San Francisco Chronicle food writer Jonathan Kaufman talks about how once-marginal foods like hummus, tofu, and granola have permeated modern American food culture. In his 2019 book, Hippie Food: How Back to the Landers, Longhairs, and Revolutionaries Changed the Way We Eat, he explains that the history of marginal foods dates back to the mid-19th century, with people like Sylvester Graham, who invented graham crackers.
Los Angeles was a hotbed of health food and the birthplace of numerous culinary and spiritual movements. (Actress Gloria Swanson, best known for her role in Sunset Boulevard, was an early advocate of clean eating.) Some foods that would later become associated with hippies (sprouts, smoothies, carob) were introduced between the 1920s and 1950s, but they only became popular in the mid-1970s, when people like Anna Thomas (The Vegetarian Epicure) and Molly Katzen (The Moosewood Cookbook) wrote influential, internationally influenced cookbooks.
Kaufman gives the example of the summer of 1970, when the U.S. airline industry spent millions of dollars to upgrade airports for jumbo jets, increasing travel capacity and making fares cheaper to Europe. American children flocked to European countries and brought back simple dishes that were little known in the United States.
Tofu has been made in California since the mid-19th century. In 1971, Frances Moore Lape, a student at the University of California, Berkeley, dropped out to study the roots of poverty. Reviewing agricultural reports, she discovered that huge amounts of corn, grains, and soybeans were being fed to animals, not people. In fact, she concluded, we could end world hunger by going vegetarian. To her, soybeans were the perfect protein. William Shurtleff and Akiko Aoyagi wrote The Tofu Book and traveled across the United States for six months to establish a tofu community. Kaufman attributes the longevity of these foods to ideas born in the 1970s.
“Hippie Food: How Back-to-the-Randers, Long Hairs, and Revolutionaries Changed the Way We Eat” chronicles the evolution of counterculture eating habits. Photo courtesy of William Morrow Paperbacks.
