“How does your body function on oranges?” I asked. According to his research, he explained, it’s possible to get all the nutrients the body requires from a single fruit. And when the body is perfectly in balance and detoxified, it creates the other amino acids, vitamins, and minerals it needs on its own. “The body heals itself when nothing is there to get in the way,” he said. To monofruitarians like Matt, eating two types of fruit at one time would “get in the way.” Juicing allows the nutrients and energy from the fruit’s simple sugars to pass directly into his blood stream instead of being slowed down by pulp during digestion. His weekly budget for oranges is approximately $300, he explained.
He hadn’t always been so obsessed with health, but after starting a nine-to-five job, the sedentary lifestyle had left him rundown and depressed. So he quit to dedicate himself fulltime to his physical and mental health while living off his savings.
His path to monofruitarianism involved extensive research, self-reflection, curiosity, and willpower. “All the year I was raw I never got cravings like this,” he said, referring to the cravings for pizza and pasta he’d had recently. When he was young, those were the types of foods he ate with his family. So he thinks it’s the idea of the grease and carbohydrates as comfort food that makes him want it now, more than the memory of the way the pasta tasted.
The memory of flavour is often stronger than actual taste, he explained. For anyone with a lifestyle that involves not eating something, whether that’s sugar-drenched desserts, salt and vinegar chips, or carb-heavy pastas, it’s memory that needs to be overcome.
So why come to a potluck where a buffet of forbidden fruit (and vegetables) tempts him? I asked. “To meet like-minded people,” he replied. Montreal’s fruitarian population is small, so the raw foodists, vegans, vegetarians, and omnivores in attendance are as close as he comes to meeting people who understand his lifestyle choices. Many share his story of searching for health through food or dealing with food “addictions” to refined sugar and wheat. But while he has acquaintances among the group, his friends are mostly online. One day, when he meets these friends, he says, it will be as though they have known each other their entire lives.
I noticed a cold sore on his face and asked if it was aggravated by all the sugar in the fruit. “No, it’s my body detoxing,” he replied. “I haven’t had a cold sore in a long time and one of the ways toxins are removed from the body is through the nose.”
Not wanting to question his conviction, I let it drop. “When will you stop drinking orange juice?”
“When my body tells me it’s time to stop,” he replied self-assuredly. His claim of being so tuned in to every tick, craving, and rhythm of his body made me want to believe that he would know when to stop. He felt he’d attained a kind of purity, cleanliness, and lucidity in his life – his own heaven on earth. And part of me wanted my body to be as “pure” and detoxed as him, despite my concerns.
A year later he has been on and off the mono-fruitarian diet a few times, and he’s currently eating only whole apples. He says he's doing much better mentally; he's working again, has recently returned from an international fruit festival where he met other fruitarians, and even dated a vegan, though it didn’t work out when she kept cooking things. But I notice his slowly rotting teeth, and as he preaches about fruitarianism my skepticism comes back. As long as he's happy, though, and can afford the grocery bill, carbon footprint and gastronomic monotony of the diet, then I figure more crunchy salads and sinfully sweet desserts for the rest of us.
by Amie Watson
