Raw Food SOS: Troubleshooting on the Raw Food Diet

As I mentioned in an earlier post, there’s often a division in the raw food world when it comes to fat versus fruit. Cultivated fruit gets plenty of  flack for being sweeter and less nutritious than its wild counterpart, thanks to human intervention and standard farming methods. And the issue of ‘man-made’ modern fruit sometimes becomes an argument for limiting its consumption and eating more raw fat instead. Heck, there was a period in my own raw journey where I thought this was true. “Gotta nix that evil, hybridized fruit sugar! It’s not natural!“

I’ll be writing about the wild/cultivated fruit issue in a later post. In the meantime, I find it interesting that avocados—one of the most popular fat sources on a raw food diet, and the staple of many low-sugar raw cuisines—have managed to dodge criticism about hybridization. I guess it’s hard to picture avocados being anything other than the plump, fleshy fruits we see in common cultivars like the Hass. But what most people don’t realize (even us fruit-and-vegetable-savvy raw foodists) is that commercial avocados are a far cry from what they were originally. In fact, without deliberate cultivation by humans, avocados are small, fibrous, large-pitted, and yield only a tiny layer of that creamy green flesh we all know and love. It’d easily take ten wild avocados to get the equivalent flesh of one Hass, if not more.

That isn’t to say we should avoid avocados or that they’re a bad food—certainly not! But for those folks (myself included) who feel bogged down after eating too much avocado, it’s helpful to understand that these so-called “alligator pears” have been bred specifically for their size, fat content, and copious edible flesh. They aren’t quite so luxuriant in the wild.

Curious what these uncultivated avos look like? Check out the pictures below, and click ‘em for a larger view. Read the rest of this entry »