Gourmet, September 1999
by Jocelyn C. Zuckerman

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The food star who doesn’t cook, doesn’t drink water, and doesn’t want you to, either.

In a SoHo loft, Juliano, the chef from California with rock-star hair and no use for a surname, bounds around a kitchen strewn with avocados, dates, and dried seaweed. He is teaching fifteen or so students how not to cook.

“Food gets pissed if you put fire on it,” Juliano says. “It’s like, ‘Dude, what did I do?’”

He gets no argument from the Tevashod twentysomethings who have paid $70 each to cleave coconuts, peel kiwis, and mince ginger with America’s most famous raw-food chef.

Over the sound of countertop juicers, Juliano lists at mind-bending speed a few of the reasons he’s banished fire from his kitchen. There’s the planet (to which his new book, Raw, is dedicated) and his concern for the psyches of cabbages and cauliflowers. He asserts that temperatures of 120 degrees and up destroy enzymes and nutrients vital to human functioning: “I mean, think about it. Wild animals don’t brush, don’t floss, and the die with perfect sets of teeth. Old, young, baby, not baby…Dude, zero animals have ever had cancer.”

Growing up in Las Vegas, where he spent his preteens planted firmly in front of the tube, Juliano didn’t have much need for nature. It wasn’t until he moved to Palm Springs at fifteen and began communing with frogs and eagles that his life “changed from a spectator sport to a truly awesome interactive adventure.” Soon after that, he gave up meat. By nineteen, he’d gone vegan. A few years later, he declared himself totally raw.

At twenty-four, Juliano opened his first restaurant, Raw, in San Francisco. It immediately won famous fans, among them Bryan Adams and Woody Harrelson. He’s since sold the place (now called Organica) and currently shuttles between San Francisco and L.A., where he’s laying the groundwork for a new restaurant, feeding celebs like Cybill Shepherd and Lisa Marie Presley, and looking into screenwriting and acting.

He is not a bad advertisement for his cause. Completely hairless save for the blond tresses he often fashions into a perky little bun, he is all ropy muscle and sinew, a fat-free model of gender-bending human efficiency. And with his goofy Bill & Ted intonation and searing optimism, he’s far from unlovable.

But Juliano’s enthusiasms can border on mania. He swears he only needs three hours of sleep a night and that he hasn’t had a sip of water for five years. (He trusts neither plumbing systems nor bottling companies and sticks with freshly extracted citrus and coconut juices.) He takes credit for having “invented an entire new cuisine,” though raw foodists have been around for decades.

Many nutrition experts, of course, think some of Juliano’s theories are, well, bunk. Leslie Bonci, a spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Association, says that his enzyme-nutrient theory is unsound. And a member of the Wildlife Disease Association says Juliano’s idealized view of animal health and well-being is pure fantasy. Responds Juliano: “I trust every living species on this planet more than I would a doctor or scientist.”

Besides, Juliano is ready for his next big life change. “I am such a genius in food,” he says, “imagine how I’ll be in the movies. I’ll own Hollywood in a month.”