Raw food sage Tassili Ma’at is forever crafting tasty dishes to add to an already popular and delectable menu featuring salads, hummus, vegetable medleys, pasta and desserts. She’s the founder of Tassili’s Raw Reality, the raw food restaurant and lounge that’s pleasing the palates of Atlantans in search of nutrition and simply a good meal, one mouth-watering morsel at a time.
It’s a rare day that you walk into Raw Reality and the customer before you didn’t order the kale salad (spicy kale is this writer’s favorite) or ask for a sample of the sweet coconut corn, Moroccan couscous, black-eyed pea hummus, or order an angelic tomato stuffed with scrambled soy or stand there gazing at the Afrikan carob cake.
When speaking to the neighborhood culinary legend, you instantly recognize there’s a bit of nostalgia behind every recipe. All in all, she’s motivated to take a different approach to the soul food recipes that we’ve all grown to love — creating what she’s coined: “passion on a plate.”
Here, Tassili discusses her raw food journey and her quest to heal the community. –yvette caslin
When did you join the raw food movement?
I have been working with live foods for the past four years. I started my training back in the mid-eighties when I lived in California. I became a vegan-vegetarian in 1988; [before then] I was a hard-core sugar addict and I was still eating fish and chicken. Becoming a vegan was new for me when I moved here to Atlanta; it was a goal that I wanted to achieve.
What is the history of Raw Reality?
We — me and my silent business partner — started with a very small budget, roughly $2,500. He [the silent partner] is just a jewel in my life; he made a small investment from his savings, which was a big investment [laughs] because we plan to expand and continue to bless other communities with the goodness that we have at Raw Reality. One of our main goals is to help heal our community and we are open for investors.
Why should we add raw food to our nutritional regimen?
Live foods provide the living enzymes that our bodies need. As a result, we find that we don’t desire to eat quite as much because the body is actually being nourished instantaneously with vitamins and minerals and the roughage helps the digestive system to stay regular. We have more energy as a result because our circulation is better. Many times, cooking kills the nutritional components of the food which is why we eat so many empty calories, especially the so-called comfort food that is lacking in nutrition. My goal is to add to your meal plan, not necessarily to transform every person that walks in the door.
For more, please be sure check out Tassili Ma’at’s video.
