Fred Bisci was standing at my refrigerator case in the first Juice Press I opened, on East First Street in New York City, in 2010. He asked if I was the owner. I said yes. He asked me to recommend a juice, which I did, and then he proceeded to grill me about every ingredient in the store and every vendor I used for organic produce.
That was the beginning.
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| Above Photo: Me and Fred Bisci, circa 2017. |
Then he asked about my philosophies on nutrition generally and juice cleansing in particular. Before he left, he said he loved the shop and thought I was going to do well. He came back about a week later and told me he had been reading what I posted on my website and that he had some advice for me.
As soon as he started talking, I knew he would be a great mentor. He had a great deal to say about both science and more abstract knowledge, and his insights were immediately useful. One particular area he addressed was the misconceptions held across the juicing industry, misconceptions I had not fully recognized until he named them. I started writing down what he taught me during our weekly encounters.
Sometimes customers in the shop would ask questions that stumped me. Fred was always my first call, and then I would cross-reference what he said with my doctor. The two were usually in sync, which built my confidence in Fred's framework considerably. But over time I began to understand that conventional medical information had real limitations in this context, because most of it is built around the dietary patterns of meat eaters. The baseline assumptions were different, which meant the conclusions were often only partially applicable to what I was trying to do and teach.
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Above Photo: Some East Village character in full battle gear for a New York City summer. Center: Me. Right: Fred Bisci. Outside Juice Press location six on East 10th Street, circa 2016. |
The medical industry fails people. Not occasionally, not in edge cases, but as a structural tendency. Insufficient information, misleading guidance, and a persistent unwillingness to say the most important thing plainly: eliminate processed food first. Before the supplements, before the prescriptions, before the specialized diets and the pyramid models built more on agricultural tradition than on science. Remove the garbage. Everything else is secondary.
Fred Bisci taught me that. It was the most clarifying idea I encountered in a decade of building a food business and trying to understand what I was actually doing. The breakthrough was its simplicity: it is what you leave out of your diet that makes the biggest difference. People who spend their energy and money searching for things to add, the right supplement, the right superfood, the right protocol, are usually solving the wrong problem. Remove the detrimental things first. The body, given the chance, does the rest.
Fred helped me understand that human beings are, by biological design, plant eaters. Not as a political position. As a physiological fact. We are adaptive creatures, which means we can include animal foods in the diet and survive, and in inhospitable conditions throughout human history, that adaptability has kept the species alive. But surviving on something and being optimally designed for it are not the same thing.
Flesh foods feel powerful because they are dense, filling, and chemically stimulating. They produce a mild euphoria. Any animal that tastes blood understands the pull. The customs and desires of humanity drove us toward carnivorous eating patterns, and those patterns became embedded in culture, religion, and identity. The Christian and Jewish Bibles condone the slaying of animals for sustenance. Restricting that practice thousands of years ago would likely have cost those traditions significant numbers of followers. Food and belief have always been entangled.
I am not a natural spokesman for the moral dimension of dietary choices. I do not want to appear judgmental or position myself as a spiritual guide. But I can say what I do and what I believe, and leave others to draw their own conclusions. Even if eating flesh is not a moral evil in itself, we have the capacity to make choices that allow other creatures to live undisturbed. That capacity is worth something.
Fred and I were in close contact for ten years. He is now in his late nineties and remains one of the most extraordinary examples of human longevity and dietary integrity I have ever encountered. He consumed the products I created at Juice Press and continues to maintain excellent health. I have brought him into the Goodsugar fold because I still need his mentorship and I still want the most pristine eaters in our society to recognize what I am trying to build and believe in it. That standard matters to me more than almost any metric I could put on a spreadsheet.
Fred has influenced me the way a father influences a son. We have covered nearly every subject in life together. He is a brilliant and generous thinker, and my gratitude for what he has given me is deep and lasting.
I love my own father enormously. He is a brilliant man who shaped me in ways I am still discovering. I am lucky to have him. And I am equally lucky to still have Fred Bisci in my life, a second father in every way that counts.
Above Photo: Fred Bisci, me picking up my middle daughter Minnie-James, and in the red cap one of my favorite yogis and a good friend, Jared McCann.
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Above Photo: Fred Bisci at Juice Press location five, with survivalist and yogi Jeff Harper.
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Above Photo: Fred Bisci, me, Minnie-James, and hidden behind me my eldest daughter Luna. Outside Juice Press location one, 70 East 1st Street, circa 2016. |
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Above Photo: Fred at age 97. In May 2026, Fred drove up to visit Goodsugar with his wife Alma. Thank you Fred and Alma. |
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Above Photo: Fred and Alma Bisci, me and my wife Teresa, visiting them at their home in Staten Island, circa 2020. |
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Above Photo: Circa 2026, me, Fred, Teresa, Alma, and a guest appearance by Eddie Stern, the great Yogi from New York. |
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Above Photo: Fred as a young man. Circa 1948. Fred Bisci is widely regarded as a father of the raw food movement, and few who make that claim can point to anything close to his track record. At 97 years old, he has maintained a 100 percent raw vegan diet for 65 years, which is not a philosophy he advocates from a distance. He has lived it completely, without compromise, for longer than most people have been alive. Fred is not only the clearest possible model of what the cleanest human diet looks like over a lifetime, he is a rigorous food science educator and a lifelong practitioner of compassionate living. He is, in every sense of the word, the real thing. |
