Few people know food like Malaysians do. We cherish our heritage of fine cuisine, and we frequently celebrate the gift we have given the world — a varied and colourful menu of food.

Eating is a pleasure and cooking is almost a sacred activity, revered for its ability to turn raw materials into culinary pieces of art. We artfully combine meat, fish and vegetables in myriad ways, creating a smorgasbord of tastes, textures and flavours.

But to an increasingly large New York-based community, we would be considered majorly uncool. Cooked food? With spices and flavours? That’s so last season, they would say.

This is from a growing subculture that subscribes to the notion that to seek good health, one should adopt a diet that features a selective return to the habits of our Paleolithic ancestors. It’s called the caveman lifestyle, and it involves eating large quantities of uncooked, unflavoured, raw meat and then fasting between meals to approximate the lean times that our distant ancestors faced between hunts. The theory is that raw fats bind to the toxins in the body, which are then more readily transported out of the system.

An article in the New York Times featured the eating habits of John Durant, a leader of his pack in the Big Apple, where he organises communal cookouts (he’s adapted his diet to allow basic cooking) and teaches friends how to make jerky with the meats he stores in his meat freezer. Durant believes the human body evolved for a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and to that end lives it by walking and exercising as much as his caveman ancestors would have done. New York is after all a city made for walking, so Durant and his fellow dieters are able to truly live the Paleolithic life.

Durant and other adherents of the Primal Diet are, however, cautious about quality, and advocate consuming organic or free-range meats or better still, meats from cattle that are fed raw grass. If meat is all you are having, it would best to ensure it’s the best that’s available.

Vegetables and fruit are acceptable additions to the diet, as is the occasional dollop of raw honey and perhaps nuts and seeds. Foods like bread, that were unavailable before the invention of agriculture, are not allowed. It’s a more rigorous extension of rawfoodism, which just specifies raw foods, but the caveman lifestyle dictates it should mostly consist of meat.

This diet was first expounded by Aajonus Vonderplanitz, a California-based nutritionist who has been eating raw meat for the past 40 years. Born a sickly child plagued with dyslexia, Vonderplanitz turned to raw fruit and vegetables when he was terminally ill with cancer, and later raw meat. He found that his health improved dramatically, and in 1969 began his nutritionist career with what he called the Primal Diet. Three books, several television appearances and scores of lectures later, his Primal Diet has become vastly popular and quickly adopted by communities across the US and the UK.

The obvious issue with the consumption of raw meat is that of hygiene — it is a well-accepted fact that raw meat may contain harmful bacteria that can cause serious illness and even death. A spokeswoman for the Centre for Human Nutrition Research in Cambridge, UK, told The Times there has been no research into the possible benefits of eating raw or rotten meat, “because the health risk would be too great”.

Other raw products also come with risks — milk and cream that isn’t pasteurised bear pathogens that can cause tuberculosis, diptheria, typhoid and salmonellosis. Vonderplanitz recently lobbied to lift restrictions on the amount of coliform bacteria in milk, which California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed.

Vonderplanitz shrugs off criticism, arguing that doctors have never observed the effects of his diet, while he has witnessed it “reverse 95% of all diseases, while energy, mental clarity and emotional well-being are acquired within 30 days to two years”. His website, www.wewant2live.com, and many others on the subject are filled with testimonies of people literally coming back from the dead thanks to his raw meat diet.

Those of you chucking out the vegetables from your refrigerator and clearing space in the meat trays, just hold on. Adopting the Primal Diet here could be a bit tough, considering the prevalence of hormone-pumped chicken in our supermarkets and the general scarcity of organic and free-range meats.

But seriously. Is chicken that isn’t in rendang or pork that isn’t in bak kut teh worth eating? Can you ever give up the assam in the assam fish?

Didn’t think so.


Bargainhunt
Elizabeth Arden’s perfumer Rodrigo Flores-Reux was in Costa Rica when he was inspired to blend the scents of plumeria and hibiscus flowers with the brand’s iconic Green Tea fragrance, giving it an exotic, beach-like floral feeling. Lush and refreshing, Green Tea Exotic begins with citrusy top notes of lime and black tea, eases into floral notes towards the middle, sweeps into a green tea, lily and jasmine-clad finish and settles with a base accords of musk and woods. Green Tea Exotic is an irreplaceably exotic, warm and sensuous fragrance, and is available for RM162 (RM100ml) or RM115 (50ml) at all Elizabeth Arden counters nationwide.


Splurge of the week
Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction and transformation, has been beautifully immortalised in solid silver by Caran D‘Ache in its limited edition Artiste Collection of writing instruments. Several representations of Shiva’s destructive and regenerative powers are depicted on the body and the cap, while a single blue agate sits placidly on the top: Shiva, having absorbed all the evil in the world is blue in colour. The pen’s personalised writing block comes engraved with the three lines of Shiva’s weapon, the Trishula. This stunning homage to the divine comes in a limited edition of 108 pens, a number sacred to the Hindu faith. RM39,800 at Caran D’Ache’s Pavilion KL boutique, Pen Gallery, Calibre and KS Gill Online Penshop.

This article appeared in Options, the lifestyle pullout of The Edge Malaysia, Issue 789, Jan 18 – 24, 2010