A Modern-Day Raw Food Movement History

Note from Fruit-Powered Magazine publisher and editor Brian Rossiter: I believe Dr. David Klein is the greatest living historian of the modern raw food movement, with his rich, varied and groundbreaking experiences dating back to 1984 while living in New Jersey and beginning his education about Natural Hygiene, raw food and fruitarianism as he healed a long bout of ulcerative colitis after seven gastroenterologists failed him.

Upon his arrival in California’s Bay Area in 1987, Dr. David Klein saw the modern-day raw food movement grow up from small potlucks and newsletters to festivals and magazines, both of which he ran. He helped bring raw food education and experiences into people’s lives across America and the world. Along the way, Dr. David Klein built a publishing empire, producing more than 10 of his own books and keeping the works of pioneers such as Drs. T.C. Fry and Herbert M. Shelton alive. Dr. David Klein is the dean of the Vibrant Health & Wealth Academy, providing a program in natural health, nutrition and healing along with career and business enterprise development.

Dave, you got going on an 80 percent raw food diet in 1984 at 26 years old and overcame severe ulcerative colitis while living in your native New Jersey. After six months, you went 99 percent raw, and you have been 100 percent raw the past 27 years. This is about 15 years before most folks first went on the internet. Will you talk about how you felt as a newly changed person at a time when the vegetarianism movement was slowly catching on, the veganism scene was extremely small and the raw food world was practically nonexistent?

Dr. David Klein: I felt ecstatic to be let out of hell, let out of jail. It was a dreary, frustrating, angry, tumultuous existence. And then when I finally put together, in my mind, that this Natural Hygiene information I had was correct, that we’re meant to live close to nature, eating what we would forage mostly off of trees, fruit, and then it all made sense. I’ve said this many times in many interviews. Thirty-six years later, I’m saying, again, my mind exploded, and the repercussions are still going. It just blew my mind.

All the limitations in my life, all the illnesses—the little ones and the big ones—I got the answer to, and I solved them. I healed up in four weeks. It inspired me in a million different ways and opened up the gates for me to overcome a lot of obstacles and be free of illness and to get on with my life in a whole new exciting way that the possibilities, the horizon, was wide open. It seemed unlimited. I had only one Natural Hygiene raw fooder friend, Dr. Lawrence Galant. He’s the one who introduced me to all this, in New Jersey. He had his Nutrition Guidance Center, and now he’s retired in Boynton Beach, Florida, and he’s still going strong. He’s close to his mid-70s, and he still looks like he’s around 40. He runs on the beach every day. We’re still in touch after all these years.

I was not aware of much of a vegetarian movement going on. There was, coincidentally, in my home state of New Jersey, the American Vegan Society, and they had this big magazine called Ahimsa, and I got a few issues of that. I don’t think I had any other vegetarian friends. I was just reading this information. Then I joined the American Natural Hygiene Society [now called the National Health Association]. I was getting their health science magazine, and I started getting Dr. T.C. Fry‘s magazine, Healthful Living.

I was aware that the American Natural Hygiene Society was around and had an annual meeting. Over the years, there were a few Natural Hygiene pen pal club newsletters: the Hygienic Network News by Helen Jean Story in Santa Cruz, California; a couple from Manhattan, Lawrence Lyons and Barbara Feldman, no relation to the actress, had the Raw Food Path Directory; and Victoria BidWell had the GetWell StayWell Veggie Penpal Club Newsletter. Then in the mid-1990s, two great fruitarian newsletters came along: the FRESH (Fruitarian Raw Energy Support and Help) News by Susie Miller of the U.K., and The Fruitarian Network News by Rene Beresford of Australia. We were soon to become great friends and share articles.

Coincidentally, on Facebook, I’ve just begun connecting with someone I never really connected with before who was in some of the original pen pal newsletters. He goes by Forrest Greenwald and lives on the Big Island of Hawaii. So, through the grapevine, now including Facebook, raw food and Natural Hygiene people were and are still connecting.

So there wasn’t much going on as far as events when I was still in New Jersey and in upstate New York for a year.

In California’s Bay Area, the Raw Food Movement Was Alive and Kicking in the Late 1980s

After a year of living in upstate New York, in 1987, you moved out to the East Bay Area in California, outside famously liberal and alternative San Francisco. What was the raw food community like out there in 1987 and the following 20-plus years until your move to Maui, Hawaii, in 2010?

Dr. David Klein: All right, so now it becomes fascinating. As far as I know, and I’m pretty sure it’s true, there was only one raw food group in the whole country: the San Francisco Living Foods Support Group, which was founded by and run by Dorleen Tong and Jessie Stewart, a couple of great ladies who have since passed away before their time. It’s very sad.

They were great friends and had monthly gatherings. It was sort of an eclectic mix of raw food approaches. It was pretty much half Natural Hygiene and half Ann Wigmore approach. They had meetings in a little room on the side of a bank in San Francisco. They eventually had a big meeting room at Fort Mason, on the waterfront in San Francisco. The meetings became bigger and bigger.

My first year there was 1987. About 12 people would show up, including ecologist Don Weaver and the late Morris Krok, who became great friends of mine. He’s a legendary fruitarian author. He wrote many books such as Fruit the Food & Medicine for Man. He ran about 15 ultra-marathons in his native country of South Africa. He would visit the Bay Area about once a year just to see his son and two daughters. He spoke at one of the meetings in 1987, and I became attached to him, and we corresponded. I visited his daughter’s home, became friends with his whole family and started selling his entire catalogue of health books to fruitarians around the world. It’s a very small little clique, or cult, if you will, and it was just fascinating to read the Morris’ folksy books and to connect with all these people.

So the meetings grew bigger and bigger, then they spread to Fort Mason. In the early 1990s, I moved up to Sebastopol, near Santa Rosa, California, and took my last engineering job. I just didn’t last long; I got laid off during the recession in 1991.

Anyway, I enrolled in the Institute for Educational Therapy (since renamed Bauman College), where I got a Nutrition Educator certification. With one of the teachers there, we started the Santa Rosa Living Food Support Group, and I think we were the second or third raw food group in California. I think there might have been another one in Santa Cruz.

So we are having monthly meetings, and, at one point, we were having three a month at different people’s homes—mine and two other people’s. With that teacher, we started the Santa Rosa Living Food Support Group Newsletter. It started at two pages and grew to about four pages. That teacher moved on to another part of the state, and I expanded and started calling it Living Foods Lifestyle, and then I found out that that’s the name of Ann Wigmore’s trademark, and I changed it to the Sunfood Lifestyle.

Then in 1994 or 1995, I was getting the San Francisco Living Foods Support Group’s newsletter, and I took it over. They wanted someone else to do it, and so I expanded that. The Santa Rosa newsletter became the official newsletter of the San Francisco Living Foods Support Group.

Dr. David Klein Launches Living Nutrition Magazine, Bringing Raw Food Education and Experiences to Subscribers Across America and, Later, the World, with Vibrance

You launched Living Nutrition as a paper magazine in 1996, later rebranding it as Vibrance, which, together, enjoyed a 20-year run. How did you find people, in the early days, to feature in your magazine? Talk about the production process.

Dr. David Klein: In 1996, it all split wide open. That’s when pretty much everybody started getting rudimentary modems for email and the first websites came out.

First, though, right when winter started in 1995, just before 1996, I got really inspired and decided to create “the greatest magazine in the world.” I called it Living Nutrition, and I worked for the next six months putting together the very first issue, which ended up being 12 pages. It was very rudimentary. I created it on my Macintosh computer. The design was pretty bad, but the articles were great, and it got things going.

So I was networking with the best Natural Hygiene teachers I could find, just corresponding. Until there was email, it was really hard to connect with people. Correspondence was slow, and it was hard to make friendships by phone. People weren’t really very connected.

So I was aware of a few great Natural Hygiene teachers. I was friends with Roe Gallo, who is a great physiology teacher. She came out with the book Perfect Body, and she was a fruitarian. She helped me get going with the first issue of Living Nutrition. Through T.C. Fry’s network, I met a few other great Natural Hygiene teachers like Art Baker. Of course, Dr. Vivian Vetrano was around and T.C. Fry.

So I was networking with a lot of Natural Hygiene teachers, and because I was laid off from my engineering job, I decided to give up engineering. I was pretty much doing odds and ends and slowly building up my health education career in the 1990s, so I had a lot of time to connect with a lot of people and immerse myself in health and meet new people in the health field.

So I had a small staff of good Natural Hygiene physiology teachers for the first issues of Living Nutrition. My network of people, of contributors, just started growing. Because of my unique experience, I was able to associate with a lot of really great Natural Hygiene teachers: Dr. Alan Goldhamer of TrueNorth Health Center, Dr. Alec Burton of Arcadia Health Centre in Australia, Dr. Keki Sidwha of the U.K. and eventually Professor Rozalind Graham and Drs. Doug Graham, Tim Trader and Robert Sniadach. Doug, Tim, Robert and I are still “The 4 Amigos.”

People liked the energy I was putting into Living Nutrition and the fact that I wanted to make it a hub for raw fooders, raw food educators and Natural Hygiene educators who were into the raw food approach. There were a lot of Natural Hygiene teachers and doctors who were aligned with the American Natural Hygiene Society and were more into the cooked-food approach and against the fruitarian diet. They thought fruitarianism was too extreme, and they were more mainstream Natural Hygiene, which sounds kind of odd, but it was a more-watered-down version of Natural Hygiene than what we raw fooders were attracted to. So that is how I built my network.

When I started to send Living Nutrition out, it looked like a newsletter. It was just a two-folded-and-stapled production. I was sending a lot of freebies to get people who were in these different Natural Hygiene and raw food directories interested.

The Internet Grows the Raw Food Movement Quickly Across the World

Living Nutrition launched as early internet users were getting online for the first time. You talked about how email could increase the connectivity of people. Let’s explore raw food websites. How did the dawn of the internet era and raw food websites affect the raw food movement?

Dr. David Klein: Well, as I remember, it was 1996—it could be 1995—when the first few websites came along. I got my first Mac PowerBook 100 in, I think, in the winter of 1995. 1996 is when the internet started taking over my life, at least.

So, around that time, I connected with John Kohler, who lived a couple towns over, and he had just recently healed up spinal meningitis, which his doctor said was going to be fatal. He was a young, dynamic guy who got his life back, and we met at one of the San Francisco Living Foods Support Group’s meetings where I gave my first standup talk. He recorded it, we met and we became great friends. A few days later, we spent 12 hours straight creating my first website because he became one of the first web hosts—LivingNutrition.com was born [and is now VibranceMagazine.com].

John created Living-Foods.com which was the biggest raw food website in the world, at over 600 pages. He was prolific and would work more than 12 hours a day putting together every bit of information he could find on raw food on this website. It had the biggest forum in the world, and I was a moderator for two years. It was wild and crazy. There were all kinds of arguments about all different kinds of approaches to raw foodism. The energy was absolutely amazing.

So John was my first website host for LivingNutrition.com and for Colitis-Crohns.com [now ColitisAndCrohnsCenter.com], the website for my Colitis & Crohn’s Health Recovery Center business. Then, slowly, a few other websites—major ones—came around. Nature’s First Law and Viktoras Kulvinskas’ were some others’ major sites I can think of.

Technology was pretty primitive in 2000, as I remember it. Then e-commerce came about, and programmers began making shopping carts, and people who were on the fringe of raw foodism were able to get totally into it and started making things like raw crackers and raw cookies and selling these things on the web, and the whole thing just started to explode with e-commerce and websites.

There weren’t website templates such as on WordPress that we have today. In the early 2000s, you would have to spend a whole lot of money to have someone develop a website from scratch. These days, you just pick a template and plug in the information. In one day, you’re up and going. Back then, technology was primitive, but the energy was growing, and we went from having five to 10 main raw food websites to 500 to 1,000 of them five years later.

The Dawn of E-Commerce Transforms and Propels the Raw Food Movement

Did this e-commerce explosion change the whole movement? At one time, was it more of a hobby, and then, all of a sudden, it became a business in which people could make a living promoting this lifestyle?

Dr. David Klein: Right. It was just a fun thing people did in their spare time like hosting raw food potlucks or just sprouting seeds in their kitchens. That’s all the raw food movement really was until people found out they could start making money doing this and have their own home-based businesses, selling raw food goods, juicers, blenders, sprouters, dehydrators and lots of recipe and other books.

We are what Viktoras Kulvinskas called “cultural creatives.” We want to do our own thing. We don’t want to have a 9-to-5 job, working for the man and earning a paycheck. We want to teach, we want to make food, we want to sell it, we want to cater at events. So the internet really enabled this big time.

So by 2005, there were hundreds of people doing it, and then in the next five years, there were thousands. Right now, the landscape is just out of sight. It’s all over the place with every kind of product and avenue for teaching raw foodism, and now veganism is exploding, of course, in a way that most of us never imagined.

YouTube Becomes a Game-Changer for the Fruitarian Movement, Giving Everyone a Voice for Free

Let’s dive into what YouTube has done for the raw food community. It requires some time and money to write and publish stories on the web, but YouTube’s made it possible for anyone with a smartphone to share their stories and experiences for free. What are your thoughts about this chapter in the 36-year history you’ve been part of the raw food movement?

Dr. David Klein: Well, it’s huge. In every aspect of culture, the best medium for marketing your message is video. So that is why it’s become so prolific, and it’s enabled people who’ve only just found out about raw foodism a month ago to go on YouTube and crow about their successes. It’s enabled people to produce educational videos on every subject under the sun that has to do with health in five- to 20-minute sound bites.

So it’s really been tremendous because, instead of people just reading about it and being very skeptical, you can see a lot of people who’ve done it, and maybe see before-and-after pictures that help make it totally compelling. It can be totally convincing, and it’s alive. It’s really shown the skeptics in this world what raw fooders look like.

This cause is helped by some movie and sports celebrities, who are doing mostly raw food. Just last week, Jennifer Aniston revealed the reason why she looks great at age 50 and the whole world is in love with her. She said, “I eat lots of organic fruit.”

So a picture is worth a thousand words, and a video in which a lot of people who are not paid actors or actresses reading scripted phony stuff has the ultimate credibility.

Raw Food Potlucks Plant Seeds for Growth in the Raw Food Community

You talked a bit about potlucks, and I’d like to focus more on them. Potlucks are thrilling times to be part of for raw food enthusiasts. These are times when people can connect with folks on the same wavelength, vibing high. Do you recall the first raw food potluck you attended? How has the raw food potluck scene blossomed over the years?

Dr. David Klein: That’s a really lively topic I enjoy talking about. I mentioned we had the Santa Rosa Living Food Support Group in the early 1990s, and a couple of other people got into it. Then, I’m sure, a whole lot of other raw food groups started up from San Diego to Los Angeles to Santa Cruz, and there was one in Oakland. Then they started growing all over the country.

Well, do I remember the first raw food potluck I went to? It was at the teacher’s home in Santa Rosa—she had invited some of her clients from her health consultant business. Some of the raw fooders in the community also came. There were only a few of us. It was a nice little gathering.

Then, I think, within a year, another person came on board and he threw, after a few potlucks, a Thanksgiving potluck, and we had 60 or 70 people in his house. It was absolutely outstanding. So, at the same time, there were still the monthly raw food potlucks going on in San Francisco. We started getting really good speakers and presentations.

The most memorable event of them all, for me, was in 1997 or 1998. The San Francisco Living Foods Support Group was holding their potlucks at different places, and they held one in a nice big penthouse space in a part of San Francisco, up near Golden Gate Park. People had been connecting like crazy through email for months or maybe the whole year, I could tell. The energy was amazing!

About 75 people showed up. Roe Gallo was there, looking absolutely magnificent. Morris Krok was there, and he gave a half-hour talk. He got me up onstage to help demonstrate some yoga poses. People who we’d never seen before showed up at this potluck. The energy in the room was just absolutely electric. I was just buzzing the entire time. I’d never seen anything like this. It was so exciting.

For we people who had been living on the fringe and hardly connecting, our dream had come true: The energy had exploded! The cat was out of the bag with the raw food movement. I felt that that event was a watershed for the raw food movement. People were meeting, exchanging their phone numbers and email addresses. It led to the first raw food expos.

Fruitarian Festivals Pop up, Paving the Way for Larger Gatherings the World Over

Fruit festivals have taken off in the past decade, with the success of The Woodstock Fruit Festival helping lead to other gatherings across the globe. Did you imagine the world would ever be ready for this back in 1984? Also, there was a festival scene that pre-dated festivals created in the past decade. Will you talk about the festivals and other events you were part of that helped grow the raw food movement through the 2000s decade?

Dr. David Klein: When I started this diet, in 1984, I couldn’t imagine what the future was going to hold. This was before the internet. We were so spread out. There were the annual Vegetarian Society gatherings in Pennsylvania, which are still going on, but I never imagined raw food exploding like it has. Of course, I never had any clue that the internet would come.

So the energy really started to, pardon the pun, sprout, in the late 1990s, with that penthouse potluck in San Francisco.

After that catalytic potluck, the San Francisco Living Foods Support Group put on a raw food expo at Fort Mason. It was really well-attended, with maybe a couple of hundred people there. Dennis Nelson of Nelson’s Books was selling all these raw food books there. Nature’s First Law was there. I was there. It was really the first big gathering of raw foodists.

The next year, Rose Lee Calabro, a member of our community, held a raw food expo at a hotel at the San Francisco airport. People came from all over the country for that one. Viktoras Kulvinskas and Dr. Gabriel Cousens had tables there. I had a table. I think John Kohler might have had a table. Nature’s First Law was there. I met Dr. Tim Trader for the first time. Things were really taking off even more greatly with that event.

Then Rose Lee Calabro took it another step higher. She rented a huge exhibition space the next year in a hotel in San Francisco. It had gone major league. There were maybe 150 vendors there. All the great raw fooders from all over the country who had written books showed up. I met Dr. Doug Graham for the first time. Our tables were right next to each other, and we became great friends. We, to this day, email just about every single day. There might have been close to 1,000 people there. It was absolutely dynamic. So that was the biggest and the last of those kinds of expos in building facilities.

In 2001, I decided to create raw food events called Raw Passion Seminars, where the great Natural Hygiene speakers and raw fooders would be speaking. I helped put on about 15 of these events, starring Dr. Doug Graham, Dr. Tim Trader, Dr. Robert Sniadach, Rozalind Graham, Art Baker and a few others. We held these events all over the country.

In summer 2001, in Sebastopol, California, I put together the first outdoor raw food festival. I called this the Raw Passion Summer Jamboree. It was out in my late friend Bill Macdonald’s eight-acre, 1,000-tree apple orchard. We had farm-fresh boxes of organic ripe fruit.

It was magnificent! We had two of those events. We had about 15 to 20 great speakers who were totally into the Natural Hygiene and raw food approaches. People came from different countries to these events. We had as many as 200 people.

During the second one, Dr. Doug Graham was sitting next to me, as we were listening to a speaker, and he whispered “Rawstock” to me. My eyes rolled, and I looked at him and said, “No way.” Because my vision of Rawstock was a huge festival, à la Woodstock. I sat there and started to jump out of my skin, and 10 minutes later, I said, “Doug, next year we’re doing Rawstock!”

We did three Rawstocks, and they were magnificent three-day events, with up to 250 people, 20 speakers and tons of farm-fresh ripe fruit. We had great presentations and camping—one of the events was held at Oceansong, an environmental education center in Occidental overlooking the ocean. We had the Raw Passion Band. We played two years in a row—my only two gigs in my entire life on my guitar. That helped kick off the outdoor raw food festivals.

There was a fellow in western New York state who put on some raw food festival. I don’t recall the name of him or the event. Concurrently, Cherie Soria and her partner, Dan Ladermann, held their raw foods events up in Fort Bragg, California, at their Living Light Culinary Arts Institute.

I have to backtrack a little. Also, in the early 2000s, a couple named Linda Chekal-Fromm and her husband, a chiropractor named John Chekal, held, I think, three raw and living food expos in Portland, Oregon. I attended two or three of those, and they were really well-attended, with dozens and dozens of presentations by every raw food educator who was a giant in the world. They were held at a suburban camp, and with many speaking venues and loads of tables. I met people from all over the country. They were magnificent.

I held the last Rawstock in 2005, deciding that was enough for me, and some other people wanted to take over. The next two or three years, Happy Oasis held big outdoor raw food festivals in Arizona and one or two on Maui. Then Mike Arnstein started The Woodstock Fruit Festivals in upstate New York, and I am thrilled to say that there are others in Denmark, London, Spain, Costa Rica and elsewhere. And my friend David Johnston is planning the Maui Fruit Festival for this June.

Looking Into the Future, With an Eye on Fruiticulture As a Solution for Climate Change

It’s a fascinating history you’ve recounted, Dave. You’re the best modern-day historian out there on the raw food movement, considering how long you’ve been part of all these festivals and that you ran your magazine for 20 years. What do you envision next for the plant-based and raw food movements? Do you believe they’ll be able to grow significantly enough to keep life for all creatures on earth going into 2050 and beyond as the human population surges and land and water resources become scarce as the climate warms? Will we make it?

Dr. David Klein: The growth of the vegan trend in the past 12 or so months has been fantastic. When the raw food movement started taking off and people like myself and other raw food leaders would be interviewed by major TV stations, radio stations, newspapers and magazines in the early 2000s, the articles were laced with a lot of skepticism. There would always be counterpoints from registered dieticians or medical doctors, who would be saying that it’s dangerous, that you’re not going to get enough B12 and that it’s too extreme. Then the raw food movement picked up steam, and more and more people were doing it, some celebrities got into it, and then all that negativity died down about 90 percent.

Now along comes the vegan movement, and we see there’s a lot of celebrities right now doing it. They don’t look like stereotypical extremely skinny vegetarian weaklings, and they’re fitting in really well with mainstream society, and they certainly fit in well with the eccentric Hollywood scene. It’s really helped open the doors for all kinds of plant-based diets, including the raw food diet.

So now when you hear about raw foodism in the media, it’s not characterized as something just for weirdos, extremists and people who live on the fringe. We see a lot of celebrities these days who are vegans who eat mostly raw food, so the vegan movement is helping to tow along the raw food movement because they’re blending together. This has been tremendously beneficial, as I see it, to our raw food cause.

Because there are some vegans who talk about the need to eat a lot of fruit or who just eat a lot of fruit, like I just mentioned, Jennifer Aniston, and there are a few others out there, our lifestyle is not being questioned as being crazy as it used to be just 15 to 20 years ago.

So where is all this heading? Cyber technology is really picking up. The medical industry and Big Pharma are hanging on to dear life even though they’re going down the tubes. They’re clinging onto their paradigm in desperation. More and more people are coming out as anti-vaccinations and anti-meat and pro-plant-based. There are people in the royal family who are vegans. Paul McCartney touts meatless Mondays. There are major influences in every part of society, and even the medical community, to a degree, touting the benefits of a plant-based diet.

Because the biggest issue is climate change, and given the perilous situation that the world is in, there are articles just about every week in every newspaper and magazine about the benefits of and the necessity for eating less red meat and stopping factory farming. So that has really snowballed.

Greta Thunberg, really, of course, helped accelerate this whole movement. To me, what’s most exciting is that she’s galvanized youths and young people, in general, to get mobilized, to get interested in eating plants instead of meat and junk food, and to think about their choices when it comes to the ecological impact on the carbon footprint, pollution and climate as well as ethics and the morality of killing animals.

So that’s all good. That’s all wonderful. I think it’s going to keep on snowballing. But, at the same time, we have a lot of negative influences that are hanging on there, and we have the most horrible president in history rolling back every pollution-control standard imaginable, making it easier for Big Coal and Big Natural Gas and Big Oil to increase their production. So there’s still a lot of turmoil that needs to be undone, and the world needs to get onboard with clean energy right now.

I just read that some country has committed to being off fossil fuels within 10 years. I and a lot of other people are saying: “That’s too long. We need to do this much more quickly, like right now.”

The age of information has helped grow the raw fruitarian movement tremendously, and, right now, it’s doing a huge or maybe even the most important job ever of increasing green awareness in the sense that we need to get off of fossil fuels and to create sustainable, renewable and regenerative technologies.

I think, you, like I, believe that our fruitarian diet has given us superior clarity, insight and the right outlook on what is needed to help sustain life on planet Earth, and to renew it and regenerate it, and to create a sustainable world that lasts for generations to come.

Ten years ago, my late friend Jim Sloman, came out with a book called A Global Solution. He said, “If you put the entire book in the first issue of Vibrance, I will finance the magazine.” He paid the print of 13,000 copies.

Jim did deep research and found out that all the world’s best forecasters foresaw that, by 2050, the Earth would run out of resources, all the raw materials—everything—at the current rate that everything’s being consumed and accounting for population growth. Humanity would cease to function because we would run out of resources.

So we don’t know if 2050 is the year or if it’s 2030 or 2040, but we’re getting too close to the deadline if things don’t change dramatically. With the dramatic temperature rises of the ocean and the atmosphere, and the drastic cataclysmic weather events we’ve been seeing in the past few years—especially last year and just recently in Australia—we need to act right now. We need to come to our senses, and we need clarity.

You and I and everybody who has done the raw food diet, especially the fruitarian diet, has gained the greatest clarity and insight. It keeps our mind the clearest; it enables our brains, our minds to function at the highest level of clarity and consciousness; it enables us to see the solutions to our place on planet Earth. And we know what the best solution is—I coined the phrase and even got it trademarked last year—”Fruiticulture.”

Don Weaver has done great research on climactic changes, epochs throughout history, how the Earth goes through glacial cycles, where minerals are abundant after glaciation, and how, toward the end of glacial epochs, the minerals become depleted through erosion and migration into the aquifers and the ocean. He says that we’re at the end of a glacial epoch right now, and that’s why the soils are so low in trace minerals. He’s written many articles on this.

I just want to sum up my thoughts about Don. Don, to me, is the world’s No. 1 ecologist. I’ve said this for many years. He’s been a 100 percent raw fooder since 1977, and he’s in magnificent health after doing this diet for more than 40 years on 100 percent organic raw foods.

Over the years, he’s written many, many articles for me on remineralizing the soil, how to plant healthy fruit orchards and how to have the healthiest, tastiest, most beautiful fruits and gardens by mineralizing the soil with the missing rock elements, mainly rock powders you can buy at some nurseries that have about 95 minerals in them.

So, last year, I decided to put together probably my final and ultimate book for humanity, and I named it Fruiticulture. It features every one of Don’s great articles in the book, and it features a lot of articles I and Dr. T.C. Fry have written. Dr. Doug Graham wrote a magnificent foreword for it. This book lays out the plan for humans to farm and grow our food; to live wisely; to reverse the decline that’s been going on with the soil, the air and society; and to regenerate the earth.

We laid out the whole plan and made it a free ebook. All of your readers can get it, of course, and if they want the paperback version, they can order it through my web store or they can get it from Amazon. To me, it’s the best book that’s ever been written on ecology. It’s timely; it’s got the blueprint; it’s got the sensible plan and has lively colorful photographs. It features the lifestyle that we live, focuses on how to do the lifestyle, the reasons to do the lifestyle along with its amazing and proven benefits. It’s based on a fruitarian agrarian society.

It’s fruit-based permaculture, growing vegetable crops interspersed among a gamut of fruit tree crops, employing permaculture practices. It’s my wish that it gets into the hands of every person on the planet.