Q: How did you become a rawfoodist?
A: I just figured it out. If you put one hand in boiling water, and you put your other hand in the deep freeze and leave it there overnight, neither one of those hands will be any good: it must do the same thing to food. Freezing and cooking food destroys the nutrients in it. When you get to the point where you stop eating for taste and start eating for nutrition, you’ll start to feel a lot better.
Q: Did Gandhi influence you in your decision to become a vegetarian?
A: No, when I became vegetarian, I didn’t know that Gandhi was a vegetarian. Ninety-nine percent of people know that Gandhi fasted, but they don’t know he was a vegetarian. I knew that he prayed and he fasted, but I didn’t know he was a vegetarian until I got into it. When I got through checking out Gandhi, I realized that Gandhi never fasted over 13 days in his life. Gandhi influenced me through Dr. Martin Luther King, and the idea of peaceful resistance.
Q: Do you use fasting as a political tool?
A: I think it’s a violation to use it for that purpose. I use it for spiritual cleansing and to help me attain the higher consciousness. When you use fasting for political ends, you violate the universal order. But occasionally I use it for that because fasting is one of the greatest weapons in the arsenal of non-violent resistance. I use it to make a point: in America, we lose more people from over-eating than from under-eating. So anytime you go on a fast, even people who resent what you’re doing — when they sit down to eat, they have to think about you.