Raw Food. Vegan Raw Food.

I'm old fashioned enough to believe that cooking food is what separates humans from animals, so the raw food movement baffles me. Veganism is also odd since no human society in history has ever chosen to be vegan.

Vegan raw food, therefore...

Of course, lots and lots of things in our world today baffle me, starting with reality television and extending to dressing pets like circus clowns, so I'm not going to let a little thing like bafflement get in the way of providing information to you, my motley crowd of readers.

Meet Roxanne Klein. She's well-known to the snootiest of snoots as the former owner of "the now-defunct internationally renowned haute cuisine restaurant Roxanne's in Larkspur." (This is a good thing?) And she is the co-author of Raw, a cookbook about guess what.

Leslie Harlib of the Marin Independent Journal tells us that Klein is a lean 43-year-old with miles of butter-and-honey-colored hair and movie-star good looks. (To see the first three feet of her hair, go to her website, Roxannes.com. Fortunately, she looks much less like an Ann Coulter doppelganger there than in the newspaper photo.)

And Klein is a launching a line of vegan raw food products. "Raw" is not necessarily what those outside the lifestyle might think. It means food that has not been "cooked" beyond 118 degrees, the temperature at which raw food can be heated or dehydrated and still retain its healthful enzymes. She says.

Klein's line, Roxanne's Fine Cuisine, includes trail mix, granola, sandwiches, cheeses, hummus, snacks, ice creams and cake. All are vegan, dairy- and wheat-free and sweetened with agave nectar, barley malt, maple syrup or honey.

The seeming contradiction between vegan and cheese and ice cream does get explained with a description of the actual items.

Trail mix of dehydrated carrots and corn as well as Himalayan goji berries and cashews; vanilla almond sprouted grain and nut granola that tastes like crumbled crunchy cookies; velvety Boursin-like nut milk and garlic cheese spread that's packaged with pre-sliced carrot and celery sticks for dipping; chocolate and vanilla nut milk-based ice creams, not quite as creamy as the restaurant versions but still smooth and remarkably like traditional ice cream; and triangles of fudgy chocolate cake layered with coconut.

For now you'll have to go to the high end food stores in the greater San Francisco area to find Roxanne's Fine Cuisine, but she is planning on a national rollout some time in the future.