Steve Meyerowitz was pronounced “Sproutman” by Vegetarian Times Magazine in a 1979 feature article that explored his 100% sprout diet. While over 2 decades time, most diets change, Meyerowitz is still a big “believer” in healthy diet and lifestyle.
Meyerowitz got interested in natural foods after a 20-year effort to treat chronic allergies and asthma with conventional medicine. He made dramatic changes in his diet and within 2 months of eating a strict “living foods,” vegetarian diet, his lifelong symptoms vanished. He continued to practice a 100% raw foods diet (nothing cooked, packaged, canned, frozen, or processed) for five years. During that time, he also experimented with other extreme diets such as fruitarianism (just fruit), juice fasting for as long as 100 days, and briefly, breatharianism (no food, no water).
Meyerowitz’s innovative kitchen gardening techniques and the cuisine he developed from them gave rise to a “School for Sprouts.” He began teaching indoor gardening 12 stories above the streets of New York City. He called his no-cooking school The Sprout House, since so much of his cuisine included vegetables from his kitchen garden sprouts. Meyerowitz invented two home sprouters, The Flax Sprout Bag and a tabletop greenhouse called Sproutman’s Kitchen Garden Salad Grower. He also supplied his growing kits and a full line of organic sprouting seeds via mail order.
Meyerowitz has since sold the mail order business, and he and his family now breathe fresher air in the Berkshire mountains of Massachusetts. Much of the information from his teaching years have been related in his books. He has the most popular books on sprouts, including Sprouts the Miracle Food, Sproutman’s Kitchen Garden Cookbook, and Wheatgrass Nature’s Finest Medicine, to name a few. But he also has other books on subjects such as fasting and raw juice therapy.
Meyerowitz has been featured on PBS, the Home Shopping Network, TV Food Network, and in Prevention, Better Nutrition, and Organic Gardening magazines. In 3 minutes on QVC, 953 people ordered his cookbook and Kitchen Garden Salad Grower.