I've ended up with the responsibility to write an article on the history of
counterculture food. As this is not my strength, I thought I'd ramble a bit and
ask for your comments-- positive and negative.

"Counterculture food" includes a wide group of individuals and groups opposed
to corporate agriculture, corporate manufacturing of food, perceived government
protection and subsidy of corporate food producers, and the globalization of
food in general.

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?

Andy Smith

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

1. environmental and sustainability issues
2. health and nutrition issues
3. legal/political issues
4. ethical/moral issues
5. science/technology issues
6. globalization issues
What obvious issue areas have I left out?

Religious ones. The whole Western "alternative" lifestyle-politics
movement, and its nutritional wing that started as "food reform",
came out of the importation of Hindu ideas into Europe in the late
19th century, in Germany and Austria in particular. James Webb's
"The Occult Establishment" will give you an idea of the cultural
matrix, though it says relatively little about food per se. This
stuff is still very much alive in certain subcultures, the Rudolf
Steiner cult in particular ("biodynamic agriculture") and, over here,
the Findhorn crowd (invoking Indian tutelary deities to boost the
growth of your vegetables).

The issues you list developed historically as secular rationales for
practices that started out motivated by pure blind religious dogma.

======== Email to "j-c" at this site; email to "bogus" will bounce ========
Jack Campin: 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU; 0131 6604760
http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/purrhome.html food intolerance data & recipes,
Mac logic fonts, Scots traditional music files and CD-ROMs of Scottish music.

"ASmith1946"

What obvious issue areas have I left out?

Union v. management? (you may have it in mind for one of your headings, but
it isn't specifically mentioned.)

On 05 Nov 2003 21:46:25 GMT, (ASmith1946) wrote:

What obvious issue areas have I left out?

Economics. Both cost of production and the final cost of food. Poor
people don't have the luxury of choosing free-range, organic,
no-additive, stone-ground, home-grown, socially-responsible and
environmentally-friendly foods.

Frogleg nattered on
m:

On 05 Nov 2003 21:46:25 GMT, (ASmith1946) wrote:

What obvious issue areas have I left out?

Economics. Both cost of production and the final cost of food. Poor
people don't have the luxury of choosing free-range, organic,
no-additive, stone-ground, home-grown, socially-responsible and
environmentally-friendly foods.


Well, since poor people are inherently inferior, anyway, the socially
aware and progressive can dismiss them as mere beasts.

in article , bogus address at
wrote on 6/11/03 11:01 AM:



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

1. environmental and sustainability issues
2. health and nutrition issues
3. legal/political issues
4. ethical/moral issues
5. science/technology issues
6. globalization issues
What obvious issue areas have I left out?

Religious ones. The whole Western "alternative" lifestyle-politics
movement, and its nutritional wing that started as "food reform",
came out of the importation of Hindu ideas into Europe in the late
19th century, in Germany and Austria in particular. James Webb's
"The Occult Establishment" will give you an idea of the cultural
matrix, though it says relatively little about food per se. This
stuff is still very much alive in certain subcultures, the Rudolf
Steiner cult in particular ("biodynamic agriculture") and, over here,
the Findhorn crowd (invoking Indian tutelary deities to boost the
growth of your vegetables).

The issues you list developed historically as secular rationales for
practices that started out motivated by pure blind religious dogma.

======== Email to "j-c" at this site; email to "bogus" will bounce ========
Jack Campin: 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU; 0131 6604760
http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/purrhome.html food intolerance data & recipes,
Mac logic fonts, Scots traditional music files and CD-ROMs of Scottish music.

Sure, how about those Christians eating pork? I know Jews who like Bacon so
I bet there are Moslems who do to and maybe some of either Abrahamic sect
who actively promote it. There might even be Hindus who like a good rare
fillet steak.

I'd also like to add to the economic side. What about the spice trades? What
about Marco Polo? What about South America? Economics may judge what the
poor eat but the chance for merchants to make cash by introducing foreign
ingredients to a domestic market would have influenced dramatic shifts in
some cultures. Think about the introduction of the tomato to italian
cuisine. I mean, just how did one ingredient alter a cuisine and how
quickly?

J

Counterculture food groups have many divergent interests, but many
cluster around the following overlapping issue areas: [...]
What obvious issue areas have I left out?
Religious ones. The whole Western "alternative" lifestyle-politics
movement, and its nutritional wing that started as "food reform",
came out of the importation of Hindu ideas into Europe in the late
19th century, in Germany and Austria in particular.
Sure, how about those Christians eating pork? I know Jews who like
Bacon so I bet there are Moslems who do to and maybe some of either
Abrahamic sect who actively promote it. There might even be Hindus
who like a good rare fillet steak.

Andy was asking about a specific cultural phenomenon that took off
in the twentieth century, not food taboo violations in general. My
mum used to make bacon sandwiches for the kids next door since they
came from a Seventh Day Adventist family and would never otherwise
have tried them, but a counterculture figure she was not.

The things this newsgroup makes you dream about. I came up with a
recipe in my sleep: take one smallish Bible, lard it with rashers
of bacon, wrap in puff pastry and bake in a hot oven. Pity I was
too late to get that into the Futurist Cookbook.


I'd also like to add to the economic side. What about the spice
trades? What about Marco Polo? What about South America? Economics
may judge what the poor eat but the chance for merchants to make
cash by introducing foreign ingredients to a domestic market would
have influenced dramatic shifts in some cultures.

For this particular shift, the soya business is the most relevant one
(though they didn't get into the act until after WW2 and started in
the US, whereas countercultural food started decades earlier in Europe).

======== Email to "j-c" at this site; email to "bogus" will bounce ========
Jack Campin: 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU; 0131 6604760
http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/purrhome.html food intolerance data & recipes,
Mac logic fonts, Scots traditional music files and CD-ROMs of Scottish music.

delurking

just a though in passing... under the categories of
legal/political/globalizaton issues or ethical/moral issues, I would think
food rationing/distribution would develop as a sub-topic.

Morgan S.


"ASmith1946" wrote in message
...
I've ended up with the responsibility to write an article on the history
of
counterculture food. As this is not my strength, I thought I'd ramble a
bit and
ask for your comments-- positive and negative.

"Counterculture food" includes a wide group of individuals and groups
opposed
to corporate agriculture, corporate manufacturing of food, perceived
government
protection and subsidy of corporate food producers, and the globalization
of
food in general.

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?

Andy Smith

Morgan Sheridan wrote:

delurking

just a though in passing... under the categories of
legal/political/globalizaton issues or ethical/moral issues, I would think
food rationing/distribution would develop as a sub-topic.

Morgan S.


"ASmith1946" wrote in message
...

I've ended up with the responsibility to write an article on the history
of counterculture food. As this is not my strength, I thought I'd ramble a
bit and ask for your comments-- positive and negative.

"Counterculture food" includes a wide group of individuals and groups
opposed to corporate agriculture, corporate manufacturing of food, perceived
government protection and subsidy of corporate food producers, and the globalization
of food in general.

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

"ASmith1946" wrote

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

snip

I agree with Bob that "counterculture" needs to be defined,
particularly with regard to time frame. I remember a vegetarian
cookbook published by high school students in the late 60s that had
nothing to do with today's flavors of vegetarianism, but was part of a
"boycott meat" protest when prices rose abruptly. As 'The Wild One'
had it: "What are you rebelling against, Johnny?" "Whadaya got?"

Also, with Bob, one might say that virtually *any* diet or food fad is
counter to the prevailing norm. You might want to take a look at
"Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century"

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg...67036?v=glance

As I recall, it covers more than that restricted time period.

You've picked a pretty wide-ranging subject. :-)

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.

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.

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?

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

(ASmith1946) nattered on
:

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.

Ya gotta love those ivory-tower suburban elitists.

In article ,
bogus address wrote:

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

On 12 Nov 2003 11:36:09 GMT, (ASmith1946) wrote:

Counterculture food started in America during the late sixties and early
seventies.

I don't think so. Note Pastorio's mention of Kellogg and Graham, who
were certainly "counterculture" in America in the 19th century. Here's
an interesting reference:

http://www.foodreference.com/html/artgranola.html

The counterculture food movement disappeared in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Again, this depends on your definitions. You mention that many 60s
"counterculture" values later became absorbed into the mainstream. And
that current movements having to do with food have shifted to
distribution, corporate farming, food and animal additives, and GM
concerns. Concerns may change or become part of the norm, but
counterculture doesn't disappear; it mutates.

It seems to me there have been food-related "counterculture" movements
probably since the first cave dweller stuck a raw haunch of antelope
on the fire and tried to convince its family that cooked was good.

That is, counterculture food movements aren't a 1960s (or 1860s)
phenomenon, but an continuum of changing positions with regard to
nutrition, health, economics, religion, agriculture, and many of the
other factors you mention.