Hasmik Manuelyan wanted only the best for her children. She spent hours finding the freshest food for them, often crossing London to buy organic fruit and vegetables. She lugged home bottles of mineral water to stop them drinking "impure" tap water. She gathered berries for them from brambles and elder trees in the fields around their Surrey home.
Yet last July her daughter Areni died of severe malnutrition at the age of nine months. A policeman said her body looked like that of "an African famine victim"; she weighed 5.2kg (about 11lb), less than two-thirds of the ideal weight for a child of her age. Pathologists concluded that her bronchopneumonia was brought on by lack of essential nutrients.
Last week Hasmik and her husband Garabet, both 45, were given community rehabilitation orders at the Old Bailey after pleading guilty to child cruelty through gross negligence. A charge of manslaughter was allowed to lie on file.
But the defence, judge and prosecution agreed that there was a terrible irony in the charge of "neglect". The Manuelyans' daughter died because they were excessively concerned about her health; believing that the "toxins" in cooked and processed foods might harm her, they put her on a raw vegan diet of juices and fruit pastes.
"It is a tragic case of a mother who cared passionately for her children - perhaps too much," said Linda Strodwick, defending Hasmik. "What began as an interest in foodstuffs as a result of genuine concern for the welfare of her family became an obsessive and destructive preoccupation."
Hasmik became vegan in 1995, following a bout of serious illness. Soon afterwards she and Garabet, who are both of Armenian origin, were converted to a far more restrictive diet when they discovered an Armenian book called Raw Eating, The Meaning of Nutrition: A New World Order.
"She believed her body required cleansing from a lifetime of impure food," Strodwick told the court. "Only by changing to raw food could she expel toxins from her diet."
The family abandoned all cooked or processed foods and existed solely on raw fruit and vegetables and their juices, nuts and some raw cereals. Hasmik diligently studied their needs, buying blue-green algae for their high level of vitamin B12 and boosting the family's protein intake with homemade almond milk, buying fresh almonds, soaking them overnight and liquidising them.
The couple combed through books and searched the internet for advice; the raw-food movement has spawned many websites warning of the "toxic" effects of cooked food. But while the authors are sincere in their enthusiasm, the literature they produce is "extremely irresponsible and dangerously so", according to one doctor involved in the case. They often jumble statistics and opinion, quote research out of context or use studies that have not been reviewed by other scientists. Several sites suggest that cooked foods are responsible for cancer; others go so far as to claim that a raw diet can cure diseases such as Aids.
It is easy to see how an insecure woman with an underlying, if low-level, mental disorder would be vulnerable to such scaremongering.
The family appears to have been insular. Hasmik tutored her nine-year-old son and six-year-old daughter at home in their tiny one-bedroom house - and they had few relatives in this country. There was no one close to them who could offer advice. Health workers could and did, but the couple refused to take it. They ignored warnings that dietary deficiencies were harming the family's health.
Their belief that the authorities were ignorant and heavy-handed hardened when child protection workers became so anxious that they put the two elder children on the at-risk register in 1997. Their response was to move to Armenia. The pattern repeated itself when they returned two years later; when health workers questioned their diet, the Manuelyans moved to France. The authorities only discovered they had returned when Areni was born in September 1999. They were immediately concerned by the baby's low birth weight and neighbours, too, noticed that the children appeared "emaciated".
But while Hasmik had introduced the family to the diet, Garabet was equally zealous in defending it. "Everyone is entitled to their own opinions and beliefs," he told the authorities in an angry letter. "We must follow the law of nature."
Insisting that Areni merely needed sunlight, the family moved to Spain, camping on a site without electricity or running water. The baby's health deteriorated dramatically after Garabet returned to the UK to earn money, and in July his family followed him home.
Even then, hospital treatment could have saved Areni. But the Manuelyans feared that this would involve drugs. Instead, they took her to an alternative health specialist for oxygen treatment. Horrified at her state, he told them she was on the verge of death and needed immediate intravenous feeding. "What, chemicals?" Hasmik asked.
By the following morning Areni was dead. Even as ambulance staff fought to resuscitate her, Hasmik had to be held back; she was trying to stop them administering drugs.
The tragedy is, as the judge observed, an unusual or even unique case. But health workers insist that raw food diets are unsuitable and potentially fatal for young children, even if adults can survive on them.
"It's not so much a lack of nutrients but the fact that the infant's dietary system would not be able to cope with many of these fruits and vegetables if they had not been broken down as they would be by cooking," says Dr Somnath Mukhopadhyay, a consultant senior lecturer at the Tayside Institute of Child Health.
"The substances can irritate an infant's digestive tract to such an extent that the child loses the nutrients in their stools. Even if there's a reasonable diet, much of it is being lost."
The Manuelyans' reluctance to follow conventional medical advice reflects wider confusion about food safety. Dr Susan Miles, who studies consumer perceptions at the Institute of Food Research, believes that food scares have left consumers increasingly unsure of whom to trust.
"People are aware that research is an ongoing process and that scientists' answers now are not necessarily the full story," she says. "Even if people are given confidence in something, that may be taken away. It was happening constantly with BSE; one group was saying it was safe to eat this or that and others were saying it wasn't. People are bombarded with so much information that it becomes difficult to know what to do.
"One of the dangers of the internet is that although it makes more information available to people, it isn't always in context. It may be that people try to avoid fruit and vegetables because of the pesticides, without realising they're increasing the risk of diseases such as bowel cancer. Their worries are out of proportion."
Whether the Manuelyans stand by their dietary beliefs is unclear. They refuse to comment on their daughter's death, not least because they are fighting to regain the care of their other children, now with foster parents.
