Hi all,

I'm a Californian trained and certified raw vegan chef/instructor. Just moved to Chiang Mai and looking for ideas as to how I might apply myself to a creative niche (rather than just work in a spa restaurant).

I would like to set up my own raw retreat centre / permaculture site in the next few years, but not quite ready for that yet. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you

Paul

May be this is quite interesting for for you:

home

he's sometimes in Phuket as well.

Gerd

A lot of the raw vegan recipes rely on cashews. Unfortunately they are always heated to remove them from the poisonous husk and that heating destroys their enzymes and make them a lot harder to digest etc.. For me anyway normal cooked but labeled raw cashews don't combine well.

Apparently there is a new way to extract the cashew with a special knife to get the truly raw cashew. They are supposed to taste amazing and digest much better with fewer allergy issues.

As far as I can tell they are not being extracted like that in Thailand.

The greatest contribution to raw foods in Thailand would be to get really raw cashews to specialty markets.

Here is a company doing it in Indonesia. Maybe David Wolfe etc from Sunfood would share their secret to this.

Truly raw cashews

Well if you want to fill a gap, I'd say try to make it a retreat that offers a weight loss program based on exercise + low cal raw diet. Currently there are, as far as I have been able to discover, no proper weight loss retreats in Thailand, just detox/fasting things where you (1) eat nothing which is not the best way to lose weight since the metabolism goes into starvation mode and (2) have to put up with colonics etc, not my cup of tea and in any case not something that helps with genuine loss of fat.

And let me know when you've set it up I wanna come!