Appetite for Change: How the Counterculture Took On the Food Industry [Second Updated Edition] 9780801471278

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APPETITE FOR CHANGE

APPETITE FOR CHANGE HOW THE COUNTERCULTURE TOOK ON THE FOOD INDUSTRY SE COND UPDATED EDITION

WARREN J. BELASCO

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ITHACA AND LONDON

Copyright© 1 989, 1 993, 2007 by Warren

J. Belasco

A l l rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without pe rmission in writing from the publ i s her. For i n formation, address Corn e l l U n i versity Press, Sage House, 5 1 2 East State Street, Ithaca, New Yo rk 1 4850. F i rst published 1 989 by Pantheon Books Updated E d i tion published, Corn e l l Paperbacks, 1 993 Second Updated E d ition published, Corn e l l Paperbacks, 2007 Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Catalogi11g-i11-P11blicatio11 Data B e lasco, Warren James. Appetite for change : how the counterc u l tu re took on the food i n d ustry I Warren James Belasco. - 2 n d updated ed. p. cm. Includes b i b l iograph ical references and index. ISBN- 1 3 : 978-0-80 1 4-7329-6 (pbk. : a l k. paper) ISBN- 1 0: 0-80 1 4-7329-2 (pbk. : a l k . paper) I. Natural foods i nd ustry- U n i ted States. United States.

3. Subculture-United States.

2 . Food i nd ustry and trade­ 4. Consumers-Un ited States.

I. Ti tle. H D9005 . B 44 2007 338.4' 764 1 3020973-dc22 200602985 1 Cornell U n i versity Press strives mate rials

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use environmentally responsible suppl iers and

the fu l lest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such mate rials

include vegetable-based, low-VOC i n ks and acid-free papers that are recycled, tota l l y chlorine-free, or partly composed of non wood fibers. For further i n formation, visit our website at www.corn e l lpress.corne l l . e d u . Paperback printing

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3

For Sonia, Nathaniel, and Amy

CONTENTS PREFACE TO THE SECOND UPDATED EDITION

1x

PREFACE

PART ONE: REBELLION: THE MAKING OF A COUNTERCUISINE 1. AN EDIBLE DYNAMIC 2. RADICAL CONSUMERISM

IS 29

3. RADICAL THERAPY: THE OPPOSITIONAL IDENTITY

43

4. ORGANIC FORCE: AN ALTERNATIVE INFRASTRUCTURE

68

PART TWO: P ROCESSING IDEOLOGY: THE MORAL PANIC 5. THE ORTHODOX DEFENSE: THE WAR OF THE METAPHORS

Ill

6. THE MESS IN WASHINGTON

13 2

7. THE PRESS: SHIFTING THE CENTER

154

CONT ENTS

PART THREE: MARKETERS: HEALTHY PROFITS 8. OPPORTUNISM IN THE MARKETPLACE

185

9. STRADDLING THE CONTRADICTIONS 10. A HEALTHY FOODS PORTFOLIO 1 1. LOOKING BACKWARD, AND FORWARD ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

VIII

NOTES

259

INDEX

315

257

200 218 2 43

PREFA CE TO THE S E COND UPDATED EDITION

T

h is is one of those book projects that starts as one t h i ng and then becomes somethi ng else. M y work on it began in the early 1 980s, when the radical hopes and trends of the 1 960s had given way to the conservative ascendancy of Ronald Reagan and M argaret Thatcher. I mp ressed and distressed by the apparent de­ feat of the counterculture, I origin a l ly p lanned to look at the recent h istory of health food as a case study i n what cul tural stu dies schol­ ars call the "hegemon ic process" -the way mainstream i nstitu tions confront, handle, and tame subc u l tu ral d issent and deviancy. I n par­ ticular, how does urban-ind ustrial-capital ist society w ithstand and even profit from d iscontent with urban-industrial-capita l ist society? I t was a q uestion that I had a l ready addressed in a book on the early years of the automobile, w h ich first appeared as a tool to enable d is­ gruntled m i d d le-class c i ty people to escape city l i fe and go " back to nature," yet w h ich soon fueled the rise of a powerfu l and, for awh ile at least, h igh ly p rofitable i n d ustry. I n t h is new work, tentatively t i ­ t l e d " Retai l i ng Revolt," I proposed t o examine the s i m i lar fate of blue jeans (origi n a l ly an emblem of working-class resistance to bour­ geois fash ion and culture), rock 'n' rol l ( like b lue jeans, once a means

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D U P DAT E D E DI T I O N

of subc u l tural deviance), and the natural foods movement ( a protest agai nst i n d ustrialized food). I n each case, counterc u l tu ra l confor­ mity was channeled i nto what Thomas Frank calls the "commodified d issent" of "cool" marketers such as The Gap, Ti me-Warner, and Whole Foods.1 M ore or l ess by chance I started with the food chapter, which soon became an entire manuscri pt about the counterc u lture's con­ frontation with the food i n d ustry. I t does seem that many food stud­ ies t h us begin not out of i n trinsic i nterest in the food but i n what food can tell us about someth i ng e lse-gender, labor relations, class, ethnic i dentity, i m peria l ism, or, in my case, capitalist cooptation.2 The original q u estion re mained: how are insurgent i m p u lses red i­ rected i nto soc i a l ly safe consumption? B u t i n the process of i nvesti­ gating t h is case study of the c u l t u re wars, I a lso came t o see that food issues matter i n themselves. And i n the many years since start i ng t h is p roject, I h ave put food at the center of my i n q ui ry i n to the so­ cial, political, and environmental challenges that confront us. My subsequent research h a s focused on the q uestion of w het her the world will be able to feed i tself i n the fut ure, especially i f economic development means that people will consume more meat. This weigh ty issue a lso p reoccupied many radical p ractitioners of what I call the counterc u isi ne, a coherent set of a l ternative food beliefs, practices, and institutions:' L i ke a l l examinations of h istory, my own perspective on t h is story has been condit ioned by my personal context. Th ree periods are particularly i m porta nt here. F i rst, it was i n the late 1960s that I initially encou ntered the health foods movement as part of the greater counterc u l tural insurgency that i n d uced so many Baby Boomers to "go" vegetarian, organic, or even macrobiotic. Second, I wrote most of the original d raft of t h is book during the Reagan era ( 1 98 1 - 1 989), when it was painfu l ly obvious that, despite i ts subver­ sive i m p l ications, the countercuisine was no real match for dominant political and economic institutions. The original preface t h us opens i n 1 989, when the hegemonic process had done much of i ts work. True, pri vate food practices had changed substantial ly thanks to counterc u l tu ra l p ressure, b u t the conservative forces that contro l led the food system-and society in general -were stro nger than ever. Third, and l ast, I am updating this book i n 2006, when the a b i l ity of l i festyle l i beral ism to coexist with pol i tical reaction seems even more obvious. Ir was an article of faith d u ring the Sixties that the personal was

P R E FA C E TO THE S ECO N D UPDAT E D E D I T I ON

political-that by "revol utionizi ng" one's own private l i fe, the con­ scientious rebel woul d a lso transform "the system." But two p ieces from the August 22, 2005, edi tion of the Washington Post underscore the fal lacies i n that basic assumption. A Style section p iece ti tled "Hai l to the Chef" heralds the appointment of the new W h i te House execut i ve chef, Cristeta Comerford-a young F i l i p i no American woman who prepares gourmet low-fat fusion feasts for sum ptuous state d i nners. Such a progressive com bination-female Asian imm igrant p l us healthy transnational cuis ine-would have been uni magi nable in the era of Lyndon Johnson or Rich ard Nixon; even the much-hyped "continental" cuisine of Joh n F. Kennedy's White House came much closer to Calvin Tri l l i n 's overly pretentious "La M aison de la Casa House" than to Comerford 's exq u isite cre­ ations at her p revious resta u rant, Vienna's Le C iel. Yet despite her c u l inary and c u l tu ra l h i pness, Comerford works for the u ltra-regres­ sive George W. B ush, who, l i ke many of his peers, eats a sophisti­ cated, healthy d iet and stays i n great shape, a l l the wh ile wreaking havoc on the planet. Meanwh ile, at the bottom of the same page, i n an article about the antiwar activist C indy Sheehan's protest camp outside of President B ush's ranch i n Crawford, Texas, we find that one can be a maj or poli tical annoyance without being a health food "nut." Despite the "growing echoes of Woodstock," we learn that d iscontent with B us h 's war i n I raq is expand i ng beyond i ts cru nchy countercultu ra l base. As the camp's kitchen manager notes, " t his is not the usual ' n uts and berries' crowd that is more typica l at peace events because 'hard ly anyone asked if we had vegan d ishes last night. ' " The fact that over seven hundred people are eati ng a h igh­ fat menu of Tex-Mex ch icken casserole, meaty l asagna, bacon, hash browns, and buffalo meat is i nterpreted as a clear i nd ication that the antiwar movement m ust be ga i n i ng traction i n mai nstream America. I ndeed, the c u rre nt s i tu ation seems so d i re, and so s i m i l a r to that of the l ate 1 960s - u nj ust war, e nv i ronmental d isasters, mounting protests, corruption i n Washi ngton-that we need to look even more close ly at the mixed fate of that origi nal h i ppy u prising. How d id i t change s o much a n d y e t s o l i ttle?4

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r 's early 1 989 and the televised battle of the cold cereal nug­ gets is heating u p . In one corner is the defend i ng champion, G rape-Nut s , first developed back in 1 898 by health food enth usiast Charles William Post. Si nce 1 986 Post's commercials have featured an apparently married couple tra d i ng i n s u l ts, feigning sur­ prise about the cru nch, and oth erwise personifying the cereal ar­ chetypes of snap, crackle, and pop. In the other corner is the fibrous upstart, Kellogg's utri-Grain Nuggets. I n its televised p i tches we see two wel l-d ressed young professionals who, as eager contenders, have no time for a proper home breakfast. Arriving early at the office, they are grabbing q u ick calories before getting a head start on a n i m portant case. W h i le not as seasoned as Post's screwba l l s, they too banter and gibe. Reflecting her taste for heavy red l i pstick, the bobbed b ru nette eyes an overglazed confection. When her nerdy coll eague shows concern for her long-term health, she wonders, what should she be eating, " n u ts and twigs?" Seeing a chance to move their professional relationship to a more physical level, he offers a spoonfu l of N u tri-Gra i n Nuggets. H m m m , she

PREFACE

2

allows, they' re better than she'd expected. Shrewdly pursuing the analogy, he asks if the same might not be said about himself-to which she replies with a playfu l punch that is only half sisterly. Stay tuned, the ad i mplies; someday these i ncipient lawyers-in­ love may be exchanging one-liners a t home too. Beyond exploiting the battle of the sexes, these commercials hint at the outcome of the recen t food wars. After years of skir­ mishes between industry critics and defenders, it's now clear, as ad people might say, that health is "hot . " For a lexicon Of curren t nutritional concerns, read a box of Grape-Nuts: " natural wheat a n d barley cereal," " n o sugar added," " n o preservatives," "provides 9 vitamins and minerals. " The side panel l ists a dizzying array of essential n utrien ts and reassures us that "all sugars . . . occur nat­ urally. " The back suggests we "top off" our salad or yogurt with the crunchy nuggets and even offers to pay for these wholesome companions-upon receipt of two proofs of purchase. E xtending the synergistic possibilities, a new TV spot urges us to add Grape­ Nuts (and "oooomph") to the hot oatmeal that, we' re told, cuts cholesterol. All of this concern from a General Foods d ivision (Post) whose siblings include Jell-0 and Maxwell House, and that through the Philip Morris kinship network is first cousin to the Marl boro Man, M iller H igh Life, and, as of November 1 988, Vel­ veeta ( Kraft)! Kellogg too has stepped up the "good for you" appeals. Al­ though descended from the nineteen th-century vegetarian healer -and i nventor of granola-John Harvey Kellogg, the modern company generally followed food industry conventions that "nutri­ tion doesn't sell"-until 1 981 , when i t introduced N utri-Grain vitamin-fortified, sugar-and-preservative-free flakes. Now, eight years later, Nutri-Grain serves as what marketers call an "um­ brella," covering a variety of flakes, biscuits ( the answer to Na­ bisco's Shredded Wheat), nuggets, and frozen waffles-with Nutri-Grain Bars and frozen microwaveable bread dough in the works. In addition, Kellogg makes bold health claims for AllBran and boasts new cereals called Nutrific, Pro Grain, Common Sense, and M ueslix-the last a E u ropean-style mix of whole grains, frui ts, and nuts previously found mainly in health food stores and coun tercultural co-ops. 1 Despite these incursions, however, the food giants clearly do not want to be associated with health foods, which are still con­ sidered d reary, if not also dangerous. Thus, a commercial for one

PREFACE

vitamin-fortified cereal shows a large guard dog barking rather fiercely when the announcer offers a wary little girl a bowl of some­ thing "good for you . " Keeping a safe d istance, the ads use i rony and l ighthearted banter to elicit surprise: gee, something can be good for you and taste good. H mmm, better than I'd expected! E xplaining the new "Grape-Nuts tops 'em off" campaign, one advertising executive observes, "People eat oatmeal because they know it's good for them. But most people say it's dull and boring or that it tastes l i ke wallpaper paste . " 2 Like yogurt and salad , the healthy mush apparently needs crunch to bridge the health vs. taste gap. Exploiting the same d ichotomy, Kellogg emphasizes how surprisingly good its healthfu l cereals can taste. (The amaze­ ment works both ways, of course: can such a crispy, flavorful processed food also be wholesome?) Even more clever, the Nutri­ Grain Nuggets commercial associates the competition with fringy health foods. The scarlet-lipped Danish maven's scorn for "nuts and twigs" is a not-so-subtle allusion to Euell Gibbons, the weed­ eating wilderness-survival expert who, tradi ng on his countercul­ tural populari ty, p i tched Grape-Nuts back in the mid-seven ties. Make no m istake, the ad tells us: these nuggets are for well­ tri m med yuppies, not scruffy, back-to-nature yippies. In d rawing such contrasts, these campaigns reflect strong so­ cial ambivalence about food and health. We've changed, but the old conflicts persist. We seem to have come far from the days when fitness was just for faddists. Words like "natura l , " "whole gra i n , " a n d "healthy" can now b e voiced b y respectable Reaganites, not just rad ical vegetarians-but the preferred context is ironic, light, self-deprecating. Health may be hot, but we need to stay cool about it. We're concerned about nutrition, but we don't want to seem too worried. And yet-and yet-we still wonder whether processed foods can really be good for us, hence again the ads' need to feign surprise. But joking aside, can we believe the claims of companies that, along With their "healthy" l i nes, market many other dubious-if not downright dangerous-products? We don ' t know how t o l ive without o r with the food i ndustry. Our curren t confusion has historical roots. One source, I be­ l ieve, is a fu ndamental and long-stand i ng misunderstanding of rad­ ical food reformers-the "nuts" and "flakes" of conventional stereotyping. Although h istorians have examined the food fights of the nineteenth and early twen tieth centuries, l i ttle has been writ­ ten about the latest flare-up , which started in the late 1 960s, when

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PREFACE

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young cultural rebels began to turn against mainstream foodways. Rather than meriting scorn, their rebellion deserves careful recon­ sideration, for it raised i mportant questions about ou r food system and a lso suggested serious alternatives, a coun tercuisine. A coher­ ent set of d ietary beliefs and practices, the countercuisine had three major elements. A consumerist component offered su rvivalist advice and suggested what to avoid, especially processed "plastic" food . Whi le radical consumerism was largely negative, the second, therapeutic component suggested ways to make food more fun­ e.g. , through a delight i n improvisation , craftsmanship, eth n ic and regional cooking. Add ressi ng issues of food production and d istri­ bution, the third element was the organic paradigm, which posited a radically decentralized infrastructure consisting of communal farms, cooperative groceries, and hip restaurants. I n Part 1 , for the sake of analysis, I will treat these parts separately, but in practice they were i nseparable, fused by a shared context-the ecology movement-and by a shared faith in the power of personal deci­ sions to spawn political transformations. In Part 2, I show what happened in the 1970s, when the arbiters of mainstream cuisine-a loose network of respected sci­ entists, government offic ials, jou rnalists, and marketers-con­ fron ted the coun tercuisine. While this food establishment unanimously opposed the most rad ical element, organic agricul­ tu re, i t split over other questions of food safety, especially add i­ tives, cholesterol, and calories. The resultant public squabble was another source of our current confusion, as once-trusted authorities raised concerns without offering comprehensive solutions. Part 3 examines how food marketers have addressed-and reinforced­ our dietary u ncertainties. The story has several d imensions. First, i t examines recent trends i n the way we produce, sell, buy, and, most of all, think about food . As a h istory of ideas, i t shows how h ighly charged notions of "healthy," "natura l , " "fitness," "faddism," and "com­ mon sense" reflect social conflict and economic i n terest. As a generational study i t traces the eating habits of certain "baby boomers" as we evolved from pol itical and cultu ral alienation dur­ ing the Vietnam War to professional-managerial success a decade later. It is thus a food h istory, a cultural commentary, and a per­ sonal memoir. Since I am writing about the counterculture and food , i t seems quite appropriate for me to start out autobiographically. For one

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thing, it seems that just about every book touching on the sixties offers a personal accounting, if not confession . Moreover, as a subject, food virtually demands self-disclosure . Knowing that eat­ ing is i ntensely personal and memorable, writers have long used food as a medium for self-reflection. It is impossible to read M . F. K. Fisher, Gael Greene, or Calvin Trillin without learning a lot abou t both the author and food. Or, at quite another level, think of the six volu mes of remembrances spawned when Marcel Proust chanced to dip a favorite childhood snack-a madeleine­ into a cup of tea! As one of my own hip sou rces observed, food is a strong "edible dynamic" binding present and past, individual and society, private household and world economy, palate and power. It is i n this spirit, though certainly not with Proust's thor­ oughness or skill, that I open with a few personal madeleines. Three of my grandparents were immigrants whose main ties to eastern E u rope were their accents and their food . I don't hear the accen ts anymore, but I still taste the well-simmered flanken, potato kugel, onion rye smeared with chicken fat, and solid, but­ tery cookies. My father's mother made a chopped eggplant hors d'oeuvre that I hated as a five-year-old ( 1 952), but twenty years later a vegetarian cookbook recipe for baba ghanouj zapped me back not just to my grandparents' dark Bronx apartment, but also to our Near E astern roots two thousand years before. Before the Second World War my other grand parents ran Mama-Papa grocer­ ies in non-Jewish neighborhoods of Queens. From their stories abou t l iving over the store, I learned that sel ling food is hard work, and also fu l l of contrad ictions: how else cou ld my kosher grand­ father sell ham? An excel lent cook, my mother's mother suffered from arthritis that slowed her down just as I began, i n the late 1 960s, to appreciate her skills, but even so, on one of her increas­ ingly scarce good days she pulled herself into the kitchen to teach me how to make potato knishes: a little of this, a little of that . . . Now I am the sole keeper of the recipe, for-in second-generation fashion-her daughters never learned , or maybe j ust forgot, what wou ld later be called ethnic cooking. Like most affluent suburban ites in the fifties and early sixties, we ate American at home. I remember especially the red meat: lamb chops, prime rib, London broil , steaks, premium franks, th ick burgers, bacon, kosher bologna and salami-all del ivered to our Long Island doorstep by a much-valued city butcher and, for the most part, requ iring just a qu ick flaming. We must have lived half the year on our patio, for we replaced the portable gril l and

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aluminum furniture almost every year. We also enjoyed the latest conven ience foods: individually wrapped slices of American cheese, fried onions in a pop-top can, toaster waffles, Rice-a-Roni, Mallomars e ncased in clear plastic bubbles. Although we grew to­ matoes, I remember few fresh vegetables. A salad consisted of a solid wedge of iceberg lettuce covered with hard cherry tomatoes, peeled cucum ber slices, and bottled Russian d ressing. We a te lots of potatoes: baked (in foil), mashed ( peeled), chipped ( i n bags), or fre nch fried (defrosted). I remember canned and frozen peas, car­ rots, corn, and string beans, but I don't think I encountered zuc­ chini, okra, or eggplant in any form-fresh or processed-until adulthood . Perhaps we had cabbage (with corned beef), but I doubt broccol i and cauliflower. My mother l iked vegetables but catered to my father, who rejected "rabbit food . " My father, in turn, claimed he became addicted to meat when he was served it three times a d ay duri ng the war. Whatever the cause, no one fel t the need t o defend such a d iet. When m y father suffered a fatal heart attack in 1 967, at age forty-seven, his doctor saw no signifi­ cance in the fact that he had been overweight. Cholesterol was not yet a household word. For reasons that had more to do with undergraduate life at M ichigan than with my father's death, my tastes began to change at about that time. Like a million other potheads with the midnight munchies, I scarfed anything: M&Ms and F iddleFaddles, cinna­ mon bagels and baklava, pizza and felafel, champagne and Ripple. I learned to cook in one of Ann Arbor's New Deal-era co-op houses, where I made d inner once a week for forty hungry males. The menu was pretty much greasy meat and potatoes, with pre­ mixed white cake and margarine-sugar icing for dessert, but there were momen ts of stoned whimsy, as when my friend Hal and I i nj ected the baked potatoes with green dye or, in a plea for "nat­ u ral" honesty, ate the overdone beef slabs with our fingers. Why not, we proposed, d i tch the boring menu and messy chores alto­ gether and eat just millet? No one laughed. Once I innocently forgot to add the customary ten-pou nd hunk of ground beef to my lasagna, thereby inviting a violent protest that clearly underscored, in my moralistic m ind, the fetishistic power of meat. Hal later provoked a similar reaction when, for reasons of economy and cu­ riosity, he served u p octopus salad instead of the scheduled tu na fish. Food, we discovered, had considerable shock value. Graduating in 1 969, I married Hal's sister, Amy, and we

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moved to Manhattan. On our own for the first time, we ate any­ thing as long as i t was cheap. Already stereotyped by hair, music, fashion, and politics, we felt exposed enough without the "health food n u t" label, which was beginning to be applied to some of the freaks around us. B u t we evolved anyway. We got three fondue pots as wed d i ng gifts. I n the Cuban-Chinese restaurants of our Upper West Side neighborhood we discovered fried bananas, es­ presso, and flan. Returning from a tour as a VISTA volu nteer in the Southwest, Hal i n troduced us to oxtai l soup, tacos, and home brew. In the spring of 1 970, after a tense New Haven rally we were served brown rice, raisins, and veggies in a Yale courtyard ; I re­ member feeling comforted-both by the free meal and by the Gothic hug. Returning i n 1971 to M ichigan for graduate school, we l ived in a group house, where we met our first macrobiotic. With h is mystical jargon and special food cache, he seemed too self­ righteous and i nconvenient. But within two years, we too were vegetarians, although not macrobiotic. As meat got more expensive than it was worth, we began to pay attention to others who had already made the change. Back east my sister- in-law Leni was provoking loud d i n ner table arguments by refusing meat and cham­ pioning granola; when her you nger sister Marty defected too, family d i nners became tense indeed. My own sister, C lare-raised, I seem to remember, on a steady diet of scrambled eggs and fried bologna-now subsisted on bulgur and lentils as she toured the Rockies in an old VW minibus with Dave from upper Michigan, where vegeta rians were scarcer than surfers. My closest cousin , Chick, was quoting Tolstoy and deploring the corned beef we once craved as kids. Someone told us about Frances Moore Lappe and protei n complementarity. Another gave us Uncle John's Bread Book. We got an old USDA pamphlet on home pickling and bought our first dozen Ball jars. Mastering the pressu re cooker, blender, can­ ning kettle, and sourdough starter, we felt free, grounded , and right . For company, we now served soybean stroganoff instead of chicken with almonds; at Christmas we gave out pints of jam made from berries we'd picked in July. I n Ann Arbor i t was getting easier to eat this way. Several of the dorms and housing co-ops now offered vegetarian options. The new Sikh restaurant served crispy vegetable tempura and curried squash soup . Volu n teer cashiers at the food co-op (opened in 1 970) toted up whatever price you wrote on the bag of grains that you

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weighed you rself. At the rad ical commune with the loud music near campus you cou ld get you r frui ts and vegetables really cheap -if you got you r weekly order in on time and helped with the bagging. If you stuck around summers you could get a free plot i n a commun i ty garden and grow your own . I n one fading photo from 1 973, Amy and I grin proudly amidst our corn patch-our first and best crop ever. Our parents doubted the beans and grains theory but fel t relieved that at least we ate cheese. That same year, how­ ever, someone accidentally mixed fi re retardant in dairy cattle feed; like everyone e lse who l ived in M ichigan at that time, we still don't know the full effects of that contami nation. I n 1 974 we moved to Washi ngton, D . C . , and immediately scouted the food supply. Safeway and Giant owned the town, but the best co-op was said to be run by a col lective of N icaraguan revolutionaries; they cleared out at the end of the decade, and the place later reopened as a French bistro, befitting the gen trification of that Adams-Morgan neighborhood . Other exiles arrived- E thi­ opians, Indoch i nese, Salvadorans, Afghans, Jamaicans, Cubans­ all making O.C. a much more interesting place to eat. The farm­ ers' market near our Capitol Hill apartmen t was pretty expensive, so we tried growing our own, which greatly annoyed our landlord -probably, we concluded, because he worked for the CIA. But the prod igious eggplants and peppers did impress our black neigh­ bors, who were the only other people to grow food out front. In 1 979 we bought a house in semihip Takoma Park and were able to go organic m peace. Somewhere in the early 1 980s the dinner table schism at fam­ ily reu n ions began to mend. The arguments about feeding the hungry in I nd ia, the perils of sugar, and the latest chemical threat continued, as did the ritualized barbs, but at least we all ate to­ gether. The carnivores tried the tamari-tahini salad dressing and we n u ts sampled the admittedly delicious roast beef. Soon the family food fights stopped altogether. Perhaps we were all tired of hearing the same old questions and giving no good answers. Since the d iscussion j ust wasn' t going anywhere , why ruin d inner? We were becoming more alike anyway: the regulars were eating less meat and the vegetarians were eating more chicken and fish. And the kids of the 1 960s were becoming the parents of the 1 980s, with our own d inner table struggles and accommodations. At our house, homemade granola gave way to the commercial vitamin and bran­ fortified varieties. We bought our grains, tofu , and eight-grain

P R E FACE

bread from the Takoma co-op, our milk, cereals, and plastic wrap from the conglomerate. We kept chemicals out of our garden, but grew more flowers than food. I n summer, it seemed easier to buy organic produce from the pricey local farmers; the rest of the year, like everyone else, we got it from California, Mexico, and, groan, Chile. We stil l u sed ou r pressure cooker and Recipes for a Small Planet, but we a lso stocked frozen pizza and chicken nuggets, and on special occasions, I took my daugh ter Sonia out for fast food ; while she savored her burger and fries, I scavenged the not-so-bad salad bar. Having shared my memories, perhaps I've j arred your own. I suspect that some readers will recognize the story-if not all the details, then at least the plot: first, a bountiful and complacent time when we didn't worry; then a stressful but energetic time of worry and change; then confusion and compromise. But, you might ask, what's so special about this? How significan t are these memories? So far this story sounds simply like another tale of growing up. This is i ndeed the implicit theme of many embar­ rassed recollections of the Woodstock generation . Haven't I just described the classic life cycle: i nnocence, rebe ll ion, "maturi ty" ? Where' s the larger d rama I promised-the edible dynamic, the connections between palate and power? I think there's much more to the story, but to get at it, memory must give way to h istory-qu ite a different way of recalling the past. Personal memory tends toward the archetypal-the u niversal , transcendent, timeless, "that's the way it is. " Selective and self-comforting, such archetypes help us get over the past, to for­ give and, u ltimately, forget ou r youthful d reams and mistakes. Since, accordi ng to the archetype, we all sow our wild oats (or brown rice) and then "grow u p , " we might as well accept what we did and get on with life. If we' re confused and compromised now, well, that's life too. H istory, on the other hand, is less accepting. Seeking u nderstanding rather than comfort, history asks tougher questions: Why did we act that way? Did we have to? Could we have acted d i fferently? Did things have to turn out the way they 9 d i d ? Do we have to act this way now? Being personal, my own memories of the late 1 960s and early 1 970s are now hopelessly compromised by selective amnesia and nostalgia, so i n researching this project I've rel ied much more heavily on the u nderground newspapers, cookbooks, guides, and catalogs of that period. Of course, as any historian must acknowl-

P R E FACE

edge, my p resent interpretation of those florid and feverish sources will be colored by my own experiences and i n terests, but I have worked hard to reconstruct the thi nking and atmosphere of that traumatic and exciting time. This reconstruction, in turn , p u ts my own dietary experiences in a cultu ral and political context that I was only dimly aware of as I l ived it; D iggers, People's Park, the New Left, Vietnam, Earth Day, feminism, the ethnic revival , R ichard N ixon, Gary Snyder-al l had a lot t o d o with what was goi ng on in the kitchens of Ann Arbor, New Haven, Berkeley, and many other hip student zones. I ndeed, I've fou nd that rather than j ust being s i l ly or perverse-as our parents and skeptical peers probably thought-we were cooking up somethi ng quite serious, ambitious, and, yes, radical : an alternative food system with its own ideology, s taples, and supply lines, a countercuisine. While a t the time we were only semiconscious of what we were doing, i n h i ndsight I see how right many of the intuitions were: the need to align private action with planetary needs; the d istrust of chemicals and technology; the resanctification of natu re, com m u n i ty, and tradition; the ecological and moral qualms about meat; the enthusiasm for small farms and organ ic methods; the i n trinsic delight in whole foods; the sense that a better society might have to be built literally from the grass roots. Yet, even with Thoreau a n d G a n d h i on ou r s i d e , w e failed t o change the world­

"healthy" foods, the supermarket is an additive minefield , processors are consolidating rapidly, the farm bel t is a disaster area, pesticides are out of control, and we reek with contradictions l ike everyone else. Later i n my narrative, I will blame much of the present mess on the quasi-organ ized food establishment. But part of the failure s tems from the coun terculture's original weaknesses: the d ruggy vagueness, the lack of follow-through , the new-convert insensitiv­ i ty to "straight" culture, the overestimation of ou r power and the u nderestimation of the establishment's . Worst of all, we d id not study our case clearly enough so that we'd have our facts straight a t the family d i n ner table. When the inevitable questioning, skep­ ticism, and ridicule came, we were u nprepared . Removed from i ts supportive bohemian enclaves, the coun tercuisine was highly vul­ nerable to counterattack by the patriarchal powers who controlled -and still control-the nation's food supply. The moral panic (Part 2) and market exploitation (Part 3) were partly our own fault. We were talking about the right things but we d idn't always know what we were talking about. o r even ourselves-very m uch. Desp i te a l l the new

10

P R E FACE

Of course, since the p roblems are still there, there may stil l b e time to get the case right. This book may b e a rather e laborate way of reviving an old d i n ner table debate, but we still need to eat, and there's much to fight about.

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REBELLION: THE MAKING 0 F A COUNTER­ CUISINE

I AN EDIBLE DYNAMIC

I

f French gourmand Anthelme Brillat-Savarin ( 1 755 - 1 826) was right and we are what we eat, then what does that make us? M ore than a m ixture of n utrients, food is a metaphor for what we l ik e most or l east about our society. To marshal sel f­ satisfaction, mainstream politici ans use reassuring i mages l i ke "Mom and apple p ie," "m il k and hon' e y," "bringing home the bacon," "meat and potatoes," "a chicken i n every pot," gri ts, j e l ly beans, and pork rinds. Conversely, social critics may consider such sta ples " u nheal thy," "poisonous," or "ju nk." I ndeed, t hroughout American h istory, food fights h ave often accompanied grass roots political struggles. Thus, i n the fiercely conten tious J ac ksonian period ( the 1 830s), radical vegetarians resisted mai nstream medical authorities (who advised a h eavy, meat-based diet). The critique of processed foods d uring the P rogressive era ( 1 900-19 1 4) m i rrored widespread concern about i rresponsible corporations and d anger­ ous urban-industrial con d iti ons. And in the J o h nson-Nixon years ( late 1 960s-early 1 970s), the rediscovery of organic foods and ho­ listic healing accompanied the ecology movement, wh ich was i tself

R E B E LL I ON : T H E M A K I NG OF A COUNT E R C U I S I N E

16

a reaction against the wholesale destruction of nature and tradi tion both here and in Southeast Asia. ' To be sure , when the first hippies wandered i nto health food stores a round 1 966 they p robably were more interested i n cheap exotica than in political advice. I ndeed , you ng bohemians often shared the conven tional view of "health food nuts" as hypochon­ d riacs who d ipped desiccated wheat germ crackers into yeasty car­ rot j uice cocktails. In turn , these genteel, middle-aged health seekers tended to look askance at the hairy, blue-jeaned "freaks" searc h i ng for hallucinogenic treats, not sound advice. The veterans often hoped to treat specific d iseases and ailments, but the new­ comers were n ' t after medical cures. You ng, healthy, well-bred , few considered d isease to be an imminent or even remote p ros­ pect. While the nuts resisted the ravages of aging, the freaks fel t more a fflicted b y their "sick" society. Still, differences aside, the older generation did have refresh­ i ngly i rreverent perspectives w share with the hip tou rists. Ventur­ i ng i nto a health food store i n late 1 968, the San Francisco Express Times's food advisor Barbara Garson ( "grandma shulma n " ) as­ sumed the manager would be another one of those "proverbial l ittle old ladies in tennis shoes . " Yet ih explaining why Garson should not eat sugar, the manager recoun ted the sordid role of U . S. refineries in Cuba since the turn of the century. P reviously wary of health food "cu lts, " Garson was pleased-and surprised­ that honey, whole wheat, soy noodles, organic raw milk, u nusual herbs, and other health food staples cou ld have a progressive con­ text. 2 Other freak explorers of the health food u nderground re­ ported similar discoveries: dusty copies of E uell Gibbons's 1 962 survival guide, Stalking the Wild Asparagus; hard-to-find works by critics Adelle Davis, Beatrice Trum H u n ter, and Rachel Carson­ all d ismissed as crackpots and cranks by mainstream authorities; complete sets of Organic Gardening and Farming, Prevention, and other publications by the much-maligned but indefatigable J. I . Rodale; and assorted pamphlets with utopian, spiritual, and dietary guidance. Writers of such advice commonly d ismissed technocratic experts, worshiped nature, warned of impending d isaster, and, in suggesting solu tions, tended to see connections, to think i n whole systems, not parts. I n short, the health food stores offered holistic i nformation that might be called protoecological. The word "ecology" i tself was not much used before 1 969, when the events at Berkeley's People's Park signaled a major

AN E DI B L E DYNA M I C

"greening" of the cou nterculture ; at that poin t the trickle of h i p visitors t o t h e health food underground swelled into a steady stream. Before 1 969, however, few freaks gave much serious thought to food , healthful or otherwise-except perhaps for the Diggers.

FOOD AS MEDIUM

L was still producing daily surprises, a yellow bus dubbed the

ate one afternoon i n October 1 966, when the Haigh t-Ashbury

Yel low Submarine p u l led up to a group of freaks lounging in the Panhandle and u nloaded a scavenged feast of day-old bread, tossed green salad , tu rkey stew, and apples. Yelling " Food as medium," the anonymous submariners-dressed i n monk costumes-also handed out m imeographed sheets crammed with political and phil­ osophical speculation. These "Digger Papers" were features i n what became regular "Feeds" ; their aim, accordi ng to Digger E m­ mett G rogan, was as much to teach as to feed-to use food as a medium to develop "collective social consciousness and social ac­ tion. " The Diggers were in fact so concerned that the medium not obscure the message that they made it hard for the hungry to reach the meal. Thus, to hammer home the poin t that the food was "free because it's yours , " the bus would cruise by several times, delib­ erately teasing the waiti ng crowd into a mini-food riot; sometimes the stew container lids were screwed on especially tight, again forcing the hungry to move out of a state of passive receptivity. And to reach their meal, people had to walk through a large yellow woode n F ra me of Reference-thus "changing their frame of ref­ erence as they d i d . " Such theatrics were soon elaborated i n a "free store" decorated with empty window frames, where customers seeking newly l iberated food and clothes were greeted with signs such as, "If someone asks to see the manager, tell him he's the manager. " 3 The Diggers were by no means the first to use the d inner table as a springboard-in the Diggers' case trampoline might be more apt-for consciousness raising. The name i tself had deep roots. I n part it came from the seventeenth-centu ry E nglish levelers who, protesting i nsensitivity to the poor, planted in the com­ mons of towns and d istributed the food free. Also, it alluded to California's Digger Indians, memorialized i n Ruth Benedict's Pat-

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R E B E L L I ON : T H E MAKING OF A COUNT E R C U I S I N E

terns of Culture, a book well known to the neotribal cou nterculture. I n 1 934 Benedict had written that the Diggers were ignorant of "the i nsides of tin cans and the things for sale at butcher shops " ; instead they had subsisted off "the health o f the desert"-includ­ i ng roots roasted over mesquite. The D igger Feeds also reflected the role of food in 1 960s activism: the symbolic importance of i n terracial dining in sit-ins at segregated res taurants; the Quaker­ led fasts against the war; the consumer boycotts in support of lettuce and grape pickers-the exploited subjects of Edward R. M urrow's 1 960 documentary, Harvest of Shame. 4 But precedents aside, the Diggers made one critical contribution: they put food at the cen ter of an activist program based on an emerging ecological consc10usness. While other prophets-both stoned and straight-were pre­ dicting a leisure-based postindustrial paradise, the Digger Papers sounded a distinctly somber note. Industrialization was a battle with 19th century ecology to win breakfast at the cost of smog and insanity. Wars against ecology are suicidal. The lJ.S. standard of living is a bourgeois baby blanketfor executives who scream in their sleep. No Pleistocene swamp could match the pesti­ lential horror of modern sewage. No children of White Western Progress will escape the cries ofpeople forced to haul their raw materials.

18

Anticipating an i mminent collapse of an u rban-industrial civiliza­ tion awash i n garbage, the Diggers articulated a stark s u rvivalist strategy: cut back, clean up, and clear out. Get back to basics­ l ike feeding the hungry or, better still, growi ng you r own . I n "Sounds from t h e Seed-Power Sitar, " one Digger welcomed a "re­ turn to the land" as a way "to straighten our heads in a natural e nvironment, to straighten our bodies with healthier foods and Pan's work, toe to toe with the physical worl d . " Moving beyond these therapeutic benefits, the author sketched a decen tralized, postapocalyptic u topia nourished by a hip food network: i n the cities free s tores and co-ops would feed the hungry with food grown by city gardeners and nearby communal farms. While con­ ventional civilization crumbled, this alternative supply system would i nsure "the healthy, organic, harmonious evolution of the Tribe. " 5

AN E D I B L E DYNAM I C

For the Diggers, the environmental crisis was both worldwide and very local : acting as what Charles Perry calls a "hip Salvation Army , " the D iggers worried about the youthful hordes jamming the Haight for the overhyped Summer of Love ( 1 967). Seeking free food sources and a rural safety valve for Gvercrowded hip ghet­ tos, Diggers visited communes outs ide the Bay Area. Formal hip i nvolvement with food production and distribution may date from March 1 967, when a delegation of Diggers proposed to pick surplus app les and farm a few vegetables at folk musician Lou Gottlieb's Sonoma Coun ty retreat, Morning Star Ranch. When the H aight began to sour that fal l , Morni ng Star filled with hundreds of refu­ gees-including overworked Digger women who d id most of the gardening and cooking for the Feeds. Harassed by local police, Gottlieb eventually had to close the ranch. But the Morning Star­ F ree S tore connection was the model for the network of rural communes and u rban co-ops that began to take shape in 1 969-70. I ndeed, when Friends of the E arth issued The Environmental Hand­ book i n time for E arth Day, a nationwide teach-in held on April 22, 1 970, i ts call for a decentralized food supply based on cooperative groceries, city gardens, and organic farms sou nded much l ike the 1 967 vision of "Sounds from the Seed-Power Sitar. " 6 B u t there was a three-year gap between "Seed-Power Sitar" and Earth Day. The Diggers were a bit early. In 1 966-67 cultural rad icals were only just discovering the u rban-acid-hip scene and were not ready to flee to Vermont or Sonoma. Charles Perry writes that many in the Haight saw the Diggers as an "anonymous group of stubborn moralists, probably stiff-necked primitive Christians in sackcloth , " and for the average street person, a Digger Feed was j ust a free meal whose moralistic messages had no more impact than the sermons at a skid-row mission. Still focused on the war and civil rights, poli tical rad icals were mostly hostile to what seemed a reactionary back-to-nature strategy. By 1 969, however, when there would be a more receptive constituency, the burn t-out Diggers had d isbanded as an identifiable group. 7 Yet their spirit and vision l ived on-especially at People's Park.

0

PEOPLE'S PARK

n April 20, 1 969, several hundred members of the ad hoc Robin Hood's Park Commission i nvaded an empty Berkeley lot owned by the University of California, plan ted vegetable seeds,

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R E B E LL I ON : T H E M A K I N G OF A CO U NT E RC U I S I N E

20

trees, and sod, erected a striped swing set, picnic tables and benches, launched balloons, shared fruit, marij uana, and wine, danced to the country rock band Joy of Cooking, and cheered the new sign: P E O P L E ' S P A R K : POW E R T O T H E PEOPLE . 8 Although the Diggers themselves had drifted off into assorted escapes and causes, the action was Digger in spirit. The seizure of public land for the purpose of producing free food and rallying the landless had seventeenth-century precedents. Also, l ike the D ig­ ger Feeds, People's Park was participatory "living thea�er. " Shar­ i ng members and ideas with the improvisational San Francisco Mime Troupe, the D iggers treated property, food , and clothes as an array of p rops and scenery to be taken or cast off at will. Deeply i ngrained habits and taboos could be shucked off as easily as a script. The acute relativism of this theatrical model served, along with psychedelic drugs, as a deconditioning mechanism, a tool of l iberation. E n tering the F ree Store you became at once i ts owner, manager, employee, and customer. As that famous sign read, all roles were open. "No owner, no manager, no employees, and no cash. " When the Diggers d istributed stolen food with the claim, " I t's free because it's you rs, " they invited recipients to act as if i t d id belong t o them. The i mplication was that if everyone started acting as if food were truly common property, perhaps it would become so.9 Similarly, the Robin Hood's Park Commission i nvited people to seize land and plant seeds everywhere. Publishing the original call to take the park, the Berkeley Barb advised , "Nobody super­ vises and the trip belongs to whoever dreams. " When one self­ described "agrarian reformer" told a reporter, "We ultimately plan to take over all Berkeley , " he almost meant it. In living theater, if enough people played the role, i t became real . As a Digger broad­ side explained in 1 967, " First free the space, goods and services. Let the theories of economics fo llow social facts. " Understanding q u i te well the marshaling power of popular drama, Governor Ron­ ald Reagan called out the National Guard . For two weeks in May, Berkeley was, accordi ng to the San Francisco Chronicle, an "occu­ pied city," as "revolutionary peasants" and reactionary "Storm Troopers" alike improvised new "social facts . " 1 0 The theories of economics soon followed, beginning with a teach-in devoted to ecology and politics in America. A widely d is­ tributed pamphlet prepared for the teach-in by an American Fed­ eration of Teachers local suggested that the confrontation raised

AN E D I B L E DYNAMIC

"questions about the quality of our l ives, about the deterioration of our environment, and abou t the propriety and legitimacy of the uses to which we put our land . " The authorities' violent response to what seemed a harmless bid for green space mirrored both a long-standing American disdain for nature and the curren t mass defoliation of Vietnam. "It is the way of the worl d ! Trees are anarchic; concrete is Civilization. " When seen through the wide­ angle lens of ecology, People's Park became a m icrocosm of Amer­ ican society. Hungry for such perspectives, the crowd was most recep tive to Gary Snyder, the Zen-beat poet who had j ust returned from several years of recharging in Japan and whose earlier work had greatly influenced the Diggers. Likening trees to other exploited m inorities-blacks, Vietnamese peasants, hippies­ Snyder termed People's Park a guerrilla strike on behalf of the "non-negotiable demands of the E arth . " 1 1 A s the tear gas evaporated, the park stayed closed and the crowds scattered; soon the restless mainstream media departed Berkeley for other stations on their tour of "campus violence . " For the u ndergrou nd press, however, People's Park pointed away from violence, toward ecology. " Revolutionaries must begin to think in ecological terms, " wrote "Pantagruel" i n New York's Rat. "An attack against environmental destruction is an attack on the s truc­ tu res of control and the mechanisms of power within a society . " I n m id- 1 969 the 500 o r so u nderground papers could not get e nough about E cology Action, Gary Snyder, DDT, trees, and environmen­ tal i s m . I n " E arth Read-Ou t , " the fi rst u n derground syndicated

ecology col u m n , Berkeley Yippie Keith Lampe trum peted a tran­ sition to a "broader, ecological ly-oriented radicalism. " By Novem­ ber 1 969 Rat' s "Pocahontas" could observe that "in the six short months since People's Park, the word 'ecology' had been l i fted from the dusty academic shelves of abstract scientific definition; i t became a powerful breathing consciousness, meaning all things about life , death, and survival that no radical could avoi d . " 1 2 Pursuing the "ecology is revolutionary" dream of 1 969, when any urban vegetable patch could seem, in Todd Gitlin's words, a "conspiracy of soi l , " a Good Times reporter visited a Berkeley "Peo­ ple's Garde n . " For spokesperson J. Channing Grant, an "organ ic" garden was a model of a peaceful, cooperative society-"a har­ mony between as many life kingdoms as possible . " His collective thus avoided all pesticides, herbicides, chemical fertil izers, and other "poisons, because most all the life is friendly-even neces-

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sary. " Skeptical but sympathetic, the reporter acknowledged the "good vibes" from all those healthy plants thriving where once only weeds had grown. If barren lots could produce free food, he mused, maybe civilization was not doomed after all. The wider implications that Grant d rew from his savory spinach were i ndeed dizzying. A cooperative garden served as an "edible dynamic," a "living medi u m through which people can relate to each other and their nou rishment. " By raising food jointly, people cou ld "explore their own roots" and overcome alienation. This sounded like "a d igestible ideology," quipped the i ntrigued but still dubious re­ porter. "That's just the point," the unfazed Grant replied. "A garden-orien ted neigh borhood wou ld become a more self-depen­ dent and self-determined group. Perhaps it will lead i n other co­ operative d i rections. " Local wastes cou ld be recycled into the soil , not lost i n sewers. Pooling scientific skills, local gardeners might hybridize vegetables to local growing conditions. The more food grown locally, the less need for energy-wasting, polluting trucks and railroads . Food u navai lable loca l ly m ight be purchased by co­ operative buying clubs-food "conspiracies" -that would under­ cut the commercial "monopolies. " Looking ahead, commu nities might be planned with cooperative gardens in mind, thereby fos­ tering decentralization and setting "functional limits on urban de­ velopme n t. " All th is from a small city garden! 1 3 The article, titled "Peopl�s Pods, " was typical of under­ groun d ecological reporting: an earnest yet playful desire to join personal means (organic gardening) with political ends ( radical de­ centralization), and conversely, to have political means (socialized production) yield personal d ividends (tasty spinach). The d ream was beautiful, and naive, but i n the otherwise gloomy atmosphere of 1 969, disaffected youth needed new d reams.

ECOLOGY: 22

THE SUBVERSIVE SCIENCE

W

hy d id ecology emerge as such a powerful buzzword almost overnight? In part, 1 968 and 1 969 were years when i t was hard to feel confident about planeta ry survival. With the King and Ken­ nedy assassinations, televised mayhem i n Vietnam, riots i n black and student ghettos, the sieges of Paris, P rague, and Chicago, social order was clearly disintegrating everywhere. The environ-

AN E DI B L E DYNAMIC

mental crises peaked in 1 969, when an oil spill off Santa Barbara fou led beaches and killed birds, a smog alert paralyzed Los Ange­ les, and C leveland's Cuyahoga River caught fire. On top of this came a rash of news stories on DDT, cyclamates, soil erosion , world h unger, and warnings of impending earthquakes and tidal waves. "We must realize that unless we are extremely lucky, everybody will d isappear in a cloud of blue steam in twenty years , " P a u l E h rlich p ronou nced i n mid- 1 969. Ehrlich's new book, The Population Bomb, had been largely ignored when published in 1 968, but i n the wake of People's Park, it received more attention i n the underground press. I n the first chapter, entitled "Too Many People-Too Little Food-A Dying Planet," E h rlich declared that the age of affluence was over. A combination of overpopula­ tion and m isguided agricu ltural practices-soil erosion, excess use of pesticides and fertilizers-was pushing the world toward ecoca­ tastrophe. B laming "a record of ecological stupid ity without paral­ lel , " E h rlich p redicted that the 1970s would witness worldwide famine, rioting, and perhaps even a nuclear war resulting from "ru naway food/popu lation p ressures. " While Ehrlich suggested that ecocatastrophe m ight take ten or twenty years to develop, hip i nterpreters often telescoped the time frame: Doomsday was al­ ready at hand. Acknowledging the apocalyptic mentality, the S ierra Club's 1 970 handbook, Ecotactics, quipped , "Some people are beginning to suspect that due to a lack of interest, tomorrow has been cancelled . " 14 The prospect o f imminent upheaval may i ndeed have been one of the reasons for ecology's appeal among the young, especially those d raftable males unable to contemplate a future beyond grad­ uation. B u t even for those not expecting The E n d , environmen­ talism was emerging as the left's primary vehicle for outrage and hope, edging aside civil rights, the antiwar movement, and revo­ lutionary socialism . M any who had once rallied to the cause of civil rights had, by 1 969, seen the movement taken over by Great So­ ciety bureaucrats and exclusionary B lack Power advocates. Idealistic entrants into the Welfare State (especially public education and social work) burned out almost overnight; m inority groups organ izing from the bottom u p were increasingly unreceptive to white middle-class young people. The antiwar movement too was i n a rut. Peaceful protest seemed ineffectual; under the liberal banner it had become a mild, s ingle-issue plea to "end the bomb­ ing, " and even this m in imal goal seemed u nattainable through the

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electoral process. Antiwar rallies continued to attract large numbers i n 1 969 and 1 970-how could you s tay away?-but few partici­ pants could feel confident that marching would end the war or solve p roblems at home. Yet confrontational street-fighting tactics were proving coun terproductive. The "revolutionary" left seemed too involved in dubious poses and impenetrable theory. At fi rst, media-savvy leaders had deliberately i nflated their rhetoric to gain attention, and stunts like the 1 967 "levitation" of the Pentagon had the freshness of Digger Living Theater. But by the time of Columbia and Chicago ( 1 968), Yippie actor-activists seemed trapped i n the media/movement script. The hardening and splin­ tering worsened after the d isastrous Chicago Democratic conven­ tion, which helped to elect Richard Nixon. Former Chicago Seed editor Abe Peck recalls that, after Students for a Democratic Soci­ ety (SOS) split into hopelessly doctrinaire and irrelevan t factions at i ts J u ne 1 969 meeting, the Seed ran a cartoon "with two scream­ ing demonstrators arguing whether the 'Neo Trotskyist P rogressive Socialist Radical Action Club for International Peace' or the 'So­ cialist P rogressive Club for International Democracy Thru Radical Prototrotskyist Action' hel d the correct line . " 1 5 Ecology emerged as a fresh oppositional alternative. Moved by Gary S nyder's performance at People's Park to read Earth House Hold, former SOS pres i d e n t Todd G i t l i n proj ected o n to the poet' s "green" message everything that the New Left was not: "tender without weakness, earth-seeking withou t romance, rel igious with­ out reverence, combative withou t cant . " For one thi ng, there was as yet no dogmatic party line. The movement seemed open to d iverse opinions and strategies. "Nobody in it is yet on a heavy ego-trip or power tri p , " wrote Keith Lampe, who had personally witnessed the calcification of the once-limber Youth International Party (Yippies). "There's a good chance such trips won't develop at all; concern for all life forms of the whole nature is inherently rel igious or disinte rested . " 1 6 One i mmediate advantage i n the repressive climate of 1 969 was that environmentalists coul d not be easily framed as violent deviants. At the very moment that the media disseminated stereo­ types of bomb-throwing revolutionaries (SOS), d rug-crazed hip­ pies (Charles Manson), and gun-toting separatists ( Bl ack Panthers), Time coul d praise environmentalists as "pragmatic pro­ testers [who] are now [ 1 969] firing at smog, waste, and mindless developers . " At a time of bitter d ivisiveness, environmentalism

AN E D I B L E DYNAM IC

appeared to bring everyone together; even President N ixon praised Earth Day. Marveling how "busy executives and bearded h ippies d iscuss the p resence of DDT in the flesh of antarctic pen­ guins," Time hoped that "pollution may soon replace the Vietnam War as the nation's major issue of protest. " E nvironmentalists fre­ quently exploited this clean i mage. "When the environmental rev­ olutionaries on this campus [Wisconsin-Madison] gather rocks, they' re for mu lching, not throwing," Organic Gardening and Farm­ ing observed . E nvironmentalism even seemed patriotic. "No one can say that a man trying to save the American environment does not love his coun try, " argued Marion E dey, who helped found F riends of the Earth in 1 969. '7 But beneath its placid surface stirred potentially d isruptive currents. E xa m i n i ng the interrelationship between living things and their surroundings, the science of ecology had been around for years. I n libraries i ts older texts were classified with ornate mono­ graphs on wetlands, rai n forests, and sand dunes-all models of sublime fragi l i ty. In the late 1 960s, however, ecology broadened from a baroque branch of biology into an interdisciplinary embrace of the whole earth . Attempti ng to meet the new student interest, textbook publishers hurriedly turned out ecology anthologies with essays covering everything from population problems i n India to pesticide pollution in Nebraska, auto emissions to sonic booms, redwoods to red tide, often spiced with transcendent pieces by poet Gary Snyder, historian Lynn White, and biologist Garrett Hard i n . P redisposed by psychedelics to find oneness where straights saw fragments , freaks fou nd scientific reinforcement i n ecology's global sweep. Moreover, i n the polarized climate o f the late 1 960s, those who felt rejected by their own country could take heart in being citizens of the Planet. As patriots of this wider pol i ty they coul d fee l righteously outraged by what they saw as the root cause of planetary problems: technology. Like Frankenstein's monster, i ndustrialism had gone berserk, wrecking the delicate balances of eternity. The notion of techno­ logical hubris seemed a plausible alternative to the New Left's now-irritating focus on "Kap i talism . " Marxism m issed the point, ecologists a rgued, for modern socialist societies were just as sick. G iven the intricacies of the planetary system , simply nationalizing ownership would not work. Everything had to be changed. Crime in the streets, racial d iscrimination, sexual subord ination, pollution in Los Angeles, starvation in Calcutta, DDT in milk-all were

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R E B E L L I O N : T H E M A K I N G OF A COUNTE RC U IS J N E

connected, all were symptoms of worldwide i mbalances. Taken to i ts logical extreme-and this is where many hoped to take i t­ ecology requi red total overhaul. "You can' t be serious about the environment without being a revolu tionary," Gary Snyder warned . 18 O n ly a complete scaling down of technology and technocracy coul d restore balance. We wou ld have to decentralize production, dep rofessionalize knowledge, live more simply. Snyder envisioned a return to primitive tribal societies on the American I ndian model. The backward-looki ng aspect of this prescription did not bother young d issidents for whom moving forward meant either quick death in some ecodisaster (or in war) or slow strangulation in the p rofessional-managerial bureaucracy. Moreover, coun tering the Marxist-Leninist charge that they were decadent bourgeoisie, ecofreaks cou l d congratulate themse lves on being the most tough­ m inded and clear-headed of rad icals, for they were calling in a most u ncompromising fashion for western civilization to pay i ts dues. Appearing firs t i n late 1 968, The Whole Earth Catalog propou nded three no-nonsense "laws" :

Everything's connected to everything. Everything's got to go somewhere. There's no such thing as a free lunch.

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Although the logic seemed i rrefu table, few i n 1 969 could e nvision exactly how the wider populace might be convinced to rel inquish their modern comforts. I ndeed, the job seemed so imme nse that just contemplating the scope of the changes needed made ecology seem, as captured in the title of one widely quoted essay collec­ tion, "the subversive science . " 1 9 Along with this transcendent vision, ecology offered immedi­ ate personal s teps. I n electoral politics, you had to wai t four years to make changes at the top; in dialectical Marxism you had to wait generations for changes from below. In ecology, however, you could act right away, in your own household. Scale down your attachments to modern technology, Snyder advised ; voluntary sim­ plicity would subvert an economy geared to overconsu mption. 20 M etaphorically, living ecologically meant adopting simpler, more " natural" styles, patterned on models that were nostalgic, often nonwestern, non-Anglo-American, or at least nonurba n .

AN E DI B L E DYNAMIC

Whereas the city-based countercu lture of the mid-sixties had as­ sumed a future based on postindustrial, universal affluence, the rural-oriented ecocultu re at the end of the decade thought in terms of preindustrial subsistence . In fashion, out went the radioactive Day-Glo colors, bright plastics and foils, the mod sophistication that had reflected a more playful view of technology. In came subdued browns and blues, faded cotton and wool, Apache head­ bands, peasan t skirts and shawls. I n arts and crafts, out went the ingenious pop art bricolage of the m id-sixties, in came a cultivation of natural materials, especially houseplants, clay, leather, and oak. In music, the louder electric rock of the Haight-Ashbury gradu­ ally gave way to softer cou ntry rock, acoustic folk blues, and Afro­ Cuban fusion. Perhaps the most publicized symbol of the neoprim­ itivist mood came in August 1 969, when over 400, 000 freaks retreated to a Bethel, New York, farm . As the movie Woodstock reveals, Max Yasgur' s proud claim, ' T m a farmer, " received thun­ derous applause, but-in graphic proof of the i m patience with activist talk-few objected when Abbie Hoffman was bu mped off the stage as he appealed for help for the imprisoned White Panther John Sinclair. Throughout the festival, the political activists' tent, Movement City, was, in Abe Peck's words, a deserted, "desperate Leftist island , " while the California commune Hog Farm won uni­ versal p raise for qu ietly serving brown rice and vegetables to the hungry crowd. 2 1 B rown rice became the icon of antimodern i ty. In the camppop spirit of the m id-sixties, freaks had been game to eat almost anythi ng while searching for experience-even mixing a chemical hallucinogen in an artificially flavored punch, as Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Trip ( 1 968) documented. Ario Guthrie's 1967 hit song "Alice's Restaurant" celebrated i t for serving "anything you want" -sometimes in tinfoil-lined hubcaps. As late as 1 968 Fifth Estate's food columnist passed on recipes for "instant espresso" ( i nstant coffee and cocoa, dash of cinnamon, nondairy creamer) and "bologna knish enchiladas" (fried eggs and onions rolled i n bologna sl ices, then wrapped in white bread a n d covered with canned cheddar cheese soup sauce). 2 2 After 1 969, however, no cou n tercultu ral food writer mentioned processed foods-unless i n contempt. Jaded as we now are by commercial phrases like "natural, whole grain goodness , " it may now be hard to see revolutionary significance in the eating of unhulled rice and curried carrots, or

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granola and yogu rt. I n 1 969-70, however, d ietary change was one of the more substantial household reforms. Compared to other cultural adaptations, the emerging countercuisine seemed less co­ optable because it demanded greater personal commitment. Any­ one could wear what Business Week called "ecology pants" ( Levi' s ) or liste n to coun try rock, but i t took a substantial act o f d isaffiliation to forgo familiar cooking. Fashion and musical styles changed rap­ idly, but food habits were i mprinted almost from birth, and even in a culture dedicated to perennial obsolescence, food patterns changed slowly. To undo these patterns took considerable effort. E xamin i ng and altering one's tastes was somewhat akin to psycho­ analysis: a confrontation with subconsciously i ngrained values, tas tes, and behaviors. Coming out of the confrontation, new con­ verts might experience a sense of l iberation and rightness, a ther­ apeutic " high" akin to the psychedelic experience. The h igh that came with breaking food conventions stemmed in part from the shock value. As many neovegetarians d iscovered when they first requested alfalfa sprouts and chopsticks over roast beef and stainless steel, the cou ntercuisine brought the war home to the family d inner table. At first parents and friends might easily dismiss the defection as adolescent perversity-a predictably fa­ miliar desire to be different. But being different in something so basic and taboo-laden as food might lead to being different in many things. This, not gen­ era tional rebellion, was the impl icit agenda of the countercuisine: food was a medi u m for broader change. I f d ietary rebels seemed a bit self-righteous, perhaps i t was from thei r renewed sense of moral puri ty and political consistency. Unlike sporadic antiwar protests, dietary rightness could be l ived 365 days a year, th ree times a d ay. The New Left had always insisted that the personal was political. What could be more personal than food ? And what cou ld be more pol i tical than challe nging agribusiness, America's largest and most environmentally troublesome industry, with $350 billion in assets ( 1 969), employing 23 million workers and 3 million farmers, selling $ 1 00 billion worth of food to 200 million consumers? 23

2 RADI CAL CONS UMERIS M

T

he close l i n k between personal l i fe and poli tics was most evident in the underground food col umns, e.g., Alice Wa ters's " A l i ce 's Resta u r a n t " in the

San Francisco Express

"E a t and E njoy" featu re, written first by move­ ment veteran Ba rbara Garson, then Jeanie Darlington (San Fran­ cisco); Quicksilver Times s anonymous "food and fu n" ( D. C . ); Fifth Estate's "Eat I t ! " by J u d i e Davis ( Detroit); Kaleidoscope's "Politix of Garbage" by "Sally Soybean" and "Annie Avocado" ( M i l wau­ kee ); the widely syndicated "Gru b Bag" by I ta Jones and "Peas­ ant's Pot" by Jay M e lugin; and numerous co l u m ns titled " Food for Thought" and "You Are What You E at." Recruiting for the emerging counterc u isi ne, these writers sp iced reci pes with scath­ i ng analysis of agribusi ness "ri p-offs" and " poisons." Although the data cited i n Rat and Good Times would not have surprised readers of Time and Newsweek, the l anguage, goals, and context were a l to­ gether d i fferent. The l i beral Naderites spotlighted by mainstream media wanted reform, but radical consumerists wrote d irely of primitive surviva l. Such ta l k may h ave been part hype, but to some Times; Coor/ Times's

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R E B E L L I O N : T H E M A K I N G OF A COUNTE R C U I S I N E

extent they really believed it, for survivalist imagery accurately reflected the apocalyptic u rgency and new-convert certainty of the early ecology movement. SURVIV ALIST STRATEGIES

W

30

hen using the word "survival" before the doomsday scare of 1 968- 7 1 , hip writers had not meant i t literally, as in life or death . Rather, in l i ne with venerable bohemian traditions, i t meant living well without running the rat race. If you got by without getting caught i n the 9-to-5 trap, then you beat the system . Price, not nutrition, was the main issue. One boho survival s trategy was to seek cheap food at local wholesale markets and eth n ic groceries and restaurants-especially those still serving first-genera tion i m­ migrants i n older city neighborhoods. J udie Davis u rged Detroit bargain h u n ters to try the Polish area of Hamtramck for kielbasa on egg bread, then d rive over to Greek Town for feta cheese and baklava. S i mi larly, grandma shulman offer