About Dr. John Calella

My life’s journey has been to combine the love, the joy of eating and the deliciousness that came from my Italian grandmother’s kitchen with the wisdom and knowledge of the hygienic systems approach to health and healing that I learned from my Uncle Vincent. He taught me that your food must not only be your joy but your main source of nutrition as well as your medicine.

My work is to uncover how to combine the wonderful flavors of the natural food cuisine with its natural compounds in a way that will be beneficial not only to the taste buds but to the health of the human body and mind. Grateful for my years of work and study in the fields of psychology and nutrition, I now understand the inseparable link between mind and body. My goal has been to educate others and myself how to attain agility of mind and body so we can live life to the fullest.

In the early 1970’s  I was living in San Francisco, following hygienic principles and following a strict vegetarian regimen. The health food stores, juice bars squeezing fresh fruit and vegetables, became an oasis for me but most of the natural vegetarian restaurants became off limits; the same old stuff buried under sprouts. What they had to offer was boring and unimaginative. Well, as they say, necessity is the mother of invention. I wrote my first book, Cooking Naturally, hoping that my recipes would be on their menus. To my surprise, I found restaurants serving the Organic John La Sagna  and Fettuccine with a red and emerald sauce (I was the first chef to introduce La Sagna with tofu instead of ricotta) eggplants, spinach, mushrooms, kale, asparagus in both red and green sauces, fettuccine with fresh tomatoes and Organic John pesto,  eggplant sandwiches, tofu with avocado and peas stuffed in roasted tomatoes, sandwiches with greens—I was the creative force behind many of the vegetarian dishes prepared today.

For twelve years as Organic John, I hosted a radio show in San Francisco called Beside The Garden Wall, established my own vegetarian catering company, had the first vegetarian cooking show, Cooking Naturally on  Viacom cable T.V., wrote my first cook book, Cooking Naturally and printed the Salade Mandala on food combining.

I moved on from there to receive my Ph.D. in Marriage and Family Therapy, building a lucrative and interesting private practice. I enjoyed my life as a therapist, which taught me more about dealing with the human experience than all my years on the streets of Brooklyn. However, my greatest and most treasured profession was becoming a father. I applied the skills I learned as a psychologist to support and raise my family, continuing always to eat the Organic John way, and share my cooking with friends and family. When all are acting in concert—diet, exercise, and philosophical outlook—the human being is capable of infinite tasks and inner satisfactions.