With Taylor Wells
From Food for Thought by Food Columnist Heather Atwood:Taylor and Phillipe, like other raw food advocates, believe that high temperatures destroy most of a foods’ nutrients, particularly enzymes. Eating raw provides a body with the complete “life force” a food contains in its natural state.It’s not about taking away, Taylor emphasizes again and again, it’s about adding nutrition to your life. Good, fresh organic food is powerful. It was Hippocrates, Taylor reminds, who said, “let food be the medicine.”
Raw food is just one leg for Taylor and Phillippe of a tripod for living: Yoga, and what Taylor describes as “deliberate creation,” or the power of words to transform one’s life, hold up the rest of the stool. “Watch your words;” Taylor has scolded me lightly, “words are powerful.”
“But what exactly is the goal of a raw food diet?” I pressed Taylor recently.
“We don’t believe in diets,” she answered right away. “The goal is to feel better, to have more energy, more creativity, more focus. Eating as many ‘high vibration’ foods as possible can do this.”
“High Vibration Foods,” from what I have culled on the web, seem to be fresh, raw, organic foods in general. Livestrong.com describes them this way: “When we eat high-vibrational foods, our energy is high and our life force is strong. We have better focus, emotional balance, and plentiful energy to handle whatever the day brings."
“Superfoods” top the high vibration list, and make their way into the Wells’ family diet from burgers to ice cream, with smoothies, puddings, and salads in between. Avocado, raw cacao, and young coconut are their superfood foundations: Avocados for their rich omega 3’s and “good fats.” Raw cacao - without the sugar and dairy - is a gold mine of magnesium and minerals. Coconut products contain Lauric Acid, which seems to reduce the ratio of total cholesterol to HDL, potentially beneficial in terms of heart disease, specifically coronary disease.
Young coconut meat is soft and a little slimy, as opposed to the older dry coconut most of us recognize. Young coconut is often found in Asian Markets, but I’ve found it tucked in a corner of the produce section of the grocery store. It’s not dark brown and round, like what we think of in a coconut, but a blond color, and has a round base and a pointed top. Young coconuts, like the old ones, are a pain to open, but Taylor sells fresh, frozen young coconut meat at the Prana Restaurant. (She also has an online store for other “superfoods,” and raw products.The texture of young coconut definitely lends itself to delicious, almost instant puddings and rich smoothies, and are far more digestible than mature coconut. “Digestible” translates into more nutrition quicker, a raw food fundamental. Taylor makes everything from the chocolate pudding below to a vanilla smoothie she drinks before bedtime (remember, she’s nursing twins!) with young coconut meat.
I’ve been blending coconut, raw cacao, cashews, and dates for an instant sublimely delicious chocolate pudding, a little simpler than Taylor’s version below. My teenage daughters say it’s a good day when there’s Taylor’s chocolate pudding in the blender. It’s profoundly delicious, but the deliciousness hits deeply, the way a food does when it’s packed with vitamins you’ve been missing, the way a beautiful green salad tastes deeply delicious after you’ve been eating cake and ice cream at a birthday party all afternoon.
