Rice. Gravy. Fried Chicken. Doughnuts. Dr. Pepper. Soy Beans. Oatmeal. Vitamin Supplements. Fig Bananas. French Fries Dipped in Dark Chocolate. This is a sampling of food from the diets of former members of Peoples Temple, as I learned when I interviewed them on the subject earlier this year.<\/p>\n
My interest in food as it pertains to Peoples Temple relates to my overall interest in both cults and diet. After uncovering some information for an article<\/a> I wrote for Vice<\/em> Magazine, I wanted to learn more, specifically about Peoples Temple. I wanted to know and understand the strength of Jim Jones\u2019 influence, not only on his members\u2019 beliefs, but ultimately on what they put in their bodies. After all, it was his final command of consumption in Jonestown that ultimately led to the death of his followers.<\/p>\n Before the Temple moved to Jonestown, former member Michael Cartmell said, \u201cI don\u2019t ever recall food being used as a weapon or a punishment. And there was a lot of punishments and a lot of brutal beatings. I mean, children got brutally beaten.\u201d<\/p>\n Food was used, however, to influence outsiders. While the church was based in Ukiah, Jones started something known as \u201cCake Diplomacy\u201d that Cartmell described as an \u201cearly form of PR.\u201d If someone in the community who was not part of the church did something that Temple members approved of, they would bake and bring them a cake. \u201cYou can\u2019t hate somebody who bakes a cake and gives it to you, right? Particularly if it\u2019s a good cake,\u201d said Cartmell.<\/p>\n The practice wasn\u2019t universally appreciated, though. Cartmell remembered a non-member who was commissioned to do a painting job for the Temple. \u201cMan, I\u2019m going to paint the bus,\u201d Cartmell recalled him saying, \u201cbut I don\u2019t want one of their god damn cakes, that\u2019s for sure. I don\u2019t want anything to do with that organization.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cCake Diplomacy didn\u2019t always work, but it didn\u2019t hurt,\u201d Cartmell added.<\/p>\n Former member Garrett Lambrev said that around 1966, Jim Jones briefly advocated for a vegetarian diet \u201cfor both moral, ethical and health reasons.\u201d The food, he said, at this time was at its best but soon ended. \u201cI suspect that the real reason in the end that we didn\u2019t eat that way was that it was too time-consuming, and Jim didn\u2019t want us to waste our time on ourselves,\u201d Lambrev said.<\/p>\n Once the Temple went communal, the diet left Lambrev \u201cpartly appalled but largely just depressed\u2026 The food was so bad, it was so heavily carbohydrates, it was almost entirely starch\u2026 I thought that if Jim wanted to use us optimally, or even well, he needed to feed us better.\u201d<\/p>\n Jones\u2019 inclination to advocate for specific food items was a re-occurrence. It seems as though Jones had ideas, some that made more sense than others, on what his members should eat and the benefit or harmfulness of these certain items.<\/p>\n \u201c[Jones] used to say don\u2019t eat cheese and drink coffee at the same time because it causes cancer,\u201d former member Tim Carter said. \u201cI have no idea if that\u2019s the truth or not. Now as I eat my cheese and drink my coffee together, I\u2019ll go \u2018Salute to you, asshole.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Another former member, Hue Fortson, remembered Jones telling members to start drinking Dr. Pepper \u201cbecause of the nutrients that it had and that it would do something good for your body.\u201d<\/p>\n When the Temple was in Redwood Valley, Jordan Vilchez said, \u201cthere was a belief that nuclear war was inevitable. So one of the things that he would promote us eating was soybeans, which apparently would help with protecting against radiation.\u201d<\/p>\n Overweight or obese members were subjected to having their mouths wired shut. \u201cIn the short run it achieved its goal \u2013 getting people to really reduce their weight. In medium-to-long-term I don\u2019t think it served any purpose,\u201d Lambrev said, then added, \u201cThose who survived.\u201d<\/p>\n Lela Howard\u2019s aunt, Mary Pearl Willis, was a member at the church in Los Angeles, and as an outsider, Lela experienced a diverse and positive experience with food whenever she went to visit the Temple. \u201cI remember there was this one dish were someone had chocolate-covered french fries. I kid you not, it was the most interesting thing. And you would think, oh my god, that\u2019s gross. But it was actually delicious.\u201d<\/p>\n She also remembered a dish that looked like long glassy noodles \u2013 but were in fact onions \u2013 that was \u201cthe most delicious meal ever.\u201d<\/p>\n Once Temple members migrated to Jonestown, the food situation changed greatly. Community residents would typically wake up to oatmeal or some sort of wheat cereal. A peanut butter and honey sandwich with a banana for lunch. Some sort of green, rice, and gravy with bits of meat in it for dinner. While animals were consumed, it was never in large quantities.<\/p>\n Beef in Guyana was expensive and only raised in the South, Carter said. For this reason, goat meat became a more popular option. There were also issues in transporting chickens from Georgetown: \u201cWe were buying over 1,000 chickens a week and most of them would be dead by the time they got to Jonestown.\u201d<\/p>\n They were working to get their chicken incubator to Jonestown to resolve this issue. \u201cIf Jonestown had gone on \u2013 and if Jim Jones had died instead of deciding to kill everybody else, including himself \u2013 within a month, because of the incubator and because we had gotten things with the hogs together, there would have been meat in every meal for everybody. And there would have been eggs for breakfast\u2026 The diet would have changed considerably.\u201d<\/p>\n Fortson recalled another source of protein, \u201cWe would go to the fish market and we would buy shark. The Guyanese people figured shark was a scavenger, and they didn\u2019t like it. So we would take it and cut the muscles out of the back and smoke them\u2026 oh my god, that was the most delicious meat.\u201d<\/p>\n Cartmell, who did not go to Guyana, said, \u201cWhen I would get letters from my sister [in Jonestown], you could tell that they had been a) censored and b) there was a very strange focus on food\u2026 There was an extreme level of consciousness about food that further told me that they probably weren\u2019t eating very much.\u201d<\/p>\n But Carter never felt like he was being deprived. \u201cI\u2019ve read a lot of bullshit out there that this was, that people were being starved to death intentionally, or being malnourished.\u201d<\/p>\n (Chloe Schildhause\u2019s previous article for this website is Remembering Peoples Temple<\/a>. She can be reached at chloe.schildhause@gmail.com<\/a><\/em>.)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Rice. Gravy. Fried Chicken. Doughnuts. Dr. Pepper. Soy Beans. Oatmeal. Vitamin Supplements. Fig Bananas. French Fries Dipped in Dark Chocolate. This is a sampling of food from the diets of former members of Peoples Temple, as I learned when I interviewed them on the subject earlier this year. My interest in food as it pertains […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":61878,"menu_order":5,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-62021","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/62021","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=62021"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/62021\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":62131,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/62021\/revisions\/62131"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/61878"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=62021"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}