The surveillance camera hanging from the ceiling of the Raw-some Foods warehouse in Venice, California, is pretty much the same as surveillance cameras hanging from the ceilings of businesses across North America. It is small and black and does what a surveillance camera is supposed to do: silently record the comings and goings of anyone who passes through the warehouse doorway.
But unlike so many surveillance cameras, which are intended to protect a business from thievery or other malicious acts perpetrated by members of the general public, the camera at Raw-some is there for an entirely different purpose: to document a potential raid by state or federal authorities.
Indeed, that is exactly what happened on June 30, 2010, at almost exactly 8:00 a.m., when the door to the warehouse swung open to admit four officers sent by the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office. The officers entered slowly and fanned out across the room. Their guns were drawn, and their heads were bent and tilted to afford a better view down the short barrels of their pistols. To my admittedly inexperienced eye, informed by drug bust and bank robber gang apprehension scenes in movie and television, it seemed like classic police invasion technique. Hell, if I’d been busting down that door with gun in hand, it’s exactly what I would have done, figuring that at any moment, some ne’er-do-well might pop out of a closet, finger on the trigger of his black market AK-47. Kill or be killed. Go ahead, punk: Make my day.
Except that, well, Rawsome’s not really that sort of place. Actually, it’s not even close to being that sort of place. Because Rawsome is . . . you might want to sit down for this . . . a grocery store. As the officers moved through the warehouse, guns and eyes scanning every nook and cranny for the criminal element, they were forced to navigate around bins of what appear to be mixed vegetables. The video is a little grainy, so it’s a bit hard to make out exactly what kinds of vegetables, but I’m pretty sure I saw some broccoli. Or maybe it was cabbage. It was something green, anyway, piled in one of those waxed cardboard boxes vegetables are often shipped in.
I know what you’re thinking: Rawsome must have been a front, the legal entity for some sort of money-laundering scheme, or simply a distraction from the gambling, moonshine, drugs, and prostitution that unfolded in a windowless room beyond the boxes of cabbage or broccoli or whatever the hell it was. Except that wasn’t the case either. No, the reason the LA County district attorney’s office had such a keen, gun-wielding interest in Rawsome wasn’t because of activities being carried out under the cover of food: It was because of the food itself.
Which makes this an appropriate place to explain that although Rawsome is merely a grocery store, it probably isn’t like any grocery story you’ve ever shopped in. Rawsome exists to provide its customers with foods that are raw. (You might have figured that out by now; the name is a bit of a giveaway.) And those foods are, in many cases, illegal. Raw milk. Raw cheese, aged for fewer than the 60 days required by the FDA. Almonds that have not been pasteurized, as has been the US law since 2007. You know, that sort of stuff.
To understand why such an establishment exists, we need to back up to Chapter 6, where we learned that a diverse population of gut microbes might well be key to vibrant health and perhaps even imbue us with a degree of protection from bacteria that would otherwise do us harm. What’s more, we need to understand that raw milk consumers do not have an exclusive on the claim to microbial and enzymatic diversity in their favorite food. Indeed, one of the fastest-growing food movements in the United States is defined by a contingent of people whose desire to eat raw food goes far beyond their milk to the fruit, vegetables, nuts, dairy, and in some cases even the meat they consume.
Now, diet extremism is nothing new to modern American culture. As Michael Pollan has correctly pointed out, we live in an era of almost paralyzing confusion regarding how and what we should feed ourselves. Anyone old enough to be reading this book has lived at least some of his or her life in the era of nutritive turmoil; that many of us don’t even recognize this turmoil is indicative of how pervasive it has become. We don’t think of it as turmoil; we think of it as normal. It is almost impossible to imagine that not so long ago, Americans weren’t obsessed with diet. The turning point isn’t hard to identify: It was the early 1960s, when cholesterol began taking the rap for heart disease. It didn’t hurt that the obesity rate was barely a third of what it is now; we had not yet become a society diseased by excess body weight. And so people ate what they liked, and what they liked was usually a reflection of how they’d been fed as children. In other words, there was still a degree of “food ancestry” in our culture.
The age of nutrition pretty much did away with all that, as we learned that saturated fats are killing us (or are they?), that high levels of cholesterol in our blood put us at extreme risk for heart disease (or do they?), that eating a low-fat, highcarb diet is the best way to maintain a healthy weight (or is it?), and that margarine and other engineered foodlike substances are the cornerstone of a well-balanced diet. In recent years, studies have begun to refute these findings, leaving us more uncertain than ever about what to eat. It’s enough to make a fellow want to do something crazy, like fill his freezer with a road-killed deer and a couple dozen pounds of dumpstered cheese.
Or, perhaps, shop at Rawsome. Now, in the interest of fairness in the context of my previous commentary on dietary fads, I feel compelled to point out that eating raw foods isn’t exactly the new, new thing. After all, there once was life without fire. In other words, eating raw foods—yes, including meat—wasn’t always considered dangerous. It wasn’t illegal to produce or distribute raw foods, and gnawing on an uncooked haunch of animal flesh wasn’t merely a stupid party trick. Because it was the norm.
The revival of the raw foods diet in the modern era owes much to a fellow named Aris LaTham. LaTham is a tall, slender African American in his sixties; he was born in Panama but immigrated to the United States, where, in 1979, he launched Sunfired Foods, a raw food business based in Harlem. He wears his hair in long, thin dreadlocks, maintains a fluffy white beard, and, if the photos on the Sunfired Web site are any indication, owns at least one purple sports jacket that he likes to wear buttoned low, his gleaming chest on proud display. It very much looks as if it might be waxed (his chest, not the jacket).
Like most raw foodists, LaTham believes that the enzymes in uncooked foods aid digestion and that these foods are teeming with beneficial microbes. And, contend LaTham and the growing legion of raw foodists, it’s not merely that raw foods are healthful, it’s that cooked foods are downright dangerous. This runs counter to pretty much every piece of advice from every food regulatory body that exists or has ever existed, but there is some science behind these claims. Ironically, this is particularly true in relation to the cooking of meat, which has been shown to release carcinogenic compounds during heating, especially at high temperatures. One study conducted by researchers at the National Cancer Institute found that people who ate beef rare or medium-rare had less than one-third the risk of stomach cancer than those who ate beef medium-well or well-done.
But it’s not merely meat, or heat, that draws the ire of raw foodists. They contend that food additives such as preservatives, flavor enhancers, colorings, and other laboratory-concocted ingredients are not part of a healthy diet. Ditto stimulants and depressants, such as alcohol, tobacco, or black tea. Coffee? Forget about it. And raw foodists tend to avoid, like the plague (or crispy bacon), added sugars. Most raw foodists are strict vegetarians, and many of those are vegans, consuming no animal products at all.
Frankly, I have a hard time getting too worked up about such a diet, but maybe that’s because I haven’t tried it and experienced the amazing, nearly boundless energy and sense of well-being it supposedly confers. I say “supposedly” because, like I said, I haven’t tried eating this way, and there’s scant research on the subject. So, like you, I really only have the testimony of LaTham and the burgeoning population of raw food devotees.
In any event, other than being one of the modern raw foods movement’s forefathers, LaTham has nothing to do with Rawsome, which was founded by a 63-year-old raw food devotee named James Stewart. Stewart is one of the protagonists of Los Angeles County’s raw foods movement; back in the ’90s, before it was legal to distribute unpasteurized milk in LA County, Stewart was bringing it into the city in the trunk of his old Mazda. He’d make the 5-hour drive north to what was then the state’s only raw milk dairy and return with a car full of milky contraband, which he distributed among his friends and the handful of health food stores willing to break the law.
Stewart’s affinity for raw foods is the result of his introduction in 1997 to the dietary beliefs of a man called Aajonus Vonderplanitz, which is the sort of name that makes me wish my parents had spent a bit more time considering all their options. As you might expect of someone with such a moniker, he lives in Malibu, California, where he is probably the 38th Aajonus Vonderplanitz in the phone book.
I’m going to sidetrack a little here, because the story of Aajonus Vonderplanitz is simply too good to ignore. This is in part because, unlike the majority of raw foodists, Vonderplanitz is a profligate consumer of raw meat, including fish, beef, chicken, and pork.
Wait a moment: chicken and pork? I was raised to believe, fervently, in the restorative powers of a rare hamburger or steak, and being a worldly fellow, I have dined at restaurants where uncooked fish was served. But I’d been taught—as surely you must have been—that chicken and pork should always be cooked to the utmost doneness. To ignore this mandate was to risk a slow, agonizing death by . . . well, actually, I never did figure out why these particular species were so dangerous. But the implied threat was enough, and despite my fondness for bloody beef, I have always cooked chicken and pork to at least 160°F, and usually a good bit more.
Back to Aajonus and his unusual story. As a boy, Aajonus suffered from numerous conditions, including dyslexia and autism; these afflictions were exacerbated by an older brother who tortured him almost daily. His father was a strict disciplinarian and put Aajonus in the hospital on numerous occasions. Around his 10th birthday, Aajonus developed peritonitis, an inflammation of the tissue that lines the wall of the abdomen and covers the abdominal organs. His doctor misdiagnosed his stomach pains as appendicitis before discovering that his appendix was just fine. It was removed anyway.
During this period, Aajonus’s bones were brittle, and he broke numerous appendages. He was diagnosed as borderline diabetic at 13; at 15, he was diagnosed with juvenile diabetes. His 15th year was a bad one indeed, because he also developed angina pectoris muscle spasms in and around the heart.
Things quieted down for a few years (one can only imagine his doctor’s relief), but the respite was short lived, because at 19, Aajonus developed an ulcer that turned tumorous after surgery. It was irradiated, but the treatment caused him to develop multiple myeloma, a cancer of the white blood cells that is generally considered incurable. Chemo was prescribed, and after 3 months of treatment, Aajonus refused to continue. He prepared himself for death.
Fortunately for Aajonus, his luck was about to take a turn for the better: As he lay about the house, waiting for the reaper to come calling, a hospice volunteer slipped him a book written by a woman who’d cured herself of cancer by drinking raw carrot juice. Aajonus considered his options and decided that carrot juice wasn’t so bad. So he started drinking raw carrot juice, and within 10 days, his dyslexia had gone away. For his entire life, dyslexia had kept him from reading; now he began to devour books, mostly about diets and nutrition. Equally noteworthy was the fact that for the time being, at least, he didn’t die.
Aajonus noticed that if he skipped a few days of carrot juice, his dyslexia returned. So he stopped skipping days and began experimenting with other radical diet-related treatments. The macrobiotic diet seemed to put the kibosh on his cancer but inflamed his diabetes and psoriasis. (I don’t think I mentioned the psoriasis before; he had that, too.)
He kept tweaking his diet, convinced that if he got it right, he could reverse the conditions that had plagued him for the entirety of his young life. By the time he was 25, he was eating an entirely vegan raw foods diet. He felt better than he ever had, but he was often extremely hungry and would compensate for this by overeating until he vomited. Still, he had enough energy to climb on his bicycle and traverse North America, pedaling from coast to coast and from Alaska to Central America. He traveled light, sleeping on the ground or, when it rained, in trees (in trees?). He took much of his nourishment from the wild, foraging for berries and other edible plants. He was often in a state of euphoria, which he now attributes to mania caused by excessive consumption of fruit and its associated fructose.
Then his cancer returned. Again, Aajonus prepared to die; he simply didn’t have any fight left in him. So he located a Native American burial ground, established a camp, and began to fast, expecting to starve himself to death. After a few weeks, he was scrawny but still alive and growing impatient with the whole process; at this rate, he’d be alive for another month. So when a coyote came into his camp with a dead rabbit and dropped it on his feet, Aajonus ate it. Not because he wanted food, but because he believed that wild rabbits harbor bacteria and viruses that would finally put an end to it all (he was probably thinking of the bacterium Francisella tularensis, which can indeed transmit from rabbits to humans but is not typically fatal). Aajonus settled in, secure in the knowledge that soon he would succumb to the effects of eating this raw, wild rodent. He closed his eyes and drifted into what he believed would be his final, forever sleep.
Imagine his surprise when he awoke the next morning feeling more refreshed than he had in years. He felt so good, in fact, that he no longer expected or even wanted to die. And damned if he wasn’t pretty freakin’ hungry. So he began hunting, eating whatever he could catch (rattlesnakes and songbirds featured prominently on his menu). Aajonus began roaming again, working on farms for foods like milk, cream, eggs, and meat. He still wasn’t eating everything raw, but it was enough that soon he felt stronger than ever.
Aajonus returned to Los Angeles to spread the word about the dual miracle of raw foods and his improbable recovery. For the most part, people thought he was crazy (remember, we’re talking about LA, so that’s really saying something), but he pressed on and began experimenting with adding more raw meat to his diet. Still, he had lingering fears over foodborne illness and parasites, and so he limited his intake to just a couple servings of fish or chicken each week. Each time he ate raw meat, he felt as if he were rolling the dice and that, eventually, he’d be stricken.
It didn’t happen. Instead, he felt stronger and stronger. He began running and doing pushups. He got a job working as the nutritionist at a health food store. People began commenting on his radiant appearance, and Aajonus excitedly explained that if only they would eat raw meat, too, they could look as good as he did. Most folks just nodded, but a few gave it a shot. Those who stuck with it told Aajonus stories of vastly improved health.
Yet Aajonus still couldn’t shake the fear that raw meat would eventually make him sick. Much of his nervousness was due to the fact that during one of his surgeries, his vagus nerve had been severed; one of the functions of the vagus nerve is to regulate the stomach acid that kills potentially dangerous bacteria and parasites. The loss of his vagus also meant the loss of the acid, which put Aajonus in a particularly dangerous place in relation to foodborne illness. He continued eating meat anyway.
Then, when he was 35, Aajonus misidentified a wild mushroom and ended up ingesting an Amanita phalloides, aka “death cap.” No one in written history had eaten even 1/15 the amount he had and lived. Aajonus survived his little fungal snack, but not without some ramifications. His cancer returned with a vengeance, and his liver was nearly wiped out. His diabetes came back. He lost weight and suffered whole-body cramps. But he continued eating raw foods (although not mushrooms, presumably) and began to recover.
After 18 months of slow, incremental improvements in his health, Aajonus became frustrated, and eventually his frustration began to outweigh his fear of getting sick from eating raw meat. By this time, the guy was supposed to have died at least a half-dozen times, so perhaps it’s no wonder he threw caution to the wind and began consuming raw animal flesh daily. Immediately, his diabetes vanished and his healing accelerated.
Over the years, Aajonus’s nutritional counseling practice has grown, as has his success rate in healing his clients of chronic and often deadly disease. Through diet alone, Aajonus claims to have helped 232 out of 242 people put their cancers into remission; he claims this achievement was confirmed by a neuroscientist named Elnora Van Winkle. I did attempt to validate this claim, and while it is certainly true there was once a neuroscientist named Elnora Van Winkle, she died in 2001, making it difficult to reach her. Aajonus also credits his diet with turning him into something of a sexual master, able to enjoy as much as 6 hours of sex daily, with multiple orgasms. I absolutely did not attempt to validate this claim.
The story of how Aajonus Vonderplanitz came to be our nation’s foremost proponent of eating raw meat is . . . how to put this . . . well, the word incredulous comes to mind. This is not to say it is untrue, only that if true, it represents perhaps the most unusual human health history I’ve ever encountered. Frankly, I did not expend much effort trying to verify or disprove Aajonus’s story; my interest in him has more to do with the issue of food rights than his personal story. But at some point, I realized that, equally, I didn’t want it to be untrue. It’s such an outlandish story, so full of bad luck and bizarre medical redemption, that I wanted to believe in it, much in the same way I once wanted to believe in Santa Claus (you can imagine my dismay when, on my 30th birthday, my wife finally revealed that ole Saint Nick wasn’t real). To fear the same fate for Aajonus’s story reveals a fatal bias in my reporting, which I am attempting to mitigate somewhat by acknowledging it.
So, barring evidence to the contrary, I have chosen to take Aajonus at his word and have presented his story as if it were the gospel truth. Admittedly, his medical history and his path to raw foods have no bearing on the issue of food rights. And admittedly, his story is so outlandish that repeating it here might only discredit me and thus cast a pall over the rest of this book. I hope that is not the case, and that is why I present it in the spirit of entertainment only. If it’s true . . . well, all I can say is Wow. Just Wow.
Which might explain why Aajonus has such a following and why he has attracted enough attention to gain a place on national network television espousing the benefits of raw meat. He appeared on Ripley’s Believe It or Not! in 2002 (the episode was charmingly called “Rotten Meat Eater”); more recently, in a segment from the CBS show The Doctors, Aajonus can be seen eating raw chicken off the bone and noshing on uncooked hamburger. On the show, he also claims to have suffered 300 heart attacks by the age of 22, an assertion I had not previously turned up. He is short, but at 63 appears well built and exceptionally healthy. The best moment in the show is when Aajonus interrupts the doctor interviewing him to say, “I’m getting hungry,” and then he proceeds to crack a raw egg against his teeth (nice touch, that one) before sucking it out of the shell. As the host delivers a “don’t try this at home”–style disclaimer, the sounds of Aajonus’s slurping can be heard in the background as he extracts the slimy remnants. Frankly, I can think of better ways to get people interested in eating raw eggs, but as a piece of theater, it works pretty darn well.
Back to James Stewart. By 2000, Stewart was illegally distributing raw milk to about 30 stores in LA County. That’s an awful lot of raw milk to escape the attention of the county’s health department. Indeed, by late in the year, the department’s attention had been captured, and they pulled the milk from most of Stewart’s outlets. So Stewart did the natural thing (well, “natural” if you’re the sort of fellow willing to break the law in order to distribute raw milk): He began selling it out of a leased garage. “All of sudden, I had 20 or 30 people lining up every Wednesday and Saturday [he was open only on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons] waiting for the garage doors to open.” Stewart called his business the Raw Garage and, for a period of about a year, operated without interference from the authorities.
In the meantime, Stewart, along with Vonderplanitz, with whom he’d become friends, successfully petitioned the county to change the laws pertaining to raw milk. With the product now fully legal to sell at the retail level, Stewart began importing milk from Mark McAfee’s Organic Pastures dairy (he claims to have been the one who convinced McAfee to shift from selling organic milk intended for pasteurization to being a completely raw dairy) and distributing it to 89 stores in the county.
The Raw Garage was eventually shuttered by the authorities for lack of permits and other workspace violations. For a time, Stewart became a mobile raw milk crusader, selling out of a pair of refrigerated trucks in and around Venice. “I was the person who created the raw milk revolution in California,” he told me. “Literally like a phoenix rising from the ashes.” If there’s anything I’ve learned about raw foodists, it’s that they’re fond of grandiose analogies. Stewart is no exception.
In 2005, Stewart and Vonderplanitz created an entity called Rawsome Foods, which would operate under the umbrella of Aajonus’s organization, Right to Choose Healthy Food, founded in 1998. According to Stewart and Vonderplanitz, the structure of the organization allows it to operate without compliance with the plethora of licensing and labeling laws that normally preclude the sale and distribution of many raw food products. What RCHF does is craft lease agreements between its members and farmers, providing the former with the rights to the land and products of about 40 small farms across the United States. Basically, RCHF sidesteps the mandates attached to the act of selling food to the general citizenry by creating the legal framework whereby the consumers are no longer members of an unwitting public but instead act as owners of the products the farms produce. Therefore, claim Stewart and Vonderplanitz, as a members-only buying outlet, Rawsome does not fall under the purview of the FDA, the USDA, or anyone else who’d prefer it didn’t exist. Instead, it is merely part of the lease agreement between members and farmers and is protected by over 80 years of precedent that equates leasing to ownership.
When Rawsome was founded, Stewart and Vonderplanitz crafted a letter outlining their intentions and beliefs and sent it to the LA County health department. “We were shocked that we didn’t get a response,” Stewart told me. “At least, we didn’t until June 30, 2010.” That’s when agents from the FDA and FBI raided the building with guns drawn and, according to Stewart, hauled away thousands of dollars’ worth of food, which was never returned.
There has been no mention of any illness related to Rawsome’s products. Club members are required to sign a waiver acknowledging, in part, that 1) the food available there is not subjected to artificial temperatures above 99°F, dairy not below 42°F, and meats not below 38°F; 2) the food may contain microbes, including but not limited to salmonella, E. coli, campylobacter, listeria, gangrene, and parasites; 3) the eggs are unwashed and may have bacteria and poultry feces on them. There is also a paragraph in the waiver that reads: “I fully understand that these features represent a different paradigm for food preparation, storage, and safety than those that are currently enforced by all local, state, and federal government agencies. As a member of this Club, I fully trust its administrative members to ensure that the preparation, handling, and packaging of the food obtained through this Club meet the standards I set forth above. I affirm that no government regulations apply to our products and that regulatory agencies have no jurisdiction over any of our products I obtain through this Club.” In other words, the members of Rawsome accept the risk associated with consuming such foods and believe it is their right to have access to these products. It is difficult for me to understand how this could justify an armed raid.
So far, the fallout from the raid has been minimal. Within hours, Rawsome was back in business, and Stewart had removed the red tag the agents had placed on the cooler to mark its illegality. “In fact, I’m holding it right now,” he said when I called him in his apartment. He sounded exceptionally smug. “It’s been on my desk for months.”
It’s hard to know what will come of it all; currently, the club is being pressured by the city’s department of building and safety for its lack of permitting, a violation that Stewart readily admits to. However, he’s convinced that the real squeeze is coming from the health department, which has realized the limits of its jurisdiction over the club’s activities and is therefore pressuring the folks in building and safety to crack down. “They’re trying to close us down, because they know the masses are waking up and taking their health in their own hands,” said Stewart. “Everybody should have the freedom to put whatever food they want into their body. You know what Hippocrates said: ‘Let food be your medicine, and medicine be your food.’ It’s time to get back to basics.”
I’m not going to tell you that I believe everything Aajonus Vonderplanitz and James Stewart say about nutrition, and I’m certainly not going to tell you that eating raw meat is the key to perfect health. There’s a roasting chicken in my refrigerator right now, and when I’m finished working for the day, I’m going to go downstairs to the kitchen, crank the oven up to 400°F, and cook that bird until its juices run clear (I love the way the skin crisps up and gets that nice, deep tawny color after it’s been in the oven for a couple of hours). So when Aajonus starts talking about eating raw chicken and pork and sucking raw eggs out of their shells, I’m not suggesting you do the same.
But there is one part of this story that I believe we should all take very seriously: the right to eat how we choose, and the right to procure and produce these foods without fear of being raided by pistol-wielding officers of the law. We live in a nation where it is perfectly legal to carry concealed weapons. We are allowed (and, through the medium of advertising, outright encouraged) to purchase products that are undisputedly hazardous to our health: cigarettes, hard alcohol, Big Macs, snack cakes. The cancer sticks alone are estimated to cause 440,000 deaths each year, which means that over the past decade, there have been 4.4 million deaths attributable to smoking. And exactly none attributable to milk intended to be sold unpasteurized. (The CDC attributes two deaths to raw milk over this period, but both were actually from unpasteurized queso fresco, a cheese that is consumed almost exclusively by Hispanic communities and produced almost exclusively from raw milk obtained from large-scale dairies where the milk is intended for pasteurization and therefore not held to a particularly high standard of cleanliness.)
To deny people the right to legally purchase the foods they believe are essential to their well-being, no matter how outrageous their beliefs might seem to most Americans, is an insult not only to us but also to the founders of our nation. Could they ever have imagined a day when citizens of the United States would not be able to legally purchase the food of their choosing? And yet, here we are, with armed crackdowns of raw food outlets and almost constant badgering of the farmers who produce unpasteurized milk and other raw dairy products. Fortunately for Aajonus and his followers, we are still allowed access to uncooked meat.
The regulators argue that consumers need to be protected from the failings or simple negligence of producers—in particular, producers supplying products that are pathogen friendly. And to a certain extent, this is true. But it is only true because our food system has become so consolidated and secretive that consumers are no longer afforded the opportunity to make informed choices regarding where they buy their food. Go ahead call any of the major multinational food conglomerates and tell them you’d like to see where your hamburgers are made or where your milk is bottled. The closest you’ll get is the parking lot or, if you’re really persistent, the lobby. The curtain that hangs between you and where your nourishment originates is thick and dark and doesn’t come with draw cords. It is amazing, really: There is no consumer product more essential to your well-being than food, and yet you have no right to understand or even see its origins.
Given this distancing, is it really surprising that we can no longer trust our food? Given what we know about corporate culture in 21st-century America, I’d argue that it would be more surprising if we did trust our food. And that is a very sad statement on what it means to live in the wealthiest, most “advanced” nation in the world.