IN 1977, EST GURU Werner Erhard had a vision: He was going to end world hunger by 1997. To that end, he started the Hunger Project, a nonprofit that quickly picked up celebrity sponsors including John Denver, Valerie Harper, and Jimmy Carter‘s son Chip. But, as Mother Jones reported in December 1978, the group had no intention of actually feeding the starving, just raising “awareness” of hunger—and est. The article also exposed Erhard’s complicated web of offshore tax shelters. In response, est threatened to sue. It didn’t, but participants in one seminar were instructed to “focus all your negative energy on the people responsible for this terrible slander.” Twelve years after it was supposed to become obsolete, the Hunger Project now has only one former Erhard associate on its board and notes it has “no ties to Mr. Erhard or his interests.”
