From the ground up
What’s the most enduring legacy of the cultural rebellions of the 1960s? Civil rights, feminism, ecological awareness, gay marriage, legal marijuana?
An engaging new book by San Francisco Chronicle food writer Jonathan Kauffman, “Hippie Food,” makes the case that the most durable contribution of the counterculture can be found in your kitchen. By uncovering the surprising histories behind the domestication and widespread adoption of foods once considered the exotic province of cultists and communards — including tofu, whole-grain bread and organically grown produce — Kauffman pays tribute to a generation of practical minded idealists who forever changed our relationship to what we eat.
Inevitably, the first chapters of “Hippie Food” are California-centric. With its juxtaposition of temperate weather, large areas of arable land, proximity to the cultures of the Pacific Rim, and tolerance of eccentric lifestyles, the Golden State proved to be the perfect incubator for early pro---
ponents of “health food” who proved to the Hollywood glitterati that you could celebrate indulgence while still feeling virtuous and minding your waistline.
Kauffman introduces us to memorable characters like Gypsy Boots, né Robert Bootzin, the son of a broom salesman in San Francisco who could stake a legitimate claim to being the original hippie. After watching his brother die of tuberculosis in the 1930s, Boots dropped out of high school and went to Los Angeles, where he fell in with a group of like-minded vagabonds who grew their hair and beards long like Jesus, eschewed meat-eating and extraneous clothing, slept in caves and called themselves the Nature Boys. (Indeed, the song “Nature Boy,” which was turned into a haunting jazz standard in 1948 by Nat King Cole, was composed by one of these vegan Tarzans.) Boots eventually launched a tikithemed temple of fruits and nuts called the Health Hut on Beverly Boulevard, where Angie Dickinson and George Hamilton tucked into rice-flour coffee cakes and the first “smoothies.”
Kauffmann also traces the fascinating journey of William Shurtleff and Akiko Aoyagi, who placed tofu at the center of millions of vegetarian tables in the West after falling in love with the snowy pressed soy curds as Zen students in Kyoto. Like other pioneers profiled in the book, Shurtleff and Aoyagi were motivated not only by genuine passion for the food they were introducing to skeptical eaters, but also by a fear (amplified by bestsellers like Francis Moore Lappé’s “Diet for a Small Planet”) that inefficient use of plant protein as feed for the livestock industry would condemn large swaths of the world’s population to death by starvation.
These Malthusian nightmares turned out to be overblown, but along the way, Shurtleff and Aoyagi developed scalable ways for the home cook (or a co-op chef ) to make tofu and a myriad of other soy products, organized a national network of “soy dairies” and encouraged more mindful enjoyment of food preparation and eating in their own books.
The next stage of the edible revolution was the creation of a coast-to-coast network of buyers’ clubs and co-ops that brought formerly esoteric ingredients like tahini, miso and yogurt to the heartland, while attempting to plant the seeds of a new, more humane society in the collapsing shell of the old.
Having grown up in a left-wing Mennonite household in Indiana, Kauffman has obvious affection for the young, improvising cooks who elevated the leaden lentil cuisine he grew up with out of its stodgy brown dolors in the ’70s, laying a foundation for the emergence of world-class, locally sourced restaurants like Chez Panisse and Greens, which in turn inspired a new generation of chefs like Elisabeth Prueitt and Jamie Oliver. The heroes of “Hippie Food” are tireless in their quests to rediscover or reinvent traditional ways of coaxing vivid flavors from the humblest of ingredients. It’s hard to read more than a few pages without feeling compelled to do something — whether it’s digging a plot for lettuce in your backyard, taking a trip to the farmers’ market or busting out an old tamari-stained copy of Mollie Katzen’s “Moosewood Cookbook” to resurrect your mushroom moussaka.
“Hippie Food” is also enlivened by Kauffman’s ear for the music of language, as when he describes the now-ubiquitous puffed rice cakes developed by macrobiotic entrepreneurs as “styrofoam-light crumbly discs that seem to radiate anticalories.” Only in the last section of the book, which focuses on the endless internal squabbling in co-ops committed to consensus decision-making and grueling sessions of collective self-criticism, does his infectious exuberance flag a bit.
“Food for people, not for profit” didn’t turn out to be a sustainable business model for aging revolutionaries who had mortgages and their kids’ college tuition to pay, but the innovations they unleashed dramatically changed how we eat for the better. No one who walked into a health-food store in 1950 to see dusty bottles of vitamins and laxatives and cans of Seventh-day Adventist meat substitute would have dared predict the emergence of the thriving landscape of organic growers, urban green markets, artisanal bakeries, farm-to-table restaurants, and supermarkets stocked to the ceiling with Middle-Earth imports like quinoa and kombucha that we take for granted today.
The Whole Foods Market at Haight and Stanyan streets — around the corner from the former location of Far-Fetched Foods, one of the first organic produce markets in the country — is a testament to both the cultural transformation wrought by the trailblazers in Kauffman’s book and the limits of what they were able to achieve. Further enriching corporations like Amazon was certainly not the goal of the co-op volunteers and Black Muslim bakers who woke before dawn to put in 16-hour shifts. Dismantling capitalism, one adzuki-bean pie at a time, was. As Kauffmann puts it succinctly, “The revolution failed. The revolution succeeded.”
Steve Silberman is the author of “NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity.” Email: books@sfchronicle.com