pretty well in the fridge for up to a week, but I tend to like them fresh, growing what I need as I need it.

Simply Raw Movie Review

I finally got hold of the documentary film Simply Raw last week. It had previously been traillered as ‘Raw for 30 Days’ and attratced a lot of interest on YouTube.com.
The film charts the progress of six diabetics as they adopt a raw food, low sugar diet for 30 days. The results are remarkable.

The film is well produced and although it’s been made as unabashed raw food promotion honestly charts some of the power of eating in a very healthy way. For a sequel, perhaps they could take people with a range of illnesses, mental and physical, and place them on a raw diet for longer. I suspect, again, the results would be eye-opening.
In Simply Raw some of the patients are not just taking shots of insulin, but a complete pharmacy of drugs to regulate their illness. Gabriel Cousens MD, the Doc in charge of the show, gets them off this cocktail in a matter of moments. One chap was on 19 pills and came off them all.
That’s 19 products no longer being sold by a drugs company. Selling sickness is good for business.

As the story plays out, talking heads appear to offer their opinions on food. There’s Woody Harrelson, there’s Morgan Spurlock of Supersize Me fame sporting a groovy beard, and there’s David Wolfe (breathlessly making up cod-spiritual quotable-quotes off the top of his head) and husky-voiced Tony Robbins, the king of stateside mega-gurus and a cool Reverand with braided hair. They add a lot of the movie, and a give a sense of the growing scale of the living foods movement.

The same production team also sell a 2-disc set called Raw for Life. I ordered this too, and although experienced raw fans will know most of it already, it’s still compelling.

David's Creamy Raw Curry and ryce

This is a very easy raw curry to make and tastes great. Just use the ingredient list as a guide and adjust to taste for heat and mildness.

Serves 2-4.

Ingredients:
3 ripe tomatoes
2 red pepper
1 or 2 sticks of celery
1 avocado
2 dates (more if you like sweetness)
Small handfull of fresh corriander (dried is fine too)
1-3 teaspoons of organic curry powder
1/2 teaspoon cumin
1/2 table
1/2 cup water
1 or 2 garlic cloves
Glug of oil (cold pressed olive, seasame, hemp)
Mixed sprouts (lentil, mung, azuki work well here)

For the rice:
1/2 a cauliflower
Handful or corriander
Juice of one lime


Method
Chop the tomatoes whole and add them to blender.
Chop up the red pepper and add helf to the blend, keeping half back.
Chop up celery and add half to blender, keeping hald back.
Add salt, dates, corriander, garlic and spices to the blender.
Add half a cup of water and blend to a liquid.
Now add the avocado and blend again for 5-10 seconds (you don't want to over-blend avocado)
Add the rest of the pepper, celery and the spouts to the blender and pulse a little to mix but don't liquidise! You want some texture.

For the rice pulse the cauliflower in a food processor until it's about the texture of cooked rice.
Squeeze a lime over the cauliflower, add olive oil, rock salt and chopped corriander.

Serve curry style!

Note: Sweeten with more dates or heat up with more spice if that's your thing.

Grass and Wild Strawberries

Nope, not a raw food recipe (although it could be, I suppose!) but an album byCanadian psychadelic band The Collectors from 1968 which I stumbledacross last year. The cover doesn't look like much - just a few blokes who look like IRA members circa 1970 but the music is incredible.

If you're looking for some wonderful summery anthems to make the greyweather more bearable (Grass and Wild Strawberries, My love delightsme/Don't turn away from me/Rainbow of fire) and some heavier psych-outs (Things I remember/Seventeenth Summer) it's the album for you.

The more I listen to this the more I think it's the ultimate lost classic. It's not a milliosn miles - in places - from Love's Forever Changes. That's on of the best records ever made and certainly the best psychadelic one.

A week off raw

My wife's been high raw for about the same time as me, just not so strict.

A week ago she return from a camping trip with a bunch of kids where the food was refined cereals, loads of white bread, sugary stuff.

Just from that week off the raw wagon, a problem with acne, black heads, and enlarged pores came back.

The finest Dermatologists quite often say that diet doesn't matter and than gorging on cooked fats and refined sugar isn't part of the problem as they tell you to smear yourself with steroid creams.

After a week back on a high raw diet and a skin recipe from a juicing guide (celery and carrot) she's much improved and any trace of the bad food week largely erased.

My wife is more and more convinced by the raw argument. She's even been telling everyone about it. I'd say she's a raw foodist now. She's won the spurs.

Mother goes raw

My Mother has been inspired to eay more raw food recently after I've been talking abour juicing, smoothies, and the nutrient dense nature of unadulturated foodstuffs.

She needed to lose weight after a dodgy blood sugar reading from the Doctor.

A short period eating much more raw food (she likes shredded-up salads a lot) and well over a stone has been shed.

My Mother's in her 60s so anyone can benefit from more raw, wherever they're at.

David's morning super-mega power smoothie

This is my basic breakfast smoothie. I have this most mornings - two modest glasses of the stuff. My wife has it too - she's a raw food convert.

I used to get jittery fast if I didn't eat in the old lacto-veggie days with hypoglycaemic-like symptoms. Afer a Morning super-mega power smoothie I can last easily until 1pm without feeling woosy.

Here's the recipe. It covers most nutritional bases nicely.

Four or five handfuls of greens (spinach, kale, darker lettuces, spring greens). You can use dandilion but as it's bitter probably not as the only greens.
1 banana ( this is a low-fruit smoothie, but the banana adds a lot)
Two table spoons of flax seeds (loads of Omega-3s, fibre)
Sprinkling of sunflower seeds (can be sprouted)
2 Apples (can use pears)
1/2 tea spoon Spirulina/Blue Green Algae
Slash of Hemp oil (super creamy, nutty flavour - the ultimate oil)
10 ice cubes

It should all fit in your Vitamix/power blender. You may need a little water to get going and will need to use the Vitamixes tamper to push and mix initially. If you have an average blender, blend the ingredients separately (and pre-grind the flax seeds with a coffee grinder).

C'est tout.

Juicing blender method

While using a masticating juicer gets you the best quality of juice the process is slow. I have the popular Samson and you needs to cut the fruit and veg into pieces and slow wait while the juice builds up.

For bulk juice, where ultimate quality is not the biggest priority, I prefer the blender and nut milk bag method. You can get nut milk bags off of a seller on ebay.co.uk for £1.99. It's best to buy a few, although just one would last you a long time if you care for it.

This method consists of merely blitzing your fruit and/or veggies for a minute or so in a power blender then straining it through the nut milk bag. You get loads of juice very fast, so if you're after jugfuls of product for a family dinner or party it's the way to go.

Off to Space of Love festival?

My wife should be finding out today if there's tickets left for the Space of Love festival (AKA funky raw) in Sussex, which runs from August 15-18. It take about two and a half hours to get there from Bristol.

In recent times I've not done an eighth of the festival-ing and camping I would have liked and summer's fast running out.

Having never attended a 'raw food event' ever, a festival camping setting seems pretty ultimate.

Read about the festival here:
http://www.funkyraw.com/festival/

Good, sharp knives

Newcomers to the raw food scene can sometimes be alarmed by the huge range of 'kit' mentioned in the literature.

You need a blender but not just any old Kenwood cheapie from the local chainstore but a VitaMix or a Blendtec, US brands most people won't have heard of unless they work in catering.

Then, they say, you need a juicer but not just a Magimix from Comets - oh no, it's gotta masticate the heck out of the fruit or veggies for maximum nutrients. Ideally, if you're truly hardcore, a 'twin gear' masticator is the way to go, rather than the more pedestrian 'single augars'.

Of course, raw foodism is about eating uncooked food, but some of us want to push the boundaries just a little by heating food just the right side of an enzyme massacre. This means low-temp dehydration is allowed, offering a kind of slow psuedo-cooking that keep the little enzymes from popping their clogs. Now, the average Joe doesn't have a 'dehydrator machine' unless he's a devoted camper and likes drying platefuls of spaghetti for a long hike. If you're pushing the boat out you just gotta have an Excalibur. That's an expensive plastic box that enables you to makes breads (of sorts) and crackers.

I'm just going to skip the distillers and elaborate filtration systems some folk install. Filtered water? Get a cheapie Brita!

Although you can 'food process' in a limited way in a Vitamix blender, you'll probably need a food processor too but, thank God, it CAN just be an ordinary kitchen-shop model. The raw food elite haven't prescribed £600, stainless steel, 6 horsepower food processors yet! I'm sure they're working on it.

Anyway, after that ramble, this post is about knives. A good knife is more satisfying than a barrage of pricey kit. You can mince herbs with a knife, chop, slice, manipulate, carve, be creative. A good knife just feels right in your hand and it must be sharp. Some people like a European chefs knife, others an east Asian cleaver-shaped vegetable knife, but either way a sharp knife is essential and you can be perfectly raw with a knife alone.