Merging Science And Tradition
Certified C.L.E.A.N.® and Certified R.A.W.® standards, philosophically, appear to reflect the nature of food and preparation found in many indigenous traditional cultures. These cultures, after many millennia of trial and error, indigenous and traditional cultures had a profound sense of what was good food. They knew how to combine food, when to eat food, and how to process food so our bodies received the optimal nutrition.
These cultures recognized that food had multiple purposes:
To deliver the nutrition for the individual’s particular constitution
To be pleasurable to eat and give joy, and
To build a sense of community as gathering, processing and eating food was a communal activity.
This is what food was about.
People in indigenous and traditional cultures did not have to worry about GMOs, since everything was organic and bio-dynamic. They didn’t have to worry about not eating too much fat, or salt, because they were in touch with their bodies and connected to the earth.
Their food was, by its very nature, real, alive and whole. By real, it meant that the food was prepared in a safe manner and was not engineered or filled with pesticides. By alive, it meant the food had good enzymes to support digestion. By whole, it meant the food was minimally processed and was nutrient-dense.
Another way they thought about their food was that it needed to be: conscious, live, ethical, bio-active, and nutritious. By conscious, they paid attention to the entire process of gathering, producing and digesting food. By live, they focused on processing methods that did not "kill" the food, by using excessive temperatures. By ethical, they expressed a deep reverence for nature, and the process of using the resources in their environment. By bio-active, they were deeply concerned with ensuring that the food was "active" with the gut and our own internal bacteria. Nutrition meant that they chose high quality nutrient dense ingredients.
The truth is indigenous and traditional cultures knew what was good and clean food.