Just to put things into perspective, after graduating from Wequahick High School and before going to Seton Hall University, I worked at a butcher shop. I was a deliveryman and occasionally had to go to the butcher shop to pick up produce for the store. Needless to say, I was neither alarmed nor aware because despite the horrors I witnessed almost daily, it never changed.
After graduating from Seton Hall with an accounting degree, I finally got married and moved to a town called Livingston. Livingston was originally a yuppie community where everyone was judged by their neighborhood and income. To say that it was a “plastic” society is an understatement.
Finally Livingston and the lowdown caught up with me. I told my wife I was fed up and wanted to move. He made it clear that he needed to be near his friends and New York. I finally packed up and moved to Colorado.
In late 1974 I was living with a lady in Aspen when one day she said “let’s go vegetarian”. I don’t know what made me say this, but I said, “Okay”! At that time, I went to the freezer and took out about $100 worth of frozen body parts and gave them to the kind mother who lived behind us. Well, everything was fine for a week and then the chick broke up with another guy.
So I’ve been a vegetarian for a couple of weeks, not really knowing what to do, how to cook, or really how to prepare anything. For about a month I was eating carrot sticks, celery sticks and yogurt. Fortunately, when I became a vegetarian in 1990, it was a simple and natural progression. Anyway, while I was walking around Aspen, I came across a vegetarian restaurant called The Little Kitchen.
Let me back up a bit. It was April 1975, the snow was melting, and the Ajax Mountain Stream was filling the streets with knee-deep mud. Now, Aspen was great for skiing, but it was very difficult to get going when the snow melted.
I was ready to call it quits and I needed somewhere warmer. I will elaborate on this in a minute.
But right now we will return to “Little Kitchen”. Knowing that I was leaving Aspen and going mostly vegetarian, I needed help. So I went into a restaurant and told them how I was doing and asked them if they would teach me how to cook. In return, I said I would wash the dishes and take out the trash. Then they asked me what I do and I said that I am an accountant.
The owner told me: “Let’s make a deal. You file our tax return and we’ll feed you too.” So for the next two weeks, I did their tax returns, washed the dishes, took out the trash, and learned as much as I could.
But, as I said, the mud was on my head. So I picked up a travel book written by a guy named Foder. The name of the book was “Hawaii”. I looked through the book and found that there is a small vegetarian restaurant in Lahaina, Maui called Mr. Natural’s. I decided right then and there to go to Lahaina and work for Mr. Natural. To cut a long story short, that’s exactly what happened.
So I’m working at Mr. Natural’s and learning all about my new diet lifestyle – it’s been great. Every afternoon we would close for lunch around 1pm and go to the Sheraton Hotel in Kaanapali and play volleyball while someone stayed to prepare dinner.
Since I was the new guy and didn’t really know how to cook, I never thought I’d be asked to stay behind to cook dinner. Well, that’s exactly what happened one afternoon; it was my turn. This posed a challenge for me because I was at the point where I finally knew how to boil water.
I was desperate, clueless and literally walking up the stream without a paddle. Fortunately, a friend of mine was sitting in the restaurant, and I asked him if he knows how to cook. He said the only thing he knows is how to cook enchiladas. He said his enchiladas are low in soy and dairy. I told him I didn’t know what an enchilada was or what he was talking about, but I needed him to show me because it was my turn for dinner.
Well, the guys are back from volleyball and they’re asking me what was for dinner. I called them enchiladas; the owner was not excited. I told him I’m low on soy and low on dairy. When he tried the enchilada, he said it was incredible. Being the humble guy that I am, I smiled and said, “Would you expect anything less?” It was probably so good that it was only on the menu that we served it twice a week. In fact, after about a week, we were selling five dozen every night we had them on the menu, and people were going around Lahaina broadcasting, “enchilada tonight at Naturals.” I never had to cook anything else.
A year later the restaurant closed and I went to a health food store in Wailuku. I never told anyone that I was an accountant and I actually pretended to be a truck driver. The guys who ran the health food store had friends in similar businesses and farms on many islands. I told them that if they could form and set up a company, they could be closed in the state. That’s when they found out I was an accountant and Down to Earth was born. Down to Earth became the largest chain of natural food stores in the islands and I was their CFO and co-manager of their largest store for 13 years.
In 1981, I started a weekly radio program to expose people to a vegetarian diet and to get them away from killing innocent creatures. I still do that show today. I pay for my own airtime and have no sponsors to undermine my integrity. A bit of a challenge was that I had to get a master’s degree in nutrition to turn off all the PhDs applying for my education.
Doing this radio show has allowed me to see through endless research the corruption that exists in the big food industries, big pharmaceutical companies, the biotech industry, and government agencies. This information, however, allowed me to see how broken our health care system is. This is explained in more depth in the introduction and throughout the book, and when you finish the book you will see it clearly and hopefully it will inspire you to make a change.
I landed in 1989, got certified as a sports injury massage therapist and traveled the world with a bunch of guys making martial arts movies. After doing that for about four years, I finally returned to Honolulu and got a job as a massage therapist at the Honolulu Club, one of Hawaii’s leading fitness clubs. It was there that I met the love of my life, who I have been with since 1998. He made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. He said, “If you want to be with me, you have to stop working with naked women.” So I went back into accounting and for many years was the financial manager of a large construction company.
Back in my Newark days, when I was a kid, I didn’t know what a “chicken” or an “egg” or a “fish” or a “pig” or a “cow” was. My food plan was imposed on me by my parents because they were imposed on them by their parents. It was by God’s grace that I was able to put things in perspective and improve my health and raise my consciousness.
The path I started in 1975 eventually led me to write my book, A Healthy Diet for a Crazy World. We hope that the information provided here will be enlightening, motivating and inspiring to encourage you to make different choices. Doing what we do from conditioning is not always the best way to follow. I hope that thanks to the many friends and personalities that I have met along the way, you will have a better perspective on what path is best for you, not only for your health, but also for your mind.
Last but not least: after being vaccinated as a child, I developed asthma that has plagued me for the rest of my life. In 2007, I was exposed to organosulfur crystals, which relieved my asthma in 3 days and has not returned for over 10 years. This is the tip of the iceberg and has helped people reverse stage 4 cancer, autism, joint pain, blood pressure problems, migraine headaches, erectile dysfunction, gingivitis and more. Also, due to its detoxifying effect by releasing oxygen that travels and heals all the cells of the body, it removes parasites, radiation, fluorides, free radicals and everything else that Big Business burdens us with in the environment.
For more information, please visit www.healthtalkhawaii.com and www.asanediet.com.
Namaste!
