One of the most remarkable men in Michigan runs the only Vegetarian Cafeteria in this area: Stanley Filipzcak has operated the Health Food Center at 5255 Schaefer Road, Dearborn, for the last six years.
Filipczak is now eighty years old. When he reached the age of forty, he was suffering from arthritis, lumbago, headaches and other diseases, which three Ann Arbor doctors could not cure. A friend turned him on to vegetarianism and by the age of forty-five he was cured and a confirmed vegetarian.
For thirty-five years Stanley has studied the relation of diet to health, and to find out what truths he has discovered, I suggest a visit to his cafeteria.
For $1.10 you can buy the special dinner plate and sample all of his best food. His menu includes buckwheats, fresh vegetables, pea soup, vegetable soup, borscht, carrot cake, dandelion coffee, honey raisin wheat pudding, and fresh garden salad.
As his signs say, “We prepare our food with loving care for your health” and “We do not use fluoridated water in our cooking.” The restaurant also makes forty-five fresh juices while you wait. The store is open from 8 am to 8 pm, Monday through Saturday.
Since becoming a vegetarian, Filipczak has developed an interest in metaphysics. He said he once had a beer in his brother’s bar, but left quickly and never returned. He says “Alcohol interferes with philosophical study.”
All the water Stanley drinks and uses in cooking comes from a fresh spring on Hagerty Road near Ann Arbor. The preparation of vegetarian food is easier than normal cooking since the long hours needed for meat cooking is eliminated along with the complexities of condiments.
The Vegetarian Society of Michigan, of which he is a former President, will be meeting September 28. He has the details concerning the group, which can teach you the philosophy of vegetarianism.
Stanley believes that eating has an effect on more than health, and that bad diet causes some of our social conditions by breeding sick personalities. He says that “If our present educational system continues, in 50 years America will cease to exist.
“The poet Shelley in “A Vindication of Natural Diet” argued that social reform would not be successful without a change in eating habits.
The reason there are so few vegetarian restaurants is that there is little money to be made from good food and health. Mass-fried hamburgers are more profitable. Stanley blames the AMA and the processed food industry for making the USA one of the world’s sickest nations. Literature on health is also available at his store, and it is interesting to discover that every great thinker discusses the subject of proper nutrition.
The June 1967 issue of Ebony has an article on Malcolm X which states that “He had very strict eating habits…In the morning I served him three beverages, freshly squeezed orange and grapefruit juice combined, a glass of fresh carrot juice combined with other fresh vegetable juices and a glass of milk with two egg yolks, honey or brown sugar…his dinner included half a grapefruit, a very light soup, a piece of lean meat (he didn’t like very much meat), plenty of fruit and vegetables and a salad, wild rice and brown bread and a quart of milk.”
Thoreau said that “We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones.”
It might be of benefit to the young to remember their body in the days of their youth. At the age of eighty, Stanley rises by 5 am and can still work over fifteen hours a day. He also reserves the last hour of the day for meditation because he says evolution is happening every minute and he wants to keep his spirit in tune with the universe.