Choosing Raw

September 15, 2014

For Hamshaw, a popular blogger (choosingraw.com) and clinical nutritionist, a healthy diet is both vegan and infused with a variety of raw foods. The author devotes a third of her first book to motivating people to embrace this fully vegan, partially raw approach by providing an overview of the two types of nutrition, debunking many vegan myths, gently advocating for animal rights, offering advice on transitioning to a new diet, and exploring ingredients and kitchen tools. In the same spirit as the text, Hamshaw's simple recipes are designed to make complementing or replacing cooked foods with uncooked ones easy. They also demonstrate how cooked and raw can meet in the middle: cooked chickpeas in an otherwise raw dip or a cooked grain mixed with raw veggies. Buying resources and citations backing up Hamshaw's nutritional claims are helpfully included. VERDICT Among vegan cookbooks, this volume will appeal most to those who are interested in better understanding a vegan diet and curious about raw foods. Cooks looking for vegan recipes without the raw focus have lots of other great recent titles to choose from, such as The Oh She Glows Cookbook by and Isa Does It by Isa Chandra Moskowitz.--Jude Baldwin, Coll. of the Siskiyous, Weed, CA

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