From culture to nature? The raw food diet and the ideal of natural eating
Résumé
Claude Lévi-Strauss approaches the history of humanity via the transition from a state of nature to one of culture through a form of art: cooking. Given that cooking has been culturally, socially, and historically adopted by all humans around the world, how can we explain the emergence of the raw food diet? This diet brings us to conceptualize the relationship between nature and culture in a different way. Based on ethnographic research in urban France and the United States with raw eaters, I explore the definition of categories related to food within this practice. By condemning the supposed degeneration associated with the modern food system, those who adopt this diet value the idea of nature; the raw food diet can be considered at the heart of the dualism of nature and culture in its conceptual elaboration, but rather than determining a rupture, it establishes a continuity between the two poles. Claude Lévi-Strauss theories help understand the dualisms that raw food eaters embrace between nature and culture.