It’s now pretty much official that goji berries, dehydrated flax crackers and young coconut & cacao smoothies are not the harbingers of vitality and enlightenment that raw foodists once thought they were. According to a growing number of raw defectors, sparing your food from the denaturing and enzyme-murdering ravages of warmth might be missing the bigger picture. 

In February, The Raw Foods Witch summed up the recent crisis in vegan raw foodism:

I just want to talk about some of the stuff that’s been happening in the raw food movement lately. In case you haven’t heard, there’s a lot of stuff going on in terms of people coming out and saying they haven’t been 100 percent raw vegan. Or other gurus and health experts saying it’s not a sustainable lifestyle to be 100 percent raw vegan long-term. … There are people who are starting to incorporate more raw animal products into their diets. For example, raw milk, raw cheese, raw eggs. 

Some of the ex-raw-foodists who now recommend such animal exploitation include Paul Nison, Stanley Bass, Debbie Took, Super Gogi Girl, Nicole Raw & Awake, The Labrawtory, Raw Model and Essene Minister Nazariah.

Theoretically an ex-raw-vegan could switch over to the Standard Vegan Diet, adding grains and beans and processed vegan foods; they could cook their greens and take some supplements for a change. But this isn’t what most of them do. Isolated soy protein is apparently more repulsive to the raw vegan mindset than raw goat’s milk, eggs or meat.

My theory for this is that vegans don’t go raw because they think it’s a bad idea to cook food. They go raw because raw foodism is the most established form of animal-free-eating that avoids the heavy starches and processed junk that dominates standard veganism. Thus potatoes, soy yogurt and vegan toast with Earth Balance on top rarely seem like the answer for vegan raw foodists who finally realize something is missing.

So it makes sense that one recent raw turncoat is trailblazing a new path for raw failures: a Paleo diet with an emphasis on wild foods and hunting. In “Hunter Safety? Why I Am Not a Vegan”, Daniel Vitalis explains how he went from vegetarian to raw vegan to bow hunter. And judging by the comments on that entry, a lot of former raw vegans think he’s onto something.

Just as veganism is promoted as “the next logical step” after vegetarianism, and some people call raw foods the next logical step after that, a Paleo diet that includes raw meat might eventually become the next logical step for raw vegans. 

So if you don’t like the idea of stalking Bambi’s mother and probably dying in a hunting accident as Karmic punishment, be sure to take your supplements and eat your TVP burgers and Sheese.