How nudist vegans sparked a jazz classic … and a movement

The Richters promoted healthy living and nudism from the comfort of their ahead-of-its-time restaurant.

Mrs. Richter’s cookbook isn’t just about food. For Beauty Salad I, she recommends tender asparagus tips with mint sauce, not because it tastes good but because it will “induce light perspiration, aiding circulation and clearing the complexion.” In fact, all of Vera Richter’s recipes were about a way of life. “Food is the answer to our problem to have a sound mind in a sound body,” she wrote in the cookbook’s opening. She was one of the essential figures of the Los Angeles healthy living scene, opening a chain of famous raw vegan restaurants alongside her husband, John T. Richter.

They might have fit the perfect hippie image, only this was 50 years before the word entered the lexicon. But even the earliest hippies would be influenced by the Richters and their desire to promote the tenants of the German Lebensreform movement.

Vera was born Verna May Weitzel to German parents in Pennsylvania. In 1903, at age 18, she graduated from the Butler Business College and accepted a job as a stenographer in Pittsburgh. By 1910, she’d moved to Los Angeles, where she met John. John had arrived in LA after working as a doctor of chiropractic and naturopathic medicine in the Midwest. They married, and perhaps it was Vera’s business acumen that got their restaurant, Eutropheon, started. However, it was John’s commitment to the ideas of Lebensreform, or life reform, that inspired the raw vegan cuisine they served.

John’s father, a German immigrant and pharmacist, had wanted him to be a doctor, but while studying at Rush Medical College in Chicago, John became more interested in natural methods of healing, including movement cures and the Battle Creek diet, a cooked vegetarian regime developed by John Harvey Kellogg to promote energy and general well-being. John saw great results with patients and even followed the diet himself, but he still felt a “general lack of energy.” That was when he learned about Dr. Benedict Lust and his uncooked food diet in a naturopathic magazine.

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Source: Ozy

Original publication 13 October, 2019

Posted on NatCorn 2 weeks ago

history, naturism

Reference to an article does not infer endorsement of any views expressed.

Lake o’the Woods dates from the 1933 when a group of Chicago-based investors settled their club on a parcel of farmland and marshy woods they bought in Valparaiso, Indiana, around some small, attractive lakes. Proud to be the second oldest nudist club in the US, the camp “advocates social and recreational outdoor nudity as a good-health (gesundheit!) practice,” laying claim to Freikörperkultur, or Free Body Culture (FKK) principles. It’s a rustic place, offering family-friendly “non-sexual social nudity.” Its posted sign greets guests: “Welcome All Ye Who Seek Sunshine and Rest for Here They Are Abundant.”

Nudists, naturists, FKK-adherents, as they might variously choose names, claim that the human form is not by itself sexually provocative as it becomes when framed, say, by teeny bikinis or high hemlines. They contrast themselves to “textiles,” those of us who prefer to cover bodies with cloth. As Brian Hoffman explains in his book, Naked, American nudist culture finds its roots in the inspiration of German immigrants.

Part of a more general movement in search of health and spiritual regeneration against the backdrop of urbanization and industrial life, late-nineteenth-century Germans dubbed their movement Freikörperkultur. FKK sought release from the constrained, artificial, and stratified, seeking instead connection with nature and with other human beings, sunshine on bare skin, fresh air, and vigorous exercise. A recent New York Times article by Katrin Bennhold analyzing public nudity in Germany (“A Very German Idea of Freedom: Nude Ping-Pong,” etc.) observes that Germans embrace nudity as a kind of freedom. Believe in it? I’ve seen it done: waders in a Black Forest stream casually leaving their clothes behind on the grassy bank, families wriggling back into sturdy cotton underwear after a splash in the park sprinkler. In FKK and other conceptions, freedom might be found by abandoning cloth; class differences, shed with jacket and petticoat and undergarment, were to become virtually invisible.

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Source: patheos.com

Original publication September 9, 2019

Posted on NatCorn 20th September 2019

history, naturism

Reference to an article does not infer endorsement of any views expressed.

The persecution of hippies in Formentera 1968/70
The police confidant, the rector of Sant Ferran, was scandalized with the nudity: “They were not violent young people, but if from time to time someone was agitated, we would give him four hosts . “

Far from a supposed tolerance and despite the idealization promoted by tourism marketing, the past hippie of Formentera is marked by the persecution and subsequent expulsion of hundreds of young people by Franco’s authorities, the Civil Guard and organized groups of Formentera in the 1968/70 period. Beginning in the summer of 1967, “summer of love”, Formentera and Ibiza became a stopover on the route that thousands of western youths set out for India and Afghanistan.

Since the arrival of the first “hairy” – as those young people, mostly American, British and French, who bathed naked, worked little and lived with less were known on the island – there were Formenterenses who showed their rejection, but at the same time , many residents welcomed those foreigners who rented houses even if they were in poor condition, consumed in bars and shopped in stores. As the book “The Francoist repression of the hippy movement to Formentera” points out, the authorities of the regime contemplated with concern the fact that the hippie collective was seen with complicity, even sympathy for a notable part of the population of Formentera, a tolerance that threatened to expand to the rest of the country. To clear up any questions about the morality prevailing in the Dictatorship, Franco’s leaders planned an operation to change the perception of those ragged young people who gave the island “an aspect of poverty, misery and abandonment” and with whom it had reached extreme never thought: it is very difficult to go to the beach without seeing several cases (of nudity) , according to one of the reports written by the rector of Sant Ferran, Pep Costa, who served as police confidant.

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Source: Histonudismo

Original publication 07/23/2019

Posted on NatCorn 27th July 2019

history, naturism