I totally agree with you overall, but refried beans are usually made with lard.
Totally agree on the green beans, by the way.
My former roommate went on a raw food kick for a while and I’m sure would say nothing but good things about it – and I have to admit, the amount of energy she had at this time was INSANE (and annoying!)
But of the things that I tried, I found every single one of them to be … uh … unpalatable.
Often, yes, but they don’t need to be.
REAL food tastes better. That is all.
I definitely agree with you there. I would rather just have limited portions than some low fat low carb low sugar substituted with some crap garbage.
Not this guy. The Lime Truck and Seabirds are probably the best at creating a meatless mouthfeel and taste, but nothing beats a grilled medium rare steak or a fried pork chop, or smoked beef brisket. Nothing.
People are in denial of how much conditioning reflects their taste.
Sure, you are a slob that eats garbage 24/7. When you eat spinach, it is going to taste repulsive.
Having said that, there is some natural, innate tendency to want fatty and possibly sweet foods… but that doesn’t mean that healthy food tastes bad.
I am not a raw foodist, but that “taco” sounds alot better than a Taco Hell Gordita Crunch. Taco Bell tastes bad. It is poorly made food, from bad ingredients.
Sure I would rather have a black bean - sweet potato taco, with avocado and sharp cheddar on a soft corn tortilla with some habanero hot sauce… but I would take the lettuce, walnut thing over Taco Bell.
Celery loaded with blue cheese is pretty good.
I’m not a vegan or a vegetarian but I’ve always preferred vegetables raw. Most of that is probably due to my mother’s awful terrible horrible cooking. As a kid I’d refuse to eat most of the side dishes she cooked but would happily munch on beans, carrots, peas, broccoli, cauliflower and even potatoes raw. She got in the habit of putting some aside for me and then boiling those designated for the rest of the family for the required 2 hours.
I still like raw vegetables and it’s one of my favorite things to snack on but I do usually eat the vegetables with my meals cooked now.
Most vegetables are best either raw, or very lightly-cooked. Off the top of my head, though, potatoes and most beans are better cooked (though still not overcooked).
I’ve had the “so why did you become a vegan/vegetarian” conversation dozens of times, and have occasionally come across someone who says something like “Well, I don’t even really like meat anyway,” but I’ve never heard someone say “I became vegan/etarian because I preferred the foods.” It seems most people come to prefer their diets over time, which isn’t surprising, but the initial reason they became vegetarian IME has always been some variation of one or more of the following:
- It’s healthier
- It’s better for the environment
- It’s humane
I don’t buy meat very often simply because it doesn’t keep long, so I’m frequently what I call an “accidental vegetarian;” I’ll realize as I bite into a burger at the bar that I haven’t actually eaten meat in 2 weeks, but through no conscious effort. I like and prepare lots of vegetarian and vegan foods, so I don’t have anything against them per se. But most of the “raw vegan” things I’ve had have been pretty terrible. Not because they’re made of raw fruits and vegetables, but because someone took a bunch of raw fruits and vegetables and set out to make an imitation of a cooked meat product. I remember thinking “Why wouldn’t you just eat a salad and a big bowl of pistachios, instead of chopping up the pistachios, mixing them with a bunch of spices, and wrapping them in a lettuce leaf?”
Vegetarian, vegan, and raw are really different things.
Vegetarian is so broad as to be virtually indistinguishable from non vegetarian food if you want it to be.
With vegan, you are mostly missing milk products. For many people milk and cheese are unpleasantly similar to mucus texture, and the absence of them gives food a cleaner, sharper taste and texture. But then if you miss them there are substitutes. I have my doubts about soy cheese, but I prefer rice milk to regular milk by a lot.
There are certain vegetables that need to be cooked, either to destroy harmful elements or to make certain nutrients available. But there are plenty that taste better raw. Definitely the texture is richer. Compare the difference between a chicken fillet and a ground up nugget.
Also note that raw food that has been sitting in the fridge is not quite the same thing as raw foodists eat.
I’ve found that much more important than the genre of food is the quality of the ingredients and skill of the preparer.
I don’t get the concept of raw food. What’s the philosophy behind it?
It’s supposed to be healthier, for various real and/or new-agey reasons.
That basically add up to “Fire Bad.” 
Your body is designed to like what it eats. So over time, the answer to your question is yes, vegans actually prefer those foods to “normal” fare.
Having personally changed my diet to eat more healthily, I’ve noticed that if I go back to eating some foods that I loved in the past, but that were particularly greasy or fatty that they don’t taste good anymore.
An easy example for most people to use to help understand this is milk. Chances are that at some point you drank whole or 2% milk and then at some point switched to 2% or skim. When you first switched, the new milk tasted “thin” or not as good. But after a while you became used to it. And if you ever went back (after having been on the new milk for a long time) and tried whole or 2% milk it was terrible, like you were drinking cream.
The raw foodists say that unprocessed, uncooked food has natural enzymes that are inactivated by cooking, and that your body NEEDS these enzymes to be healthy.
They REALLY push the envelope, though. Supposedly, the cutoff temperature where the enzymes are inactivated is about 140 degrees Fahrenheit. So now they are preparing dishes with a dehydrator. The various ingredients are chopped and blended into goop, and the goop is dehydrated into a leather, and woo HOO, we’ve got a new food on the menu!
~VOW
I have a few friends really ‘into’ the vegan ‘scene’ (as much as it’s a ‘scene’).
The consensus among those friends is that giving up cooked food is much harder than giving up meat/dairy.
Sure, they’ll have raw food from time to time - even a complete meal - but giving up warm, cooked food entirely? No way.
Don’t tell that to Richard Wrangham ;).