[Music] [Music] I have one single intention for us today and that is for us to understand more deeply the dynamic and healing force of raw food so go on this journey with me it starts in 2011 and at that stage I was going through life like a robot I was just going through a series of roles my heart was dead to everything around me and my mind was running out of creative ways to make people around me believe that I was a happy and engaged person have you ever been in that situation where you are
just simply burning out from the sheer pretense of living a life not real not yours you feel severely depressed because you lack Direction you have no goals you don't know how to find your passion and you feel completely and utterly untethered I felt all those things and I badly wanted to not feel them I wanted to numb my mind and the way I did that was through food every day I would go into my kitchen from the moment I awoke to the moment my fatigued body could no longer stand and I cooked I sought refuge
in morning markets where the cacophony of sounds around me deafened my chaotic mind into silence and the colors and shapes of vegetables jumped out and sat like a salve over my bleeding heart the weight of the bags I carried home displaced the weight I felt sitting in my chest like wet cement I cooked I thought I was cooking to numb my mind but as time wore on it started to dawn on me that the very thing I was using to numb my mind was the very same thing that was healing me the tears that fell
from my eyes into the dough that I needed told me that I was starting to feel again the rising plumes of yeast that yielded life caused my own heart to come to life and when the bread was baking in the oven I would watch it rising and my own heart would rise in unison finally when it was time to break that Bread open I felt parts of myself break open and fill with new light but don't worry if you ever do if I ever do have a chance to cook for you one day I will
not be feeding you sad bread maybe some joyful chocolate or some ecstatic cheese so as I sumed Along on this path I delved deeper and deeper and I found myself falling in love with food my Explorations became more fevered and fervent these vegetables they completely astounded me because the more of them I ate the better I felt and the better I felt the more mobilized I became and the more mobilized I became the deeper my study into them and that is how I discovered the healing and dynamic quality of raw food I had no idea
what I was doing no idea of the future career path I was carving all I knew was that I wanted to change my life I wanted a life in which I felt connected strong happy and healthy and you know what the point at which I discovered raw food was the point at which everything changed and do you know how I knew because of the way my body felt and functioned after I ate raw food I felt energized my mood stabilized I had felt a Clarity of thought and I felt more positive about life my path
was set into motion raw food blew my mind open because it is whole natural unprocessed unrefined and uncooked food not on stoves not in in microwaves and not in ovens but it is of the bounty of this beautiful earth like this dish for example this is simply a plate of raw vegetables and nuts suspiciously disguised as raw Nuki we all know noi right it's a beloved Italian dish made with flour potatoes and eggs cooked until soft and then combined usually with uh cheese cream or butter and so in this raw version of noi we Ju
root vegetables we extract the fiber pulp and we combine it with spices and herbs to create a raw NY and then we use a very common raw food technique and that is air drying which does two things it preserves the shelf life of food and it brings structure to food but it must be done at a temperature of 45° or lower because this is the temperature at which food is still considered raw and at which most of the Nutri still remain intact so after we air dry the noi for 4 hours we plate it in
this visually Dynamic way because we want to break the boundaries of what healthy food perceptions are every plate is a celebration of what we know raw food to be and how we know it makes us feel and this celebratory aspect also allows our guests to give themselves permission to make the the right food choices without feeling like they have to sacrifice pleasure this is a plate of raw dumplings and the color of the skin is green so to create this kind of skin we process raw coconuts and tomatoes with a variety of vegetable juices and
then we spread it on a tray and we dry it for 6 hours after those 6 hours we peel it off and we cut them into squares we fill them with kimchi that we make on our own and other really delicious ingredients and there you have a raw dumpling so these are visually playful foods but they are so much more than shog girls just distracting you from the fact that they are so powerfully nutritious first of all you cannot achieve this dramatic quality of color with cooked food this is a very high in phytonutrient kind
of food so firstly phytonutrients are a bun in antioxidants which fight free radicals that cause disease secondly they contain kimchi fermented foods like kimchi miso and sauerkraut are some of the most healing foods you will find on the planet precisely because they contain micro microbial life forms that do a lot of problem solving in our bodies and third of all they just explode with flavor in your mouth the intensity of flavor and the complete sensoric experience of raw food is the thing that first surprises people when they try raw food CU usually when people think
about raw food they imagine limp lettuce leaves and offensive salad dressings but I just want to set the record straight today this is raw food it contains the most potent quality and quantity of minerals vitamins antioxidants phytonutrients bacterias and yeasts all intuitively designed by nature to enhance and improve our health and how does it do that or how does that happen well precisely because the cellulo structure of the vegetables have not been denatured by high heat don't get me wrong I'm not saying cooked foods are bad some foods need to be cooked for the nutrients
to be released what I am saying is cooking foods that would rather be eaten raw it's like taking a piece of Steel and heating it to high heat where it structurally remains intact but it it it remains intact but it structurally becomes weakened so it cannot bear as much weight as it could have were it not heated the same logic can be applied to the nutrients in our food they may not be completely destroyed by the cooking process but they are not as beneficial to us as they could have been were they raw so these
raw nutrients provide the metabolic system system with enough resources to restore repair and rejuvenate a depleted digestive system which in turn boosts our defense line against diseases so I asked a few of my friends to share their experiences about eating raw food take a look one great benefit of raw food is after a while you will develop clearer thoughts clearer thoughts will lead to better judgment so that's why it will help you for your everyday life for your job or even your studies uh adding in more raw food was powerfully life-changing for me um it
gave me more energy than I'd ever experienced and and that really is you know for for me the the greatest benefit of raw food uh it helped me to find balance and homeostasis you know physically emotionally and spirit um ultimately it was through raw foods that transformed my health um most notably my mood and my misdiagnosed status um ultimately I I wouldn't be here if it weren't for the healing forces of these ingredients I've been keeping my breakfast and lunch with mostly raw food it givs me the energy and Clarity I need for work especially
after lunch I don't feel the food coma anymore I also trying to put as much fermented food as possible into my diet the enzymes and good bacterias that um makes me get sick less and even I get a Cal uh I was able to recover much faster with healthier and happier guts floor ra Fu changed my way of eating my lifestyle it keeps my body more energized and my stomach happy with all the live enzymes so as as my friends have alluded to raw food uh increases the clarity of your mind it increases your energy
and it helps to resolve health challenges from the mild to the serious and how does this happen so what you see in front of you is a tray of Buckwheat which has been sprouting over a period of 3 days so when we Sprout these little guys we take really good care of them we build them their own sprouting room we turn the lights down we make sure the temperature is just right and over a period of three days we water the Bak three times a day so this is how you sprout um so after the
so what is so important about the sprouting process is that after those 3 days they grow these beautiful long strong tails and food that is a sprout is really high in enzyme value as with anything that requires growth to grow you need energy so when you eat a sprout in its first phase of growth you're consuming a lot of that enzy enzyme energy and in the body enzymes are responsible for catalyzing the chemical processes of digestion so the more enzymes you eat the more efficient the process the more vibrant and healthy you feel so after
we dry the sprouted buak wheat for 6 hours we then combine them with a variety of fresh and dried fruit nuts seeds and date paste as sugar source and then we put them back in the dehydrator and this time we leave them in for up to 2 days and after we take the uh finished product out what we have is an enzyme Rich highly nutritious Guaranteed Clean food source and it's also delicious so this is not the only thing you can do with sprouting buckweed you can also ferment it I'm a little bit fascinated by
fermentation and I'm hoping that by the time we're done today you will feel encouraged to go home and try and ferment some of your own food so in the process of fermentation bacterias and yeast feed off the nutrients in organic matter and give rise to something called biopreservatives which are a collection of acids gases or alcohols and these biopreservatives perform many functions and two of the most important are that they preserve food for a very long period of time and they also enliven and enrich food with even more bacterial nutrition so what you see in
front of you is is a jar of our well muscled buckwheat Sprouts but this time instead of being used to make granola we're using them to to ferment um with drinking water so over a period of 2 days the liquid will through a series of chemical processes where the microorganisms in the air are drawn into the jar and feed off the nutrients of the sprouted buckweed they will give rise to a probiotic Rich liquid called rejuvelac so rejuvelac was created by Anne Wigmore who was born in 1909 and was the founder of the um hypocrates
Institute of Health which is still going really well today so rejuvelac has a really long history of um enriching and supporting Digestive Health in people we use this liquid to ferment our dairyfree tree nut cheeses we make cheeses out of nuts and we combine the rejuven to improve and increase the bacterial quality and quantity in the cheese we leave it to ferment in a fermentation room for 24 hours and after those 24 hours we're left with a a solid cheese matter that looks like that after which we season we age we air dry we age
again and we have something that looks like this so this is a cheese that is fermented that is filled with bacteria and it's made from nuts and it slices like a cheese it has a mouth feel like a soft cheese and it's really satisfying on the belly um this is our red wine onion Jam cheese and in this one we have a spectrum of flavors from sweet to acidic to Umami from the dehydrated onions and finally this is our blue cheese so to make a tree nut cheese that tastes like blue cheese took a lot
of experimentation but finally we came up with something that we are really proud of and this is made with a homemade Japanese miso spirulina and maple syrup so you get that full complement of stinky funky acrid kind of blue cheese flavor that you're supposed to get from a dairy blue cheese um and the final celebration looks like this it enthralls me to no end to know that when I'm eating my cheese I'm engaging with bacterial life forms that are as old as as this planet and I am actively engaging with food as a healing Dynamic
Force these microorganisms first existed on our planet as single celled microorganisms whose DNA information just floated around inside the cell not bound by a nucleus they later Diversified into nucleus bound cells and finally complexified into us they are essential to our existence they live in our our digestive systems they live all around in the air around us and they keep this planet functioning healthily so Sando Alex cats author of the book Wild fermentation and one of my biggest Heroes says this about fermentation fermentation is everywhere it is an everyday Miracle the path of least resistance
microscopic bacteria and fungi are in every breath we take and every bite we eat they are the ubiquitous agents of transformation con uh constantly feasting on decaying matter constantly shifting Dynamic life forces from one miraculous and horrible creation to the next microorganisms are our allies and our ancestors they keep the soil fertile and they comprise an indispensible part of the life cycle without them there could be no other life so I remember one night I was alone in my kitchen everyone had gone home for the day and I had with me a bag of organic
beetro just freshly pulled out of the earth that day by a dear friend they were still caked in mud and when I held them in my hand they seemed to pulse with a steady dark heartbeat of the earth I knew I was holding life force in my hands I was about to ferment them and I felt myself entering into ritual space because even though I was alone in my kitchen I knew I was surrounded by millions and millions of microscopic life forms and that together we were going to enter into the Primal dance of intuitive
co-creation together we were going to create a food that was rejuvenating Dynamic and healing a food that I could put into my body and bring greater complexity to my own ecosystem enlivening and diversifying allowing it to function at its greatest capacity and in turn Within Myself reflect the Earth's Own ecosystem and all this just by adding salt to beets removing air and leaving it in a dark cupboard to incubate does this process sound familiar to you isn't this the way in which we incubate in our mother's wombs in the sweet dark softness of it all
with millions and millions of microbial life forms processing us into shape we collect our microbial identities from lactobacilus which is most richly found in the birth canal every painful contraction feeding us Dynamic and mysterious information which exists which um which identifies our existence on this very planet and as adults the more raw and fermented foods we eat the Richer are microbial identities so what I ask you can be any more healing and dynamic than our relationship with raw and fermented foods thank you [Applause] [Music]
