Life is full of ironies, and Pure Market Express co-founder and executive chef Rebecca Irey being born and raised on a 3,000-acre cattle ranch is one of them. "I can't remember once having a green salad growing up," she says. "Dinner was meatloaf, hamburgers, steak, goulash—always with boiled potatoes and white bread and butter."
The ironies continue: "I still don't like vegetables," says Rebecca (likely the first raw chef to ever concede such). Yet hers is the appetite that was won over by the life-giving, energy-boosting, weight-melting, soul-satisfying wonders of eating raw.
A taco salad at Ecopolitan, a Minneapolis raw restaurant, triggered Rebecca's conversion. "It had sour cream and cheese—mock, of course—and I thought, 'If this is what raw food is like, okay!'" She became an Ecopolitan regular, trying, with gusto, everything on the menu and taking every class the restaurant offered. Then she headed to New Hampshire to train with and get her certification from internationally acclaimed raw author and educator Alissa Cohen.
Thousands of recipe trials later (her husband and six children are ready repositories for her kitchen experiments), she and her husband launched Pure Market Express as a way to spread, like so much hummus on dehydrator onion bread, the goodness of eating raw.
