The curious connection between health food restaurants and cults

Stephanie Weber
The Takeout
April 9, 2020

My favorite breakfast spot in Chicago was Victory’s Banner. It was a quirky, cheerful cafe in Roscoe Village with yellow walls, a diverse waitstaff wearing saris, pictures of an older man weightlifting and smiling on every wall, and sugar packets that had quotes on the back of them like “listen to your heart whispers.” My heart whispers told me to continue eating there, because the French toast with peach butter was truly the best I’ve ever had. I continued to eat there for years despite a mounting list of questions, like: Who exactly was the weightlifting man in all these photographs? Who was telling me, via fortune-cookie-esque sugar packets, to live my best life journey? And why would a restaurant also organize meditation workshops? The answer to all of these questions was Sri Chinmoy, a spiritual guru who promoted healthy living and meditation from the 1960s until his death in 2007. His followers continue to propagate his teachings.

I once asked a server at Victory’s Banner if the owners and staff were part of a religion, and she informed me they were “a meditation group” that offered seminars. “Meditation group” is pretty vague, but to some, that’s exactly what they were. Others would consider them a cult, albeit one that served a great vegetarian brunch with bottomless chai.

When I looked into Sri Chinmoy, I found that his followers operated vegetarian restaurants all over the country. A cursory search on Reddit brings up threads that ask the question, “Is the vegan restaurant near me owned by a cult?” Maybe!

The followers of Sri Chinmoy aren’t the exception; they appear to be the rule. Why would all these self-proclaimed meditation groups own meat-free restaurants? An easy answer is that many such groups adhere to very strict and specific diets. According to the Sri Chinmoy Center’s website, “Vegan and vegetarian diets are often the preferred lifestyle choice of seekers and meditators. The mild qualities of the plant kingdom likewise nourish mild qualities in ourselves, strengthening our simplicity, kindness and oneness with others.” It’s not too far off from what you might have been told by some yogis in your own life.

It’s fair to say that the promotion of vegetarianism and veganism by groups like Sri Chinmoy is at least partially responsible for the health food movement of the 1960s and ’70s. The Hare Krishnas, also founded in the 1960s, are known for having inclusive and free vegetarian dinners on Sundays, but they also run Hare Krishna Food for Life organization which is a nonprofit vegan food relief fund. The Twelve Tribes, which arose in the 1970s, are responsible for The Yellow Deli. All of these groups ran their restaurants to promote what they deem a healthy balance of diet and spirituality.

Perhaps the O.G. of spiritual restaurants was in Los Angeles. In 1969, Jim Baker, aka Father Yod, recruited his followers to open and operate The Source, the nation’s first health food restaurant of any renown that served organic vegetarian food to hippies, locals, tourists, and movie stars. Employees of the restaurant were like family. Literally: they were a cult (and rock band) known as The Source Family. The Source had crossover appeal with the general public; the restaurant was even featured in Annie Hall. It continued to prosper until Baker sold the business in 1974.

In more recent years, the most famous modern example of a cult-run vegetarian restaurant is likely The Loving Hut. Entrepreneur Supreme Master Ching Hai is the mysterious spiritual leader behind The Loving Hut, a vegetarian franchise that boasts over 100 locations around the world and whose locations all have TVs broadcasting Supreme Master TV, a channel owned by Ching Hai that promotes “24 hours of positive news a day.” (This is a bit more forward than the meditation workshops recommended to customers at Victory’s Banner.) The group behind The Loving Hut practices the Quan Yin Method, the Buddhist-based meditation practice and belief system that Supreme Master Ching Hai promotes to followers around the world. Ching Hai is a Vietnamese millionaire who has been growing both her fortune and her following since the 1990s.

Since its peak in 2015, however, some of The Loving Hut’s 140 locations around the world have closed. The Sri Chinmoy restaurant I frequented in Chicago is also now closed—sort of. It reopened in 2018 as Lucy’s Cafe, and while it has the same menu, the new owners informed me they are not affiliated with Sri Chinmoy. They bought the restaurant a few years ago, but they kept the Victory’s Banner menu, which means we can all still enjoy French toast with peach butter. The inspirational sugar packets, however, are long gone.

It’s hard to tell where the Sri Chinmoy–affiliated owners went, or why they sold the business. There was negative press surrounding Sri Chinmoy after his death in 2007, with a former member publishing a book about her experiences in what she deems a controlling cult. But that was ten whole years before the closure of Victory’s Banner. Still, it’s possible that with each damning expose, institutions like Chicago’s brunch cafe and The Loving Hut lose out on interested parties who arrive with an appetite for both pancakes and enlightenment.

Because, after all, these restaurants are operating under a dual business model: they want the restaurant to make money to fund their respective organizations, but they also consider recruitment a metric for their success. With the restaurant industry’s razor-thin margins, the health food is just as much a promotional expense as a moneymaker. I reached out to representatives from these groups and the employees of several spiritually inclined vegetarian restaurants around the country, but they all declined to comment on the particulars of their restaurants. Instead, I’m left with what Sri Chinmoy himself had to say: “We came into the world, not only to eat material food, but also to feed our heart with our aspiration-meal.” My own aspiration is to skip the meditation workshops and order another serving of that peachy French toast.

https://thetakeout.com/sri-chinmoy-and-the-vegetarian-health-food-restaurants-1842726300

The Truly bizarre story of Father Yod’s cult

Nathan Jolly
News.com.au
March 28, 2016

IN 1969, one of the world’s first health food restaurants opened on LA’s Sunset Strip.

Operated by the charismatic Father Yod, the Source Restaurant offered organic vegetarian food served by a collective of young hippies dressed in white robes.

John Lennon and Yoko Ono were regulars, as were Marlon Brando and Warren Beatty, and the restaurant even featured in Woody Allen’s classic Annie Hall, where he mockingly orders alfalfa sprouts and mashed yeast.

At its peak it reportedly took in $300,000 a month.

What a lot of the regulars didn’t realise at the time — despite the white robes — was that the restaurant was ground zero for the Source Family — a collective of roughly 150 of Father Yod’s religious followers, who lived communal style in a house in Hollywood Hills.

Father Yod seems to have lived numerous lives before starting the restaurant. Born Jim Baker, he was awarded the Silver Star Medal for heroism during World War II, was an expert in jujitsu, a suspected bank robber, and an accused murderer.

Baker moved to LA in the late ‘60s to pursue stuntman work, but was soon seduced by the Eastern mysticism dripping through the streets at the time.

Baker became Father Yod, a spiritual leader who espoused the virtues of healthy eating, yoga, mediation, and a number of other practices that were nascent at the time but are now commonly accepted.

The restaurant was the perfect recruiting tool for the Source Family, and its ranks quickly swelled with young, impressionable people looking for a sense of purpose and community.

Members took on the surname Aquarian, and crammed into a three-bedroom house in the Hills.

Music was central to the Family lifestyle, with members forming a ‘house band’ named Ya Ho Wha 13, selling albums from the restaurant.

Ya Ho Wha 13 sounds exactly like you imagine it would
Djin Aquarian was the band’s guitarist, and explains to news.com.au he was looking less for a leader, and more for community.

“I was [a] vegetarian, long-haired hippy, meditator, Jewish mystic, and yoga beginner so the Source Brotherhood sounded intriguing,” he explains via email.

He met Father Yod at the age of 23 — and although he was drawn to the Family, he left his first meeting dissatisfied, opposing the use of sheep skins for meditation. Djin travelled for a further year, returning in 1972, and joining the Family that October.

“[Father Yod] was so accomplished in so many ways and was so willing to share his every success and knowledge with us; that kind of gift in a young, seeking person’s life — you can only imagine the influence,” he recalls.

“It was literally like meeting God, the Father or God the Brother — however you wish to see it.”

Octavius Aquarian was another young seeker drawn to the Family. He was told of the Family by a friend — “I went to check it out. I never left,” he tells news.com.au.

Like Djin, he was a musician and initially drawn to the community aspect.

“It was more about what they were into in those days”, he explains in an email. “[Father Yod] was first and foremost a father figure to all the people who clearly had a need for an example in their lives.”

Not surprisingly, the Family’s lifestyle was not without its share of detractors.

“The Source was equated with the Manson family back then,” Octavius remembers. “Fear of the unknown is usually a factor.”

Some of the rumblings were coming within the Family itself, as Djin explains.

“Father Yod got slammed with a tremendous amount of negativity for so many reasons and from multiple sources, including quite a few Source sisters and brothers.”

With living conditions becoming untenable — close to 150 people squashed into three bedrooms — the Family sold the restaurant and departed to Hawaii in late 1974.

“It was like a military campaign,” Djin recalls. “Father had to be resourceful, clever and wise. We didn’t have as much money available without the restaurant income and we didn’t have employment until we settled and created — or found — jobs to keep 144 mouths fed and bodies sheltered.”

Tragedy struck shortly after the move, with Father Yod attempting to hang-glide off a 400m cliff, despite having zero experience. He crash-landed on the beach and died from his injuries.

Even this has a positive spin put on it. “To this day, I felt he was calling the unseen world’s bluff,” Octavius says.

Djin feels similarly: “It was a shock to all but perhaps subconsciously expected. He often mentioned him leaving this plane to serve his children less-fettered in the next dimension.”

The Family attempted to stay together for what Djin refers to as “two very difficult years”, but without Yod’s guidance as an anchor or the restaurant as a cash cow, the Family split and hit the fields and streets of Hawaii in 1977, “many of us without means, and in shock after living communally for six and seven years”.

“It was brutal coming back to the system we left behind for most,” Djin says, “even when having wealthy families to go back to, because of all the ‘I told you so’s’ and humble pie that was served.”

Octavius struggled with the transition. “When you offer a crutch, it helps but can also create a weakness,” he explains. “It took me a couple of years to enter back into the traditional society.”

Despite the eventual fallout, neither Djin and Octavius regret their years with the Source Family. “It was such a creative time and I feel so fortunate to have been a part of such a memorable scene,” Octavius remembers.

“I look back with gratitude and feel it was more of a blessing than a curse as a whole,” adds Djin. “I learned a lot, achieved a lot, and see how it prepared me to offer a lot to those who have been born generations after, and feel an affinity.”

http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/wtf/the-truly-bizarre-story-of-father-yods-cult/news-story/