Hippie Food: How Back-to-the-Landers, Longhairs, and Revolutionaries Changed the Way We Eat

In this informative, briskly paced first book, James Beard Award–winning food writer Kauffman details how the concept of health food “evolved in the kitchens of young baby boomers” during the late 1960s counterculture and then in the post-Vietnam age. “Counterculture adherents,” he writes, “turned their efforts away from protest and created institutions, businesses, and cookbooks that brought the food movement to a much broader audience.” Kauffman explains that many of the staples of what is considered today to be a healthy diet—whole-grain bread, low-fat yogurt, organic or pesticide-free fruits and vegetables—had once been associated with fringe movements and have always been available to consumers. He interviews dozens of influential people within the healthy food movement, including the owners of the Aware Inn on the Sunset Strip, one of the earliest health food restaurants in the late 1950s; the editors of Zen Macrobiotics, which popularized the use of brown rice; and Frances Moore Lappé, author of Diet for a Small Planet, which introduced soybeans and tofu to American tables. Kauffman is equally thorough in tracing how these early innovators inspired the food co-ops and whole food stores that exist today, as well as how, during the 1980s and 1990s, mainstream supermarkets across the country added natural food sections to sell what was dismissed as “hippie food” in the 1960s. This is an outstanding food and cultural history. Agent: Nicole Tourtelot, DeFiore and Co. (Nov.)