Hippie Food: How Back-to-the-Landers, Longhairs, and Revolutionaries Changed the Way We Eat by Jonathan Kauffman
If you were a child in the 1970s, you came from a white-bread house or a whole-wheat-bread house. If it was the latter, you remember well the smell of health-food stores. They were often small, with sawdust on the wooden floors, and the odors of blackstrap molasses, vitamin pills, and whole grains in the bulk bins were embedded into the very fibers of the buildings. As a child from a wheat-bread house — and whose first job as a teenager was working in a health-food store — just thinking about that smell makes me long for a sarsaparilla root beer or a Rice Dream ice-cream sandwich, or even a post-grocery-shopping snack of thick toast spread with a swirl of peanut butter that had been ground in the store, so fresh it was still warm.
At some point, health food went mainstream. It was a movement that began as a counterculture rebellion against the mass-produced, additive-enhanced, prepackaged goods that took over grocery stores in the middle part of the 20th century. Now that Amazon owns Whole Foods — which began as a single store in a renovated Austin nightclub in 1980 — you could say that health food has officially sold out to The Man.
When and how did that happen? Where did ideas about health food come from in the first place? And how did American culture go from considering health food to be flavorless, overly chewy, and totally fringe to embracing it (and sometimes even imbuing with moral value the choice to eat it)? San Franciscobased food writer Jonathan Kauffman seeks answers to these questions in Hippie Food: How Back-to-theLanders, Longhairs, and Revolutionaries Changed the Way We Eat. He begins in California in 1958, before going back even further in time. “Los Angeles had been a mecca for health seekers, beautiful people, spiritual radicals, and not a few hucksters for threequarters of a century,” he writes. The area’s “drugless healers,” including chiropractors and naturopaths, had long focused on the “vitality” of food that was raw or minimally processed. They endorsed avoiding flour, sugar, and salt. Kauffman showcases several early food fads, many of which sound indistinguishable from those we see today, such as Arnold Ehret’s “mucusless diet” — consisting of stewed fruits, salads with simple dressings, steamed vegetables, and a rare slice of whole-wheat bread — that was supposed to purge the body of a backup of phlegm, fluid, and other “gunk” that caused inflammation.
Kauffman describes the first vegetarian restaurants of LA, including The Aware Inn and The Back to Nature Health Hut, delving in some detail into the biographies of their proprietors. In this early chapter, Kauffman can sound skeptical yet indulgent both of mainstream mores and the sometimes-outrageous personalities in the health-food movement. He employs a few unusual metaphors and analogies, such as in a passage about the reasoning behind the macrobiotic diet, developed by George Ohsawa in the early 1960s, which depended on the intrinsic yin and yang, or femaleness and maleness, of foods. “Sometimes, Ohsawa’s yang and yin foods actually synced up with traditional Chinese dietary prescriptions, in the same way that you sometimes wave to your next-door neighbor when he’s coming home from a one-night stand and you’re taking your dog out for an early morning run,” Kauffman writes.
As Hippie Food weaves its way past the rise of health-food staples like carob, nutritional yeast, and brown rice and tofu seasoned with tamari, the writing begins to lose its humor, focusing instead on dates, names, and the in-group political squabbles of various farm collectives and food co-op boards. Kauffman writes about farming communes, farmers’ markets, and buyers’ clubs from California through the Midwest, into New York and New England, and down through Texas. He presents a thorough picture of the different kinds of groups and organizations that formed to grow, distribute, and sell natural foods in the United States. Many of the brand names that crop up are familiar to any Whole Foods shopper, including Lundberg Rice, Hain Pure Foods, Arrowhead Mills, Cascadian Farm, and Garden of Eatin’. That many of these brands are now owned by companies like Smucker’s and General Mills stands as proof of the economic influence of health food on corporate America. Cookbooks like Frances Moore Lappé’s Diet for a Small Planet (1971) and The Moosewood Cookbook (1977) by Mollie Katzen played a big role in mainstreaming health food and vegetarianism, which in its early days focused on the protein content of meals using casseroles and loaves that were heavy on beans. Cookbook authors and health-food restaurant chefs learned how to make the food taste better — often relying on flavors from cultures outside of the United States.
Kauffman mentions several times that the healthfood movement largely sprung from white America, and that the food has always been more expensive than conventional groceries, which has given it the reputation as the choice of the privileged. Though health food has blossomed into a multibillion-dollar industry presided over by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, the wealthiest man in the world, it didn’t start out that way. Hippies who gravitated to the health-food movement in the 1960s and ’70s wanted to return to basics — to live collectively, consume ethically, and offer ways for people from all walks of life to be able to cook wholesome meals for their families.