When I first met Jinjee in 1993 I was still mourning the loss of my four year old son. Or to put it another way I was really blaming everyone and everything. When he died from swallowing a marble I was out working with other people’s kids.

I had a non-profit wilderness adventure school that was very well funded. It was set up to work with wealthy problem teens. After that horrible tragedy I no longer believed in anyone or anything. If you are out in the world doing good work then you shouldn’t come home and find your son dead.

Through the birth of our five kids Jinjee slowly dragged me back from the land of the shadows. When we first met, Jinjee’s health was not too great – she had a lump in her breast, she was 45 pounds overweight, she had recurring pains in her heart, and she had systemic candida.

When I first met her I had already been a raw vegan for twenty three years and even though I was 17 years older than her I was in great condition. We had met in college where I was on two athletic teams – I had a seat in the eight man boat on crew, and I was also the captain of the fencing team.

So when Jinjee compared out health with our ages this more than anything else convinced her to go raw. After being a raw vegan for about two months all of her health conditions reversed themselves. She was so excited, right away she wanted to build a website and share this information about the raw vegan diet with the world. I tried as hard as I could to convince her that this was not really a very good idea.

I knew about the amazing health transformation properties of the raw vegan diet if you could convince someone to really stick with the program. Most of the time you can’t. 1998 was still the dark ages as far as the raw vegan diet was concerned. At that time we had two kids – Raven and Jome and I was deathly afraid that they were going to come and take our children away if we were to go public with the fact that we were feeding our children an exclusively raw vegan diet.

We had just released our first music CD and it was starting to sell pretty well online. We had endless arguments about what direction to go in and whether she should build the raw vegan website. I was still harboring great feelings of guilt from the death of my son. I knew from bitter experience that you could be out trying to save the world and lose your own family.

I believed then and I still believe now that you aren’t going to get rich by promoting paradigms that totally fly in the face of not one but six multi-billion dollar industries. Your only chance at survival is not becoming too successful at what you are doing. But once you do become successful they are just going to reach out and squash you. I have been a committed activist since the mid sixties and I know how the system works or rather how it doesn’t work.

So what Jinjee was proposing scared me to death. But the one thing no man really wants is for his woman to look at him like he is a coward. And the more I resisted doing the raw food website the more she looked at me like I was a spineless urchin bottom feeder. So finally I gave in. Word of this new raw family website spread like wildfire in the raw food niche online and we became an overnight success.

Here is where it gets a little tricky. If you mean by success a large number of people coming to the site and being convinced to try the raw vegan diet and experiencing great results then it has been successful beyond my wildest dreams. If you mean by success making lots of money then no the site still as it has since it started just kind of breaks even.

The raw vegan sites that are making hundreds of thousands of dollars or even millions of dollars all have one thing in common. They sell supplements, super foods, dehydrated foods, raw cacao, coconut oil, maca powder, green powders, etc… And what all of these foods have in common is that they have an almost indefinite shelf life, they are light and easy to ship, they are addictive, and they are expensive.

We advocate eating fresh fruits and veggies, nuts and seeds. We tried shipping forty pounds of oranges to the east coast. The oranges cost us eight dollars and cost sixty dollars to ship. By the time they gt to New York the box had burst open and a lot of the oranges were crushed; it was a mess.

And since we don’t use any supplements, superfoods, or any of the money making items that would cause our website to be really profitable we realized that we were never going to make money like a lot of the bigger sites, even though I have been doing the raw vegan diet since before a lot of  these new teachers were even born and have a solid program than has helped hundreds of people.

The Garden Diet site has been online for about 13 years. We have developed a series of raw vegan menu plan programs that have helped countless people go raw with amazing results. They have not come to take our children away yet even though they did come out to the house once and went all through our cupboards and asked us a hundred questions.

The one thing that stands out in my mind more than anything else is the effect that the simple way we do the raw vegan diet has had on other people’s health. Please click on this link and check out some of the major conditions that have been reversed by a simple diet change.

http://thegardendiet.com/testimonials-gorawprograms.html

I have always done really well on the raw vegan diet, so for me there was no question, but now thanks to the internet I can see that hundreds of other people have also had amazing experiences.

One of the things to grow out of this is that we have attracted the attention of some doctors and scientists. This is huge because they are the ones who should really be doing this work.  We are now in the process of working with a group of these professionals who are interested in doing research on the raw vegan diet.

So this blog is really a call to action. We want to expand the work that The Garden Diet is doing. So from now until the beginning of the new year we are gong to do a series of fund raisers. Right now we are using the popular crowd-funding platform, Indiegogo, for our fund-raising Campaign.

We are offering some really amazing pledge rewards. And besides the ones listed we’ll also send all our contributors my new eBooklet “Guilt-Free Decadence: Gourmet Raw Vegan Sauces, Creams and Salad Dressings”. I’ve put up a free sample recipe “Sour Cream and Chives” on the Indiegogo Campaign page below my video here: http://igg.me/p/238287?a=1377928

Your funding pledges will help us to go after feature film funding to turn my self-published children’s book “The Problem with Unicorns” in to a feature animated film. With the funds realized from this film, we want to expand our work in the Raw Food Movement, in the following ways….

1. We want to fund a group of doctors and researchers who have expressed interest in doing research into why and how the raw vegan diet can and should be our front line of defense against chronic debilitating diseases. This is huge because the results of this research will be published in medical journals, providing the missing link to having the scientific community acknowledge the unequivocal benefits of the raw vegan diet.

2. We want to produce and air a series of infomercials that will play in rotation on national cable networks. Our first movie “Breakthrough” was a huge success as far as reaching people and showing them that the raw vegan diet works. To see how this movie was received by the general public please click on this link and when you get to the page please scroll down to the comments.
http://www.breakthroughthedocumentary.com

Even though tens of thousands of people saw this film we didn’t make any money off of it because people posted it on media sharing sites and gave it away. If you type in breakthroughthedocumentary in google you will see this movie listed as view for free. At first we fought and made google take the movie down but two days later it was right back up there. This is why we want to make an infomercial instead of a movie.

Infomercials have been incredibly successful at launching national health brands from TaeBo to P90X to Colloidal Silver. We haven’t yet seen a raw food menu plan Program and I think we could do a great job of bringing our acclaimed programs to the public through an infomercial campaign, drawing on the strength of the scientific research studies’ findings.

3. We want to be able to hire some staff to do some of our administrative work. The Garden Diet site has become so big until both Jinjee and I are totally overwhelmed just keeping it at a break even level. There is no way that we can expand the work that this site is doing in the world without help. We want to hire a Business Manager and Accountant. We would then be better able to continue to expand and market our programs, adding new recipes and more resources to help people to stay raw long-term.

In Closing…
Even though I fought Jinjee tooth and claw to not put up The Garden Diet website I’m now really proud of the work that it has accomplished. We now have over twenty five thousand people in our newsgroup which represents a huge amount of power if we band together and focus the energy potential.

If everyone in our newsletter made a small $5 pledge we would be able to bring this animation to life and if this is a hit – and there is far less competition amongst animated feature films with only about 10 a year being made vs. 100s of live action feature films – we believe this film has a chance of changing the world.

With the type of funds made by a successful animated feature film we could run raw vegan ads on national Television that would improve the quality of life for millions of people and ease the strain on the economy generated by the epidemic levels of chronic disease in our society needlessly brought about by poor diet.

I have come to realize that we all buy into companies that we really hate and we give them much more than $5 every day. Every time we buy gas, or every time we turn on the light.  And it’s not just twenty five thousand people it’s tens of millions of us. And this is why we feel so powerless as individuals.

One of the things that I have been asking people is what if there were two planets that were exactly the same only on one planet everyone drove a solar hydrogen car and everything was powered by solar hydrogen and everybody on that planet was a vegetarian and all of the houses were state of the art green and sustainable. And the other planet was just like the earth we now live on.

Which planet would you rather live on? If you answered the solar hydrogen vegetarian planet then please support our pledge drive because the future is truly in your hands.

The corporations are not going to do it, big government is not going to do it and the big money interests are not eager to change anything. It is truly up to you to make the difference!

Please click here to help and also get your “Guilt-Free Decadence” eBook!

Thank you for taking the time to read this.

Storm