Cooked Raw: How One Celebrity Chef Risked Everything to Change the Way We Eat

Not familiar enough know Matthew Kenney to know what to expect of his memoir Cooked Raw, I was pleasantly surprised. On the surface, the book is about what we might consider to be a traditional celebrity chef who becomes a raw food chef trying to use or regain his celebrity. Kenney is the first to admit his mistakes and, for the most part, he names the names of those who have wronged him (or caused him problems along the way). Kenney has continued to reinvent himself, and so it’s the stories, such as his ill-advised raw cooking school in the heart of meat country, that feel almost as if Kenney is trying to settle the score. But, more importantly, he in turn is revealing who he is and how he became the businessman/celebrity chef he is. In the end, he trusts his reader and is open with his own faults. Kenney has provided a window into celebrity chefs, the costs, the competition, and the struggles to stay true to their own lives. The start of each chapter provides a dancing description of a recipe that works to give a poetic foretelling of what is about to come.