ASmith1946 wrote:

Thanks Bob.

Counterculture food started in America during the late sixties and early
seventies. At its roots were the work of luminaries, such as Adelle Davis
(Let's Eat Right to Keep Fit), J. I. Rodale (Organic Gardening and Farming),
James S. Turner (The Chemical Feasts), and Francis Lappe (Diet for a Small
Planet). It's core rejected corporate farming and the corporate food
distribution system with the intent of replacing them with communes and food
co-ops. (Some of America's most famous restaurants emerged from this ferment,
including Alice Water's Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California, and Mollie
Katzen's Moosewood in Ithaca, New York.) There certainly were fads, but this
image of "kooks and nuts" was also intentionally promoted by corporate media to
discredit the movement.

There was a wonderfully hilarious restaurant in New Brunswick, New
Jersey called (get ready!) Manna Fest Station in the late 60's and
early 70's. Running it were deeply uninformed but idealistic communard
hippie types who wanted everybody to eat brown rice and strange Asian
dishes or South American concoctions that smelled like bird cages. My
first wife worked there after we came apart and regaled me with tales
of nasty-sounding dishes of whole grains and unusual fruits and
veggies that they had no idea what to do with but they cooked into
peculiar dishes anyway. They were vegetarians because "It was wrong to
eat things with faces." Except my ex who happily plunged in at my
parents' house for the holidays and ate things, faces notwithstanding

I asked the leader of the pack if the place was making money. He
looked startled. "I don't know," he said. I asked how long he could
support it if it didn't make money. He really hadn't considered it.

I asked why they served what they did and he spent a lot of time and
way too many words explaining that these foods were more ecologically
friendly and more "sustainable." He didn't really know what that
meant, obviously.

The real impetus behind the restaurant and the lifestyle that
accompanied it was a rejection of what their parents had done. It
wasn't so much they were moving towards something as that they were
moving away from something. There was no real intellectual push. No
real philosophical impulsion.

The counterculture food movement disappeared in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
It was partly co-opted by businesses (who defined virtually all processed as
"natural," "organic," "healthful," "fat free," etc.) and partly mutated into
health food stores, macrobiotic diets, popular restaurants, support for the
family farm (such as Community Supported Agriculture), green markets, and
concern for food and hunger issues. Today, store-bought yoghurt, herbal teas,
sprouts and soy products are remnants of this movement.

Some significant other components still survive and are actually
growing. Organic farming is a wider movement than it was just 10 years
ago. Artisanal production of breads, cheeses, beers, liquors and other
foods is increasing. These people are very often the same ones who
tried to walk away from their roots. Now they've decided to go back
further towards their roots when food was grown and prepared more
simply and, according to them, more wholesomely. You can see this
phenomenon in farmers' markets across the country.

During the 1990s, new concerns emerged to recreate the counterculture food
movement: Globalization and genetic engineering. This movement rejects
corporate farming and the corporate food distribution system. It wants to
substitute backyard gardens, local family farms and food co-ops, and promote
laws against genetic engineering, etc.

How does this sound?

I think it too rarefied a vision. An awful lot of the whole
countercultural excitement was just about having fun. It was fun to
play with woks. It was fun to eat raw fish. Joints the size of your
thumb were fun. It was fun to wear gauzy shirts from India. Later, it
was justified on ethical or moral or political grounds. Much of the
whole era was about having a lark.

Look at the Spring 2003 issue of Gastronomica for an article called
"The Political Palate" subtitled "Reading Commune Cookbooks" for a
different viewpoint than mine.

Pastorio

Andy Smith


Andy, I'm afraid I can't get the 60's out of my head when considering
the whole notion of counterculture. I and many others ate a lot of
stupid food and bought a lot of stupid toys and utensils because it
was a kind of trickle-down reaction to genuine issues. We mostly
rejected the past (as does every generation in its own fashion)
because it was the past And we were so much smarter than anybody who
had ever lived before.

We cooked nasty-tasting things in primitive cooking equipment because
it was cool rather than because we were making many statements of
protest. Way up at the rarefied top of the philosophical tree there
may well have been great thinkers pondering universal questions and
conundrums. By the time it filtered down to us, we were eating things
because we had the munchies, not because we were terribly worried
about the plight of farmers in Uganda. The shock of The Great Folk
Music Catastrophe in the late 50's set the stage for everything to be
taken over by amateurs. So we wove bad cloth, threw clumsy pots,
carved embarrassing sculptures, smoked junk weed, embroidered mad LSD
dreams on our shirts and generally misbehaved thinking it was actually
a valid rebellion against, um, something.

We ate Alice B. Toklas brownies and blurted out "profound"
observations about the world and we sang folk songs we had learned in
New York where there are no folks.

I think there's a great deal of plain and simple fashion and fad in
counterculture behavior. Maybe a good and important idea way back at
the beginning, but by the time it hit the streets, it was
questionable, at best. Like Einstein strolling down Paul Robeson Place
in Princeton with his fly open.

I know. This is a good example of the logical flaw of extrapolating

from the particular to the universal.

Counterculture food groups have many divergent interests, but many cluster
around the following overlapping issue areas:

1. environmental and sustainability issues (organic gardening; family farm
vs factory farm, etc.);

2. health and nutrition issues (chemical additives, pesticides; junk food,
fast foods, obesity, etc.);

3. legal/political issues (labeling, approval processes, political power
of food companies, etc.);

4. ethical/moral issues (animal rights, vegetarianism, religion,
humanitarian matters, hunger and malnutrition, food advertising/promotion,

etc.);

5. science/technology issues (GMOs, cloning, etc.);

6. globalization issues (NAFTA, WTO, EU, etc.).

What obvious issue areas have I left out?

To me, this feels like the current picture rather than an overview of
the various movements that ran counter to the prevailing culture's
notions about food and health, etc. Think of the Kelloggs, Graham,
Leibig. Later, McFadden et al. And more recently Euell Gibbons and the
like. Might even tuck Robert Atkins in there. An ungenerous look calls
them faddists. But they were also countercultural and, for better or
worse, helped to shape the futures of the mainstream.

Pastorio

Andy Smith