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You're right, many foods are difficult to digest raw, but it's a matter of severity. Eat enough legumes (the seeds/bean part) raw and there's a good chance of death. Even when soaked and cooked they're still toxic, but then again, so are mushrooms.

Meat is relatively easy to digest raw. I've already mentioned sashimi, but red meat is too. Cooking accomplishes three things: it increases the caloric content, it alters/improves the flavour, and, important to industrial agriculture, it kills pathogens. Cooking, however, is not necessary from a digestive standpoint. Most people have no difficulty digesting a rare steak.

Many grains lack some of the essential amino acids. Carefully combining grains can provide all the essential amino acids. It's more nutritive to let a ruminant eat the grasses/grains and then eat the ruminant (not to mention the energy and input costs involved with industrial crop growing).

When it comes to the toxicity of grains, I'll skip the fungi that may be present. Phytic acid can interfere with the absorption of minerals, including calcium, magnesium, iron, copper and zinc, which are the main non-caloric nutrition in grains. Gliadin, a gluten protein and the cause of celiac disease, is an indigestible protein that gets trapped in the villi of the intestines causing inflammation, even in non-celiac individuals.

The high carbohydrate concentrations of grains wreak havoc on the metabolic system. Here's a good sumary of the trouble with eating high amounts of carbohydrates.

I'd say an ideal diet consists primarily of vegetables. Fruits, while nutrient dense, shouldn't make up a large part of the diet due to the high carbohydrate content. Calories should come largely from fat and animal protein. I avoid industrial agriculture products when possible. The pesticides, fungicides, antibiotics, colouring, preservatives, etc., present are obviously not good for you. Furthermore, much like a poor diet affects human health, so does a poor diet affect an animal's health. Corn-fed animal meat is far higher in omega 6 fats, and far lower in omega 3 fats than optimal. A high omega 6/3 fats ratio in the diet promotes many diseases and should be avoided.

I see no reason not to cook. I simply suggest eating only foods that are okay to eat raw. I would, however, avoid charring food as doing so creates carcinogens.

And of course, to each his or her own. :-)

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/09/080918170357.htm
Solution To Global Fisheries Collapse? 'Catch Shares' Could Rescue Failing Fisheries, Protect The Ocean
A third of open fisheries have collapsed. A sixth of privatized fisheries have collapsed.
Even with privatised fishers, instead of a staple, fish becomes a luxury as "the per-pound price has increased significantly."

On top of that,
http://www.healthcastle.com/fish-safe-eat.shtml
Fish are contaminated with mercury and industrial chemicals.
It's okay to eat low mercury fish-- just limit it to 12 oz per week.

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080911234836AAEic4K
Since 1945- almost 11% of the earths land area degraded for raising crops. 70,000 sq k. abandoned annually.
While food production has risen, the rate of increase has been dropping for decades.
"If the trend towards soil exhaustion and degradation continues, food production will not keep pace with population growth; this is already the situation in Africa."

http://www.unwater.org/wwd10/faqs.html
Water quality is declining.

http://www.newsday.com/long-island/suffolk/gradual-decline-in-suffolk-s-drinking-water-1.2570399
Suffolk's draft water management plan found "a continued gradual decline in water quality" since 1987.

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Up to about 1960, you could pollute and the earth had enough excess capacity to handle it.
After that we started having pollution outbreaks and tighter laws. The laws will need to get tighter.
Once you have enough people. you reduce the earth to lifeless soil and the water to mud. Their urine and wastes are coming in large enough quantities that it's increasingly difficult to keep up.

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What could we do now? Well, we could remove the tax deduction for having a child. That's not killing anyone, right?

But as i posted elsewhere-- I don't think we fix this one. The folks who breed will come to dominate the population. I know three ladies who each had 4 kids. All of modern industrialization didn't do anything to slow them down.

We know, contrary to the wiki article, that the majority of deaths from the 1918 flu were caused by bacterial pneumonia.

Wikipedia doesn't say that. And you don't get it. So what if most 1918 flu deaths didn't come directly from the flu? I read several books on the 1918 flu pandemic. They indicate a lot of people survived "cytokine storm" symptoms (some only to die of pneumonia symptoms later). Further, we've actually seen cases in the past few years of the cytokine storm. There were a number of bird flu cases, for example. So it's not just an "urban myth". The World Health Organization has some literature on that subject.

And I don't understand your complaint about spinach. This link seems to indicate that despite your supposed myth busting that spinach is a considerable source of iron. That link even suggests ways to overcome the digestive difficulties that reduce intake of iron from spinach. Sure there was an erroneous study, but spinach still turns out to be a source of iron despite the errors in that study.

Try Ginger. It's an ancient remedy for motion sickness of all kinds. My Fiancee swears by it now. 3D games have always made her sick.. and now that she discovered Ginger (thanks to Mythbusters) she can play too.

http://www.healthcastle.com/ginger.shtml

Google around for some suggested doses. I've heard as little as a pill or two before, to as much as 5 for the entire day before. Course, being it's a "spice" (if you've ever eaten sushi, they always give you a pile) doses can be liberal. experiment and find what works for you.

But the amount of saturated fat in butter is usually much higher than the amount of hydrogenated fats in margarine. (This site said 7g saturated fat in butter; 5g of combined saturated (2g) and trans (3g) fat in margarine.) As nasty as those fats are, I don't think a double-dose of saturated fat is any better.

http://www.healthcastle.com/trans.shtml

I might also note that the FDA does not require that trans-fatty acids be listed explicitly on the nutrition facts label. It does require that they be properly counted, so if you look at the label and see this:

3g total fat
1g unsaturated
1g saturated

Next they'll try to return from Saturn with car parts.

The 'offical' figure is 50 million Americans. However, this is non-evenly distributed, with non-northern European descendants it's 75% to 90% (details here). Around the world overall, it's 70% Of course it's not a binary condition, and different people will have more or less severe problems, so what level you call tolerance is going to be quite arbitary.