Sonnenorden Kabakon

The Sonnenorden (English: "Order of the Sun") was a German religious colony dedicated to Sun worship, nudism, and a dietetic system of Kokovorismus (cocoivorism), the consumption of coconuts only. It was active in the early part of the twentieth century at Kabakon, an island in the Bismarck Archipelago of German New Guinea (now Papua New Guinea), under the leadership of August Engelhardt.

Critiques of the Sonnenorden and its Coconut Mono-Diet

• Brook, Harry Ellington, ed. (Jun. 1914), "Cocoanut Worship", Brain and Brawn (Los Angeles: Naturopathic Pub. Co. Inc.) 3 (1): 31, https://archive.org/details/brainbrawn03broo/page/30/mode/2up 
  

  AUGUST ENGELHARDT has lived for fifteen years on Kabakon, an islet of German New Guinea, whence he sends forth the gospel of cocoanut eating, and of sun and cocoanut worship, teaching that to go naked in the sun and eat nothing but cocoanuts is the only road to mental, moral and physical salvation. The idea of the world's population emigrating to the narrow fringes of sandy seashore, where the cocoanut flourishes, is too absurd to need comment. Besides, life should mean something more than lying in the sun and chewing. That is too much like the Indian devotee who spends his time in contemplation, with his gaze fixed upon his navel.

  The cocoanut is a valuable food. I use it constantly, finely ground, with fruit. It is, however, an imperfect food. As I have heretofore shown, it is deficient in iron, as also is fish. This is why those who live mainly on these foods suffer from leprosy and beri-beri.

  In BRAIN AND BRAWN for December, 1913, I published a translation from an article in the Vegetarische Warte, a German vegetarian paper, by G. Staudenmaier, who spent four weeks at Engelhardt's place, and described him as a living skeleton, walking with the aid of a cane, looking seventy-five years of age, suffering from kidney troubles, and instead of living on cocoanuts alone, importing all kinds of delicacies from Germany. I received a letter from Engelhardt dated March 7, in which he protests against this article, yet he practically admits the truth of Mr. Staudenmaier's statements. He admits that he eats all kinds of food besides cocoanuts, but says that since 1899 he has lived altogether for over 800 days on cocoanut alone, in various periods, one of them as long as 188 days, or six months. That is quite different from living on cocoanut alone.