Appetite for Change

How the Counterculture Took On the Food Industry

Warren J. Belasco

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780801471261
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Agricultural Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In this engaging inquiry, originally published in 1989 and now fully updated for the twenty-first century, Warren J. Belasco considers the rise of the "countercuisine" in the 1960s, the subsequent success of mainstream businesses in turning granola, herbal tea, and other "revolutionary" foodstuffs into profitable products; the popularity of vegetarian and vegan diets; and the increasing availability of organic foods. From reviews of the previous edition: "Although Red Zinger never became our national drink, food and eating changed in America as a result of the social revolution of the 1960s. According to Warren Belasco, there was political ferment at the dinner table as well as in the streets. In this lively and intelligent mixture of narrative history and cultural analysis, Belasco argues that middle-class America eats differently today than in the 1950 because of the way the counterculture raised the national consciousness about food."—Joan Jacobs Brumberg, The Nation "This book documents not only how cultural rebels created a new set of foodways, brown rice and all, but also how American capitalists commercialized these innovations to their own economic advantage. Along the way, the author discusses the significant relationship between the rise of a 'countercuisine' and feminism, environmentalism, organic agriculture, health consciousness, the popularity of ethnic cuisine, radical economic theory, granola bars, and Natural Lite Beer. Never has history been such a good read!"— The Digest: A Review for the Interdisciplinary Study of Food "Now comes an examination of... the sweeping change in American eating habits ushered in by hippiedom in rebellion against middle-class America.... Appetite for Change tells how the food industry co-opted the health-food craze, discussing such hip capitalists as the founder of Celestial Seasonings teas; the rise of health-food cookbooks; how ethnic cuisine came to enjoy new popularity; and how watchdog agencies like the FDA served, arguably, more often as sleeping dogs than as vigilant ones."— Publishers Weekly "A challenging and sparkling book.... In Belasco's analysis, the ideology of an alternative cuisine was the most radical thrust of the entire counterculture and the one carrying the most realistic and urgently necessary blueprint for structural social change."— Food and Foodways "Here is meat, or perhaps miso, for those who want an overview of the social and economic forces behind the changes in our food supply.... This is a thought-provoking and pioneering examination of recent events that are still very much part of the present."— Tufts University Diet and Nutrition Letter

PART ONE

REBELLION :
THE
MAKING
OF A
COUNTER -
CUISINE

1

AN EDIBLE DYNAMIC

If French gourmand Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755–1826) was right and we are what we eat, then what does that make us? More than a mixture of nutrients, food is a metaphor for what we like most or least about our society. To marshal self-satisfaction, mainstream politicians use reassuring images like “Mom and apple pie,” “milk and honey,” “bringing home the bacon,” “meat and potatoes,” “a chicken in every pot,” grits, jelly beans, and pork rinds. Conversely, social critics may consider such staples “unhealthy,” “poisonous,” or “junk.” Indeed, throughout American history, food fights have often accompanied grass roots political struggles. Thus, in the fiercely contentious Jacksonian period (the 18330s), radical vegetarians resisted mainstream medical authorities (who advised a heavy, meat-based diet). The critique of processed foods during the Progressive era (1900–1914) mirrored widespread concern about irresponsible corporations and dangerous urban-industrial conditions. And in the Johnson-Nixon years (late 1960s–early 1970s), the rediscovery of organic foods and holistic healing accompanied the ecology movement, which was itself a reaction against the wholesale destruction of nature and tradition both here and in Southeast Asia. 1

To be sure, when the first hippies wandered into health food stores around 1966 they probably were more interested in cheap exotica than in political advice. Indeed, young bohemians often shared the conventional view of “health food nuts” as hypochondriacs who dipped desiccated wheat germ crackers into yeasty carrot juice cocktails. In turn, these genteel, middle-aged health seekers tended to look askance at the hairy, blue-jeaned “freaks” searching for hallucinogenic treats, not sound advice. The veterans often hoped to treat specific diseases and ailments, but the newcomers weren’t after medical cures. Young, healthy, well-bred, few considered disease to be an imminent or even remote prospect. While the nuts resisted the ravages of aging, the freaks felt more afflicted by their “sick” society.

Still, differences aside, the older generation did have refreshingly irreverent perspectives to share with the hip tourists. Venturing into a health food store in late 1968, the San Francisco Express Times’s food advisor Barbara Garson (“grandma shulman”) assumed the manager would be another one of those “proverbial little old ladies in tennis shoes.” Yet in explaining why Garson should not eat sugar, the manager recounted the sordid role of U.S. refineries in Cuba since the turn of the century. Previously wary of health food “cults,” Garson was pleased—and surprised—that honey, whole wheat, soy noodles, organic raw milk, unusual herbs, and other health food staples could have a progressive context. 2 Other freak explorers of the health food underground reported similar discoveries: dusty copies of Euell Gibbons’s 1962 survival guide, Stalking the Wild Asparagus; hard-to-find works by critics Adelle Davis, Beatrice Trum Hunter, and Rachel Carson—all dismissed 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 dismissed technocratic experts, worshiped nature, warned of impending disaster, and, in suggesting solutions, tended to see connections, to think in whole systems, not parts. In short, the health food stores offered holistic information that might be called protoecological.

The word “ecology” itself was not much used before 1969, when the events at Berkeley’s People’s Park signaled a major “greening” of the counterculture; at that point the trickle of hip visitors to the health food underground swelled into a steady stream. Before 1969, however, few freaks gave much serious thought to food, healthful or otherwise—except perhaps for the Diggers.

FOOD AS MEDIUM

Late one afternoon in October 1966, when the Haight-Ashbury was still producing daily surprises, a yellow bus dubbed the Yellow Submarine pulled up to a group of freaks lounging in the Panhandle and unloaded a scavenged feast of day-old bread, tossed green salad, turkey stew, and apples. Yelling “Food as medium,” the anonymous submariners—dressed in monk costumes—also handed out mimeographed sheets crammed with political and philosophical speculation. These “Digger Papers” were features in what became regular “Feeds”; their aim, according to Digger Emmett Grogan, was as much to teach as to feed—to use food as a medium to develop “collective social consciousness and social action.” 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 point that the food was “free because it’s yours,” the bus would cruise by several times, deliberately teasing the waiting 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 wooden Frame of Reference—thus “changing their frame of reference as they did.” Such theatrics were soon elaborated in a “free store” decorated with empty window frames, where customers seeking newly liberated 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 dinner table as a springboard—in the Diggers’ case trampoline might be more apt—for consciousness raising. The name itself had deep roots. In part it came from the seventeenth-century English levelers who, protesting insensitivity to the poor, planted in the commons of towns and distributed the food free. Also, it alluded to California’s Digger Indians, memorialized in Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture, a book well known to the neotribal counterculture. In 1934 Benedict had written that the Diggers were ignorant of “the insides of tin cans and the things for sale at butcher shops”; instead they had subsisted off “the health of the desert”—including roots roasted over mesquite. The Digger Feeds also reflected the role of food in 1960s activism: the symbolic importance of interracial dining in sit-ins at segregated restaurants; the Quakerled fasts against the war; the consumer boycotts in support of lettuce and grape pickers—the exploited subjects of Edward R. Murrow’s 1960 documentary, Harvest of Shame.4 But precedents aside, the Diggers made one critical contribution: they put food at the center of an activist program based on an emerging ecological consciousness.

While other prophets—both stoned and straight—were predicting 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 U.S. standard of living is a bourgeois baby blanket for executives who scream in their sleep. No Pleistocene swamp could match the pestilential horror of modern sewage. No children of White Western Progress will escape the cries of people forced to haul their raw materials.

Anticipating an imminent collapse of an urban-industrial civilization awash in garbage, the Diggers articulated a stark survivalist strategy: cut back, clean up, and clear out. Get back to basics—like feeding the hungry or, better still, growing your own. In “Sounds from the Seed-Power Sitar,” one Digger welcomed a “return to the land” as a way “to straighten our heads in a natural environment, to straighten our bodies with healthier foods and Pan’s work, toe to toe with the physical world.” Moving beyond these therapeutic benefits, the author sketched a decentralized, postapocalyptic utopia nourished by a hip food network: in the cities free stores and co-ops would feed the hungry with food grown by city gardeners and nearby communal farms. While conventional civilization crumbled, this alternative supply system would insure “the healthy, organic, harmonious evolution of the Tribe.” 5

For the Diggers, the environmental crisis was both worldwide and very local: acting as what Charles Perry calls a “hip Salvation Army,” the Diggers worried about the youthful hordes jamming the Haight for the overhyped Summer of Love (1967). Seeking free food sources and a rural safety valve for overcrowded hip ghettos, Diggers visited communes outside the Bay Area. Formal hip involvement with food production and distribution may date from March 1967, when a delegation of Diggers proposed to pick surplus apples and farm a few vegetables at folk musician Lou Gottlieb’s Sonoma County retreat, Morning Star Ranch. When the Haight began to sour that fall, Morning Star filled with hundreds of refugees—including overworked Digger women who did most of the gardening and cooking for the Feeds. Harassed by local police, Gottlieb eventually had to close the ranch. But the Morning Star–Free Store connection was the model for the network of rural communes and urban co-ops that began to take shape in 1969–70. Indeed, when Friends of the Earth issued The Environmental Handbook in time for Earth Day, a nationwide teach-in held on April 22, 1970, its call for a decentralized food supply based on cooperative groceries, city gardens, and organic farms sounded much like the 1967 vision of “Sounds from the Seed-Power Sitar.” 6

But there was a three-year gap between “Seed-Power Sitar” and Earth Day. The Diggers were a bit early. In 1966–67 cultural radicals were only just discovering the urban-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 just 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, political radicals were mostly hostile to what seemed a reactionary back-to-nature strategy. By 1969, however, when there would be a more receptive constituency, the burnt-out Diggers had disbanded as an identifiable group.7 Yet their spirit and vision lived on—especially at People’s Park.

PEOPLE’S PARK

On April 20, 1969, several hundred members of the ad hoc Robin Hood’s Park Commission invaded an empty Berkeley lot owned by the University of California, planted vegetable seeds, trees, and sod, erected a striped swing set, picnic tables and benches, launched balloons, shared fruit, marijuana, and wine, danced to the country rock band Joy of Cooking, and cheered the new sign: PEOPLE’S PARK: POWER TO THE 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, like the Digger Feeds, People’s Park was participatory “living theater.” Sharing members and ideas with the improvisational San Francisco Mime Troupe, the Diggers treated property, food, and clothes as an array of props and scenery to be taken or cast off at will. Deeply ingrained 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 liberation. Entering the Free Store you became at once its 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 distributed stolen food with the claim, “It’s free because it’s yours,” they invited recipients to act as if it did belong to them. The implication 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 invited people to seize land and plant seeds everywhere. Publishing the original call to take the park, the Berkeley Barb advised, “Nobody supervises 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, it became real. As a Digger broadside explained in 1967, “First free the space, goods and services. Let the theories of economics follow social facts.” Understanding quite well the marshaling power of popular drama, Governor Ronald Reagan called out the National Guard. For two weeks in May, Berkeley was, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, an “occupied city,” as “revolutionary peasants” and reactionary “Storm Troopers” alike improvised new “social facts.” 10

The theories of economics soon followed, beginning with a teach-in devoted to ecology and politics in America. A widely distributed pamphlet prepared for the teach-in by an American Federation of Teachers local suggested that the confrontation raised “questions about the quality of our lives, about the deterioration of our environment, and about 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 current mass defoliation of Vietnam. “It is the way of the world! Trees are anarchic; concrete is Civilization.” When seen through the wide-angle lens of ecology, People’s Park became a microcosm of American society. Hungry for such perspectives, the crowd was most receptive to Gary Snyder, the Zen-beat poet who had just returned from several years of recharging in Japan and whose earlier work had greatly influenced the Diggers. Likening trees to other exploited minorities—blacks, Vietnamese peasants, hippies—Snyder termed People’s Park a guerrilla strike on behalf of the “non-negotiable demands of the Earth.” 11

As 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 underground press, however, People’s Park pointed away from violence, toward ecology. “Revolutionaries must begin to think in ecological terms,” wrote “Pantagruel” in New York’s Rat. “An attack against environmental destruction is an attack on the structures of control and the mechanisms of power within a society.” In mid-1969 the 500 or so underground papers could not get enough about Ecology Action, Gary Snyder, DDT, trees, and environmentalism. In “Earth Read-Out,” the first underground syndicated ecology column, Berkeley Yippie Keith Lampe trumpeted a transition to a “broader, ecologically-oriented radicalism.” By November 1969 Rat’s “Pocahontas” could observe that “in the six short months since People’s Park, the word ‘ecology’ had been lifted from the dusty academic shelves of abstract scientific definition; it became a powerful breathing consciousness, meaning all things about life, death, and survival that no radical could avoid.” 12

Pursuing the “ecology is revolutionary” dream of 1969, when any urban vegetable patch could seem, in Todd Gitlin’s words, a “conspiracy of soil,” a Good Times reporter visited a Berkeley “People’s Garden.” For spokesperson J. Channing Grant, an “organic” garden was a model of a peaceful, cooperative society—”a harmony between as many life kingdoms as possible.” His collective thus avoided all pesticides, herbicides, chemical fertilizers, and other “poisons, because most all the life is friendly—even necessary.” Skeptical but sympathetic, the reporter acknowledged the “good vibes” from all those healthy plant...

Table of contents

• PREFACE TO THE SECOND UPDATED EDITION
• PREFACE
• PART ONE: REBELLION: THE MAKING OF A COUNTERCUISINE
• PART TWO: PROCESSING IDEOLOGY: THE MORAL PANIC
• PART THREE: MARKETERS: HEALTHY PROFITS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• NOTES