The Associated Press reports on a new trend in health food. "After giving up meat for vegetarian cooking... and sugar for macrobiotic cooking, 70 New Yorkers have gathered to get serious about the way they eat: They've given up cooking." That is: no boiling, no baking, and no stoves. Enthusiasts of so-called "live" foods refer to the cooked food other people eat as "dead." A movement spokeswoman who goes by the single name of Rhio explains that "foods start losing some enzymes and life energy at 105 degrees. By 118 degrees, that's it. You've killed all the life energy. This is the way we're really supposed to eat. This is the way the animals eat."

There are now support groups devoted to the trend, along with at least one restaurant and a cable TV show. Raw-food chefs, who do not like to be called cooks, process food through soaking and chopping, but not by using heat. Journalist Ellen Knickmeyer reported from a live-food potluck, "You could take a drinking straw to much of the plate, like a vegetable Slurpee." Also on the menu that evening: a "lasagna" made of sprouted buckwheat, almonds, mushrooms, tomatoes, and figs; a "cheese" made of pulverized almonds; and a "champagne" of "something sprouted and fermented."

In an interesting twist, there are also live-food omnivores who have no problem eating meat, so long as it isn't cooked. There are also "fruitarians" who regard vegetarians as murderers and eat only raw fruit, and "sproutarians" who eat only live sprouts, as well as non-violent fruitarians "who eat only fruits off the ground, not those that have been picked," Rhio also insists that there are "breatharians" who aim to get "all the nutrition they need from the air.... I've met some people doing it occasionally, but they're not at 100 percent. Yet."

[Ed.: Note that many vegetarians forswear eating food that it is ostensibly alive, while others shun food that is dead. The spokesman for the "breatharians," by the way, was photographed several years ago, presumably during a lapse, wolfing down a full meal at a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet. At the same time, another imaginative soul floated a trial balloon for the "Neanderthal Diet," word of which seeped into print and which I recount despite the distinct possibility that it, too, was a media hoax. Dieters were presumed to be more in tune with their health needs if they ate fresh, raw meat, to be accompanied perhaps by the exercise of chasing after and killing their prey with only the aid of primitive tools. Starvation probably helps, too. The Neanderthals, of course, are extinct.]

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