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Aajonus Vonderplanitz (April 17, 1947 – August 28, 2013) was an American alternative nutritionist and food-rights activist who focused on raw foods, especially meat and dairy.[1][2] Especially controversial, he conducted legal battles and implemented legal workarounds for consumer access to raw milk,[3] and developed a diet based largely on raw meat, the Primal Diet.[4][5][6][7] Yet his later years, marked by his allegations of conspiracies and by his infighting within the food-rights community, drew him notoriety even among advocates of alternative healthcare and food rights.

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Aajonus Vonderplanitz
Born	John Richard Swigart (1947-04-17)April 17, 1947 Denver, Colorado, U.S.
Died	July 28, 2013(2013-07-28) (aged 66) Thailand
Nationality	American
Occupation	Alternative Nutritionist

He claimed hospital diagnosis of cancer soon ruled terminal, but experiencing remission via raw carrot juice and raw dairy by age 21^{[citation needed]}. Later, he began informal nutritional counseling. By age 25, he had adopted raw veganism. Yet at age 29, he added raw meat, which he claimed to vastly improve healing. After publication of his first book, We Want to Live, in 1997, he became a leading alternative nutritionist.[8] He made apparently miraculous claims of his clients' routinely curing their diverse diseases, but published no case documentations.[5][9] Untested by medical scientists,[5] his protocols remain controversial.[2]

Vonderplanitz founded the not-for-profit Right to Choose Healthy Foods (RTCHF).[lower-alpha 1] In 2001, his campaign ended Los Angeles County's ban on raw milk's retail sale.[10][11] As to laws banning sale of unpasteurized dairy elsewhere, he originated "animal leasing",[lower-alpha 2] whereby a dairy farm is leased to, thus effectively owned by, and renders all of its dairy to a private food club, which elects to omit pasteurization. Vonderplanitz's legal defenses of RTCHF's farmers and club managers were mostly successful.[12] By 2010, food clubs under RTCHF numbered about 80 across the United States, including a few with over 1000 members.[13]

In 2010, Vonderplanitz accused a non-RTCHF farmer of misrepresenting food source and quality when supplying certain foods to RTCHF's preeminent food club, Rawesome, which had been attracting celebrity membership, in Venice, Los Angeles.[14][15] Waging negative publicity and a lawsuit against the farmer and Rawesome's owner, Vonderplanitz fostered the club's debacle while the government prosecuted the farmer and Rawesome owner for distributing raw dairy.[16] Meanwhile, Vonderplanitz's growing claims of governmental or pharmaceutical plots against him seem implausible.[17] In 2013, at his farmhouse in rural Thailand, he fell through a faulty balcony rail, and, severely injured, died a few days later.

Biographical sketch

Preadulthood

Originally named John Richard Swigart,[18] and born in Denver, Colorado,[19] Vonderplanitz spent most of childhood and adolescence in the Cincinnati suburb Finneytown, Ohio.[20] He described having been a sickly child misunderstood and abused.[18][lower-alpha 1][21] His brother, a couple of years elder, allegedly resentful at loss of maternal attention, "tortured me nearly daily", Vonderplanitz explained.[lower-alpha 1] Being "dyslexic" and "borderline autistic", conditions "which no one understood at the time", Vonderplanitz "rarely played with other children", and "embarrassed and frustrated my parents", fueling paternal "discipline" that led to several hospitalizations, Vonderplanitz claimed.[21][lower-alpha 1]

In another hospitalization near his 10th birthday, Vonderplanitz's alleged peritonitis was misdiagnosed appendicitis,[lower-alpha 3] whereupon his appendix, discovered fine, was removed anyway, he recounted.[lower-alpha 1] He claimed that his bones were brittle, he "regularly" breaking limb bones, and at age 15 was diagnosed with "juvenile diabetes".[lower-alpha 1] Vonderplanitz first received family and community support, he recalled, once he found his first girlfriend in his junior year at Finneytown High School. At age 17, Vonderplanitz married her, a recent schoolmate one year elder, who bore his only child, a son, in his senior year.[22] Once he graduated, the new family moved elsewhere near Cincinnati.

While renting a small apartment at a business intersection, Vonderplanitz's wife worked as a utility-company secretary, and he as a short-order cook also attending the Cincinnati Institute of Computer Technology.[23][24] Their son's severe colic, her postpartum mood problems, and his own confusions and mood problems ended their prior bliss.[20] He increasingly drank with friends, and entered an extramarital affair with a female instructor at his trade school.[20] Divorced at 19, he moved to Los Angeles for work in computer programming.[20] Although he seemingly never remarried, his own and other persons' anecdotes about him involve several girlfriends throughout his later life.

Adulthood

On moving to Los Angeles, feeling directionless and distressed, Vonderplanitz continued heavy drinking.[20] Still aged 19, he developed a stomach ulcer, whose surgical treatment caused a keloidal scar in turn treated by radiation therapy that then caused multiple myeloma, Vonderplanitz recounted.[lower-alpha 1][20] Once chemotherapy caused further illnesses, including psoriasis, bursitis, and severe periodontitis, he discontinued treatment of his terminal cancer, but a hospice worker, paying him volunteer home visits, gave him a small book on cancer treatment by raw carrot juice, Vonderplanitz would claim.[lower-alpha 1][20] Within 10 days, the regimen ended his alleged dyslexia, and soon thereafter put his cancer in remission, Vonderplanitz would claim.[20][lower-alpha 1]

At age 22, Vonderplanitz began promoting himself as a nutritionist.[18] At about age 23, the still John Swigart met a girl toddler who renamed him Aajonus.[18] Disliking his given name, a reminder of illness and mistreatment,[20] he accepted the renaming, and later took his European ancestors' last name Vonderplanitz.[18] He would attribute his health gains over the next two years mostly to raw juices and raw dairy.[lower-alpha 1][18] By age 25, eliminating raw dairy, Vonderplanitz adopted raw veganism.[lower-alpha 1] At age 27, seeking health answers, he reputedly sojourned by bicycle, while he "lived off the earth", across North America and into Latin America.[lower-alpha 1] Nearly three years later, he returned to Los Angeles telling of a seemingly implausible health answer: eating raw meat.[5][lower-alpha 1][20]

Vonderplanitz would claim a diverse résumé, partly since by age 40, he still had marginal income as a nutritionist.[25] He recalled ethically refusing $7.5 million to be made, in 1971, the Winston Man for seven years,[lower-alpha 4] and, in the 1980s, while earning income painting murals and such inside homes, some acting on the soap opera General Hospital.[25] He claimed to have created a brief diet, damaging within a few days to weeks, for a client demanding quick weight loss, but who allegedly published it for profit as the Beverly Hills Diet.[lower-alpha 4] Upon overturning a traffic ticket at age 22, he sought to develop legal expertise by private study.[18] After 2000, he wrote business contracts and legal responses for farmers.[26] In his latest years, owning a farm in the Philippines and another in a remote area of Thailand, near its northern border with Laos, he spent much time at his Thailand farm.[27]

Nutritional career

Vonderplanitz claimed tutelage by a Southern California nutritionist named Bruno Corigliano followed by nearly three years of bicycle travel across North America and into Latin America in his late 20s, while studying biology and medical textbooks, Native American indigenous healthcare, and wildlife habits.[20][28] He claimed to have discovered raw meat's putative healing capacity when fasting in the wilderness, where a pack of coyotes killed, tore open, and offered him a jackrabbit, then watched him until he ate it.[5][20]

In his early 20s, among the outdoor purveyors at Venice Beach, he set up a table with the banner NUTRITIONIST, and began counseling in a raw-food niche.[18] In hindsight, he claimed that his advice had been often ineffective, and sometimes even harmful, until he included raw meat.[lower-alpha 1][20] At perhaps age 30, he became a staff nutritionist, advising customers, at a healthfood store, Aunt Tilly's Too.[lower-alpha 1][20] Although not in his 1997 book, he used the title PhD, specifying nutritional science, in a 2001 research report on milk, cowritten with William Campbell Douglass II MD, and thereafter. In 2009, he was reported to lack accredited scientific or medical training.[5]

In September 1986, at age 39, living in a Beverly Hills "slum" while freelancing in nutrition, Vonderplanitz returned to Cincinnati, Ohio.[29] There, his only child, his son, estranged for about 20 years, had recently been in a severe car wreck, driving, without a seatbelt on, straight into a tree.[29] Vonderplanitz claimed to have sabotaged his son's conventional medical treatment, in Mercy Hospital's intensive-care unit, and used raw foods to awaken and retrieve his comatose son from imminent death, and to reverse his paralysis and brain damage.[5][20] Ten years after his son's recovery, Vonderplanitz recounted the tale in his first book, We Want to Live, first published in 1997 and revised in 2005.

Upon the 1997 release of Vonderplanitz's first book, Robert Atkins interviewed him, based by then in Malibu, on Atkins's nationally syndicated radio show. Vonderplanitz had claimed that his own protocol had cured over 200 clients of cancer.[9] In 2000, Vonderplanitz trademarked the name Primal Diet.[30] Unlike later diets called "primal",[lower-alpha 5] Vonderplanitz's Primal Diet principally includes raw meat, raw eggs, raw dairy, raw fats, and unheated honey.[31] In 2002, his other book, the Recipe for Living Without Disease, was published. Nearing 2010, he was still claiming over 90% rate of cancer remission among his clients closely heeding it.[5] Despite mainstream dismissal,[2] his Primal Diet gained a sizable, if underground, following.[4][5][7]

Food activism

Although Vonderplanitz dated it to the 1970s,[3][32] his food-rights campaign more clearly began nearing 2000.[lower-alpha 1] Into 2011, Vonderplanitz and an ally, James Stewart, were the raw-milk movement's de facto leaders.[33]

California

In 1997 or 1998, Venice resident James Stewart, in poor health, discovered Vonderplanitz's Primal Diet.[6][34] By 2000, Stewart was a southern California distributor of raw milk for Claravale Farm, which had only eight cows, but was the state's only farm still licensed to supply unpasteurized milk to retail stores.[35] While Claravale Farm added cows for Stewart's distribution reaching 30 stores in four counties—Orange, Ventura, San Diego, and Los Angeles—one county, Los Angeles, was the state's only where raw milk's retail sale was illegal.[35] By 2001, L. A. county's regulators were pulling Stewart's placed milk from stores, yet Vonderplanitz's campaign to legalize raw milk's retail sale was culminating.[6][36]

In 2001, Vonderplanitz drew Stewart to help demonstrations and protests, although initial turnout was minuscule.[35] Later in 2001, cowritten with William Campbell Douglass II, and submitted to the county's board of supervisors, Vonderplanitz's report on raw milk,[37] and accompanying threat of legal action, got the county's board of supervisors to end the ban on raw milk's retail sale.[10][11] Highly publicized, the hearings fueled consumer demand for unpasteurized dairy.[11] Claravale Farm's supply via Stewart insufficient,[11] southern California residents would travel north to buy raw milk at the McAfee brothers' farm, Organic Pastures Dairy Company.[38] In early 2000, the McAfees' farm had switched to organic, but their Organic Pastures still sold its milk wholesale to Organic Valley, which in turn supplied only pasteurized milk to stores.[38]

Upon visits by southern Californian customers, the McAfees' Organic Pastures obtained a permit to sell raw dairy retail.[38] During 2001, Mark McAfee contacted Stewart, who then recruited Vonderplanitz.[11] Vonderplanitz invested $15 000, and with Stewart recruited others, including real-estate executive Larry Otting, who invested $17 000, and Organic Pastures began supplying unpasteurized dairy retail.[11] The volume allowed Stewart, despite dropping Claravale's milk, to reach 89 stores.[11] Yet in 2004, as the nation's largest unpasteurized supplier, Organic Pastures brought distribution in-house, eliminating Stewart.[39] Stewart then focused on growing his private food club, Rawesome.[39] Rawesome would keep Stewart and Vonderplanitz at the center of the raw-dairy movement until Rawesome's controversial closure via government raid in 2011.[33]

Nationwide

In the late 1990s, Vonderplanitz formed the not-for-profit organization Right to Choose Healthy Food (RTCHF).[lower-alpha 1][40] RTCHF, declared Vonderplanitz, "will combat any legislation banning people's right to choose raw food".[lower-alpha 1] Yet RTCHF apparently focused on raw dairy. In this agenda, Vonderplanitz originated the "animal-leasing" model, whereby a private food club, whose members are also RTCHF members, contracts a farmer to produce solely for that food club.[41] As president of RTCHF, Vonderplanitz mediated these animal-leasing arrangements in multiple states.[3][40][42] Vonderplanitz meanwhile criticized the "herdshare" or "cowshare" model, whereby a consumer buys "shares", thus "partially owns" the cattle, and then buys dairy directly from the farmer, who may still sell to nonshareholders, too.[41]

Partly by writing legal documents for farmers and consumers despite not being an attorney, Vonderplanitz discomfited the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund (FTCLDF).[41] Operated by attorneys, the FTCLDF also endorsed the herdshare model, which Vonderplanitz claimed to lack precedent, as shareholding can entitle one to profits without any ownership of property, whereas leasing held long precedent of full responsibility matching ownership, argued Vonderplanitz.[41] Vonderplanitz's being not a lawyer appealed to Amish farmers, however, who traditionally avoided taking legal actions. By 2010, Vonderplanitz's legal responses were well known for ending regulators' legal threats against RTCHF's farmers.[43] Once so threatened, some non-RTCHF farmers newly signed RTCHF contracts.[44][45] By 2010, RTCHF's food clubs numbered about 80, each commonly having about 100 to 200 members, and a few having over a 1000 members.[13]

Nearing 2010, federal government began pressuring state governments to enforce laws against raw milk. A dragnet against farmers and club managers connected to Vonderplanitz unfolded.[46] Vonderplanitz's attempts to defend them drew mixed results.[26] In April 2011, the FDA filed in federal court against Amish farmer Daniel Allgyer of Pennsylvania.[47] Unable to reach Vonderplanitz, who was traveling abroad as nutritionist, Allgyer dropped Vonderplanitz's RTCHF the next month and hired Karl Dahlstrom's ProAdvocate Group.[48] Against Allyger's resistance, Vonderplanitz filed a motion to intercede, but the judge denied it, excluding Vondeplanitz from the case, and added that Vonderplanitz's arguments about health and rights were irrelevant to whether Allgyer were guilty of interstate commerce of unpasteurized dairy. In February 2012, ruling against Allgyer, the judge called it "a cow share" that was "merely a subterfuge".[49] Yet in the Wisconsin state trial of farmer Vernon Hershberger, Vonderplanitz participated and claimed victory in May 2013.[50]

Rawesome food club

The preeminent food club linked to Vonderplanitz's Right to Choose Healthy Food was the Rawesome food club, known for exotic raw foods, and thriving, drawing celebrity clientele, in Venice, Los Angeles.[14] In 2001, James Stewart had founded a private food club, "The Garage".[39] By 2003, it evolved into Rawesome, which Vonderplanitz wrote the contract for, invested in, and steered clients to.[14][39] In 2005, regulators tried to restrict Rawesome, but Vonderplanitz wrote the response and persuaded Stewart to resist.[51] The government dropped the citation, Rawesome continued normal operation, and, over the next few years, this success drew Vonderplanitz renown for fending off regulators' legal threats.[52] Yet in October 2010, Vonderplanitz would turn against Stewart, a conflict that divided the food club.[15]

Having long thought his body responding poorly to some of her products, Vonderplanitz suspected Healthy Family Farms' owner Sharon Palmer, one of Rawesome's main suppliers, of secretly outsourcing, supplying meat not organic and not soy-free, and providing contaminated eggs.[14][15] Stewart stood by Palmer and kept carrying her products.[47] Vonderplanitz and Palmer's main creditor, Rawesome member Larry Otting, then published a defamatory website, Unhealthy Family Farms.[16][53] In June 2010, an unnamed Palmer employee explained to a Ventura County Sheriff's detective and a Los Angeles County District Attorney's agent that Healthy Family Farms lacked the means to produce all of the food it was supplying.[54] Later that month, on June 30, but via investigation since 2008, regulators raided Rawesome.

Two days after that June 2010 raid on Rawesome, Vonderplanitz sent from Asia a group email alleging that "government agents trespassed and kidnapped volunteers and members for the entire time that they seized the property, about five hours", and that "they stole, under the term confiscate, thousands of dollars worth of members' FOOD that was private property".[55] Referring to Vonderplanitz's "online notices", a Los Angeles County District Attorney agent, arguing to protect the investigation and to conceal identifies of undercover agents, whose "lives and safety would be put into jeopardy", got a Los Angeles Superior Court judge to seal the investigation's documents.[56] The Los Angeles District Attorney's office also began surveillance of the email accounts of Vonderplanitz, of Palmer, and of Palmer's farm employee Victoria Bloch.[57]

Although Rawesome continued normal operation, and even drew support in mainstream media,[lower-alpha 6] the raid intensified the Stewart–Vonderplanitz conflict, dividing Rawesome's membership and poisoning Rawesome's atmosphere,[16][58] where a cloud of vague conspiracy theories reaching global proportions seemed to hover.[58] In late 2010, but to no avail, Vonderplanitz visited Ventura County District Attorney investigators to seek Palmer's prosecution for allegedly defrauding Rawesome.[53] In January 2011, Vonderplanitz and Otting sued Stewart and Palmer for some $20 million.[16][59] In August 2011, authorities again raided Rawesome, but this time closed it, arrested Stewart, and, elsewhere, arrested Palmer for criminal conspiracy in illegally producing and selling unpasteurized dairy.[60] Also arrested was Palmer's farm employee Victoria Bloch, charged similarly.

Although claiming credit for building Rawesome's success, Vonderplanitz found himself marginalized by Rawesome's supporters demonstrating publicly.[61] Further, outside the courthouse at such a demonstration, Vonderplanitz, trying to answer interested news media, concluded himself blacklisted from newsgathering.[61] In 2012, Stewart and Palmer were arrested on criminal charges as to the funding of Palmer's farm, whereby they allegedly misled investors about their own credit worthiness, and could each face 40 years imprisonment.[62] After four months of jail, Stewart took a plea deal, paid a fine, gave up Rawesome's cause, and began distributing olive oil. By July 2013, the civil suit's judge had reduced the 30 civil charges to two, Palmer had countersued Vonderplanitz and Otting, and the judge ordered the parties to negotiate a settlement.[16] By then, Vonderplanitz's seemingly irrational vendetta was infamous, partially blamed for Rawesome's downfall.[16][32]

Final years

Despite his role in Rawesome and the other animal-leasing arrangements that he continued after Rawesome's debacle, Vonderplanitz would never be prosecuted.[63] Still, by 2010, he believed himself the target of governmental or pharmaceutical conspiracy to neutralize him.[17]

In 2009, he had described the ongoing flu pandemic as a hoax mediated by flu vaccination.[64] Soon, he alleged apparent retribution by invaders of his hotel room in Thailand forcibly giving him injections that sent his "mercury, barium, and chromium readings off the charts", impairing his health, causing weight loss, and prematurely aging him.[17] Later, he claimed that on a Thailand road, his car's brakes suddenly failed, causing a potentially fatal car wreck that he likewise attributed to a plot against his life.

In August 2013, at his farm in Thailand, Vonderplanitz apparently leaned against his house's second-story balcony rail, which proved faulty, allowing his fall that broke his spine and paralyzed him.[12][27] At the hospital, he accepted pain-killing drugs, yet refused surgery to repair internal bleeding.[27] After a few days, he lost consciousness and died.[12][27] Despite rumors of conspiracy, two of Vonderplanitz's colleagues described local circumstances suggesting a genuine accident.[27] Vonderplanitz had authored two books: a memoir retracing his path to and introducing the Primal Diet, We Want To Live (1997/2005), and a follow-up recipe book citing putative scientific evidence, The Recipe for Living Without Disease (2002).[5]

Notes

References

Bibliography

• Gumpert, David E (2013). Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Food Rights: The Escalating Battle Over Who Decides What We Eat. White River Junction VT: Chelsea Green Publishing. ISBN 9781603584050.
• Vonderplanitz, Aajonus (2005) [Originally published 1997]. We Want to Live: The Primal Diet (2nd ed.). Los Angeles: Carnelian Bay Castle Press. ISBN 9781889356105.

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