Hippie Food: How Back-to-the-Landers, Longhairs, and Revolutionaries Changed the Way We Eat by Jonathan Kauffman
Book Review
Hippie Food: How Back-to-the-Landers, Longhairs, and Revolutionaries Changed the Way We Eat by Jonathan Kauffman.
I read this book as background to a PHIT work-in-progress on organics.
Specifically, the background to the story of Texas being the first state to have a verifiable, and trusted, Organic Label.
Historians point to three historical trends leading to the organics movement—
1)religious traditionalists and the emphasis of natural food,
2) the food cranks of the turn of the 19th century who, along with the progressives, criticized the food monopolies and the adulteration of natural food, and
3) the counterculture movement of the 60s—the hippies. The hippie food critique runs from the original opposition of pesticides to a complete critique of the industrial and oligopolistic food of mid-century America. Basically, mainstream food was too white, too bland, too corporate.
Hippie Food: How Back-to-the-Landers, Longhairs, and Revolutionaries Changed the Way We Eat concerns itself with the third leg of organic food history
Here are the Texas connections to counterculture hippie food.
Silent Spring by Rachel Carson and Diet for a Small Planet by Lappe were the literary holy books for the movement. Francis Moore Lappe is a Fort Worth Texas girl. Yee- Haw!2
When the first counterculture folks were looking for pesticide free and whole grains, one of the few places available was Arrowhead Mills in West Texas. Frank Ford was an early organic farmer who wisely didn’t think pesticides were good for people or for the soil or for the environment. Arrowhead was the place to get your pesticide free oats and grains.
Austin was one of the centers in the pioneering Food Co-op scene. Wheatsville is portrayed as a shining example of the new “food” economy.
What is missing from this book is the Hightower contribution, which is the historical element that PHIT is trying to reclaim. The Hightower TDA provided the first certifiable organic label, along with offering strong government agency support of farmer’s markets, and, of special interest to me, official promotion of an emerging Southwestern and fine dining cuisine.
The hippie countercultural food movement of the 1970s, as I see it, was a collective effort to come up with a healthier and a more environmentally responsible cuisine for the twentieth century and beyond. Initially, it was simple and straightforward, and well…boring. It required no special equipment, but you did have to pay attention to the food and the provenance of the food. The recipes, even the most elaborate, were easy for beginning cooks to tackle, as long as they could shake off a reflexive fear of millet.
Kauffman explains that the 1969 trope “the personal is political” was the guiding principle. “Food choices were political. Buying vegetables grown without chemical fertilizers and pesticides became a political act. Shopping at a community-owned market became a political act. Making your own bread or yogurt could be seen as a political act: a denial of a morally bankrupt, capitalist system that prized profits over nutrition.”
Kaufmann does his homework. He tracks down all the originators…macrobiotic and brown rice, brown bread and the Tassajara recipe book, tofu as the original political food, and the back to land, grow-your-own-food movement. Kaufmann traces each of these down to their roots and talks about the adventures and struggles of the new hippie cuisine.
It wasn’t easy. For instance, where, in America was one supposed to find brown rice. Honestly, who sold brown rice? The answer was Lundberg and, full disclosure, I can still buy Lundberg brown rice at my local Central Market grocery store.
Reading this book was a trip down memory lane for me. I went through most of those stages. The one I missed was back to the land. People 8 years younger didn’t go through this process. But, at the time, for me, it was fun. And educational. It was a sea change.
But the chapter that really stirred up some ghosts was the last chapter on Food Co-ops, which details the background and the story of Wheatsvile.
Full disclosure…I worked in the Avenues Co-op, unpaid, as a buyer for spices and herbs. And I worked on the Rag, unpaid, during the time that Bill Meacham was following and reporting on the Austin Community Project. The Co-op movement was fairly extensive in those days—housing, food, an auto repair co-op, and a few other things as well that I can’t even remember.
“Wheatsville, like thousands of buying clubs and food co-ops that had appeared across the country between 1969 and 1978, had every intention to reform America’s food system and bring good food—whole grains and pulses, fresh organic vegetables—to the masses. The store’s founders and customers, though, thought that was just the beginning. Like so many of this new wave of co-ops, Wheatsville’s secondary goal was to establish a more human-centered economy outside the bounds of the current one, corrupted and exploitative as it was.”
It started out with a food buying coop. “Organizers of the Milo Minderbinder Memorial Food Co-op, named after a character in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, bought food wholesale from railroad salvagers and drove a truck to the San Antonio produce market to pick up apples, tomatoes, dry beans, and onions.”
It was replaced by a “food conspiracy that narrowed its focus to healthy, ecologically sound natural foods.”
And then Woody Hills food co-op was opened. Over the next few years,
The Austin Community Project created one of the country’s most ambitious, interlocking local cooperative networks.
The ACP ultimately was overly ambitious and the movement faded, but it is one of Austin’s endearing legacies. Wheatsville continues to exist as a local institution.
John Mackey worked on the peripheries of the Food Co-op scene. He decided he could steal the idea, privatize it, and make some big bucks. He was right. He did make some big bucks. And he claims credit for his big ideas. But folks who read the PHIT substack know better.
Ah, memories! As a Baylor student I read Lappe, became vegetarian, and joined a Waco food buying co-op (we drove to Austin for pick-up). In Boston I joined the Hungry Grad Students (HGS) Co-op, then the Boston Food Co-op. Then, here to Austin in '76, shopping at Woody Hills, then joining Wheatsville, doing my hours there, helping move it up to Guadalupe, serving on its board, and working with Hightower when TDA certified Wheatsville as Organic Retail. Good times!
Yum!