The Raw Food Diet: What’s In a Name?

The raw food world does this really interesting thing to make the raw food diet appeal to the greater masses and the tentative novice: it gives everything names that evoke cooked food versions of itself. Exhibit A: Not Tuna Salad. Exhibit B: Rawmesan Cheese, Exhibit C… I could go through the alphabet. But I’ll stop myself.

All these things sound more than vaguely familiar, right? But are they? I think not.

Have you ever had raw pizza? I rest my case.

Now, on some dimension, I understand this trickery. Because on the base level what we are all trying to do is fool ourselves into not feeling cheated out of our cooked food favorites. Our comfortable addictions. And the first step to doing this for the raw food diet is identifying things as something familiar.

If you read my earlier post about my own introduction to the world of raw food, you will have witnessed my own amazement at ‘beet meat’ and ‘nut cheese’. Similarly I’ve used jicama ‘rice’ in vegetable sushi rolls and coconut meat custard in innumerable deserts. We seem intent on duplication.

And maybe we are just not very creative when it comes to identifying things.

Once upon a time there were guys out there who classified pretty much everything and new words have been emerging to describe everything from twerking to hashtags (neither of which existed in any way, shape or form even a decade ago and probably shouldn’t today). Seems like not so long ago there were just five sexual orientations: straight, gay, bi-sexual, trans-sexual and asexual. Transvestites were just members of some other category who liked to play dress-up.  Now there’s multitudes: sis, pan, metro-sexual, to name a few. Point being: people are out there naming things like crazy.

So what’s the deal with raw food? Can’t anyone come up with a few decent names for raw recipes that don’t conjure up dairy delicacies or meaty mouthfuls? What’s in a name? Does a rose by any other name smell as sweet?

Or not? Why can’t we just call our raw vegan meal what it is – and trust that the taste will speak for itself?