Former butcher Amos Larkins doesn’t always follow wife Annette’s diet of no meat and nothing cooked, but he brags about what it has done for her.
Annette Larkins stunned her family and friends 37 years ago by giving up meat. Now, on a diet of only raw fruits and vegetables, she’s still stunning them. Even when Amos Larkins has to resort to showing off a picture of his wife, people still say “Yeah, right,” and they look at him with his 67-year-old skin and 67-year-old hair and 67-hear old paunch. She’s a grandmother, he’ll insist. She’s a woman who’s been married 41 years. All of them, he’ll add with a grin, to him. She’s 58. They look at the picture again. “Yeah, right.”
“She’s a cheap date, too,” he’ll say, though that’s as close as he comes to telling how she manages to look as good as she does.
Annette Larkins, his wife, eats nothing but raw fruits and vegetables, fresh enough to have their “life force,” as she puts it, still in them. It’s why her husband sometimes thinks his life is a Hollywood movie and he’s married to the star. And it’s so totally unexpected, given her upbringing that he thought she had lost her mind on that day 37 years ago when she announced she would never again eat meat. She had always eaten what everyone else ate in the black Miami neighborhood where she grew up in the 1950s: pork chops, ham hocks and chicken, all of it fried. He worked as a butcher back then, so it wasn’t just on kind of meat they’d have at each meal, but two. On this particular day, she was frying bacon and ham for breakfast, when, unaccountably, the stuff splattering away in the frying pan was no longer meat to her but dead animal flesh. Yuck! Just like that, it seemed, only it wasn’t just like that, she realized two weeks later when she finally cam around to telling her husband.
She had always loathed the sight of fat jiggling from the skin of ham hocks. She had always had in the of her mind thoughts of fried rat when she ate fried chicken. She had eaten meat anyway because she had been brought up on it, and it had never occurred to her that she might not like it. And so, at 21, Larkins, a mother of two, a woman with no complete high school education, became the only vegetarian in the neighborhood.
“This is not the way I was brought up,” she says as she feeds wheat grass into a juicer in the kitchen of her Miami home. “I don’t know if it’s in my genes. I really don’t have a clue. All I know is that I’m different.” Her husband figures that she got scared off meat after seeing her mother and grandmother die of breast cancer when they were still young. But that doesn’t explain what happened next. From no more meat, his wife went to no more sugar and no more processed flour. From there, it was not more cheese and no more dairy. And then, after nearly 21 years, no more cooking. That’s when dinner out with Annette to be real cheap. All she got was water and a salad, which, until then, Amos had always figured was something restaurants gave people to fill them up, so they wouldn’t want bigger portions of meat. “I do not have to eat and drink to be merry,” said Annette. Her upstairs juicer, a $1,700 Norwalk, can liquefy any fruit or vegetable. Her downstairs juicer, a $300 Champion, can turn a frozen banana into a bowl of ice cream. For trips, she has an Acme juicer that folds up for easy packing. She says it only takes a little longer than it used to for her to prepare meals. She used a dehydrator to dry food in bulk, and her cabinets are filled with zip-seal bags of pizza crust, tacos and chips made out of crushed corn and raw honey. She grows her own sprouts and wheat grass in the backyard garden. She has jars of mayonnaise and spread, plastic containers with cookies and custard, all dried or juiced or squeezed or blended, all mad without a single animal, a single egg, or a single burner on the stove. Last year, she wrote an autobiography focusing on her dietary transformation, along with some recipes. The booklet, Journey to Health, is selling at health food stores. “Welcome to a new world—where live is king and raw is queen,” she writes. Ever since she started eating raw food only, she has slept sounder and woken up fresher. She never gets sick, she says. She has more energy than she ever did before. When her infant granddaughter got a intestinal blockage last year, Larkins started juicing wheat grass for her. “The baby was back to normal in a few days.” “It’s not good food versus band food,” says Sheah Rarback, spokeswoman for American Dietetic Association in Miami. “it’s good diet versus bad diet. If someone chooses to eat meat, they can still have a very healthy diet.” While Larkins has managed to drag her husband and two sons away from their meat-eating roots, they still eat chicken now and then, and Amos Larkins has had stints as a vegetarian over the years, inspired, he says, by the passing of years that have seemed to pass right over his wife. If she wants a younger man, she should have him because I’ve had 41 hears of having her,” he says, grinning. “She’s a lotta woman.: He was just back from lunch. He had Chinese. His wife was making herself a con crust pizza with not ball sausages.Robert George can be reached at 954-356-4727 or bgeorge@sunsentinel.com

Published Sunday, May 21, 2000, in the Miami    Herald

No cooked foods, no meat, and an 18-inch-waist    at 58

BY BEA    L. HINES

bhines@herald.com            Wearing high-heeled red boots and skin-tight red pants and    shirt, Annette Larkins strolls into the room, totally aware that she is    stopping traffic. At 58, Larkins has a stunning figure (waist: 18 inches) and    flawless complexion and seems to glow with health.

She attributes her healthy good looks to the way she eats and    has written and published an inspirational booklet that shares her story and    philosophy.        Called Journey to Health, it tells how her life changed when she    stopped eating meat 38 years ago. And how it changed even more 15 years ago    when she stopped eating cooked food. Her diet now consists of raw fruits and    vegetables (including juices), nuts, grains and sprouts.

“This isn’t a lifestyle that I encourage people to jump into,”    says Larkins, who lives in South Miami-Dade’s Richmond Heights. “It is    something that most people have to gradually get into. Not everyone can quit    eating meat the way I did. But they can start by adding more fruits and    vegetables to their diet and eliminating red meat.”

Born in Asheville, N.C., Larkins was reared in Detroit and moved    with her family to Miami in her early teens. She was 16 and a student at    Carver High School when she married Amos Larkins. Two years later, their    first son, Amos II, was born; their second, Anthony, followed 10 months    later.

“They were so close together, it was like having twins,” she    says.

When the boys were 10 and 11, Larkins became a professional jazz    singer, and was featured at a Miami Beach nightclub for a time. She gave up    show business for education, graduating with honors from Miami-Dade Community    College and teaching Spanish. Her resume also lists insurance agent and    computer whiz (she has built six personal computers). And when a grandson was    having trouble learning to read, she wrote and self-published a textbook, using him as the star character.

What makes this grandmother of six run?

“I have always been passionate about motivating individuals to    make changes that will enrich their lives.”

Larkins certainly knows about change; when she became a    vegetarian, her husband was a butcher.

“Every morning I’d cook a big breakfast, complete with grits, eggs, toast and two meats, usually bacon and ham or sausage,” she says.

But one day in 1962, after just such as breakfast, she went to    the freezer to take out pork chops for the evening meal, “and just the sight    of those chops made me sick,” she says. “That breakfast was the last meal I    had that included meat. My whole life changed between morning and mid-day.”

A family history of diet-related illness — her grandmother died    at 36 and her mother at 47, both of cancer, and an aunt died of diabetes —    may have motivated her.

“Having knowledge of this history, I probably subconsciously    wanted to do something about it.”

Although she continued cooking meat for her husband and sons, she never ate another piece. “I didn’t want to push my lifestyle on my    family,” she says.

Amos Larkins breaks into smiles when he talks about his wife.

“I wish I’d joined her eating routine back when she started,”    he says. “Just look at her. . .. We can’t go anywhere that people don’t    follow her around and ask her questions. They think she is a celebrity. And    she is so kind, she will take however long it takes to talk to anyone. There    is no such thing as a short trip to the grocery for her.”

Larkins cautions: “Don’t try to be me. You go where you can.   Old habits are hard to break. But determine your goal and learn the    necessary steps to achieve it.  The main thing is to stay focused.”