Why is it that offering someone a dessert and calling it “no-bake” will often be seen as more appealing than if you call it “raw”? Is it because the word “raw” is, in fact, raw itself?
“No-bake” implies nostalgic childhood memories of making goodies and working with gooey, delicious dough. It makes me think of licking batter off of my fingers (okay, so I totally did that if there was raw egg in the dough and we were going to bake it, too. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger!). No-bake treats are often thought of as easy to toss together.
“Raw” makes people a little more cautious. It’s like using the word “vegan” or “vegetarian”: it sounds “healthy” or “diet-y”, and therefore “scary”.* Raw treats are also believed to use fancy or hard-to-find ingredients, which makes people view them as a hassle.
So if you make a dessert which uses raw ingredients and has not been baked, you might be better off referring to it as a no-bake treat rather than a raw treat. It could change the way that another person perceives the treat, and thus alter how it tastes to them. Maybe one day there won’t be such a stigma about eating raw foods, but for now, it might be easier to gently show people how tasty raw treats can be by calling them “no-bake” rather than scaring them off or causing them to be biased before they’ve even tried it.
Would you eat a raw treat or are you more of a no-bake kind of person?
*I think that quotation marks are the new semicolon for me – I may need an intervention from my over-use of them.