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Subtitled: How Back-to-the-Landers, Longhairs and Revolutionaries Changed the Way We Eat
I made this book last as long as I could. I really did! I did lots of side research on the people he wrote about. I cooked some of the food he talked about (great to read the backstory on the Lundberg brothers, and how they came to grow the organic brown rice that is the only organic brown rice that consistently tastes good to me). I looked up various organizations he mentioned, to see which ones were still around. I savored. It was glorious.
I’ll probably reread it.
I am not vegetarian, much less vegan. I never have been. But I’ve been consuming soy milk products since I was a couple months old, because I have a long-standing cow milk allergy. It has waxed and waned over the years — my mother and pediatrician had a plan to find a threshold that if I stayed beneath it, I wouldn’t get _too_ sick (I’d just catch every cold that went around and never let it go and wind up taking antibiotics for the secondary infection that developed. Little things like that.). My teenage years, however, put me in the path of Steve’s Ice Cream when that was still an amazing thing, and my first job with FICA taken out of it involved a manager who liked to go next door to the place that sold fudge at the mall and bring some back for whoever was working that day. Bad things to do to someone who consumes some dairy, but falls off a cliff digestively speaking when consuming a little too much.
Years ago, I (tried to) read a book about private law that was just appalling. It was interesting, because Jewish dietary restrictions mean there is a lot of private law out there enforcing rules on producers of kosher food. I’m interested now because I’m Jewish, but because Kosher Parve / pareve means “I can eat that safely”. Similarly, I love vegans, because they make baked goodies and other things that I can safely eat. And while I eat meat (I had a BLT for lunch), I don’t have to eat it all the time. I’m pretty happy with a lot of different kinds of foods, as long as I don’t get sick.
Unlike the private law book, Kauffman did a fantastic job on research. And his structure is brilliant: the first few chapters develop early health food culture in the US through specific foods: a catch all chapter on fruits, seeds, nuts and early SoCal health stores, gurus, and restaurants, followed by Ohsawa, macrobiotic and brown rice, then whole grains, tofu, and finally, a chapter on the back-to-the-land and rural commune movement. The integration of international cuisines and foodways into vegetarianism in the US and finally, a chapter on food (and other) co-ops. As you can see, the structure gives focus to what might otherwise be a meandering — and entertaining, but difficult to make sense of and retain — series of chronologically ordered anecdotes about the many contributors to the dramatic change from the four food groups of my childhood, to the various plant centered diets today.
There’s a great list of sources / bibliography at the back, if you want to read more about particular trends / participants. And so, so, so many people described are connected to or their own names are brands that are familiar to anyone who has shopped at health food stores, Whole Foods, or the “natural foods” section of a supermarket. From Bragg (of cider vinegar and amino acids) to Mackey (of Whole Foods), from Ohsawa (Whole Foods still sells an Ohsawa branded variation on soy sauce), through the Lundbergs, Ed Brown of Tassajara, Katzen of Moosewood and many, many more, it’s wonderful to finally have an answer key to explain how all those shelves got populated by all that stuff that we had to figure out how to cook without any useful explanation from a family member.
Well, apparently Kauffman grew up with this stuff. I’m assuming he’s slightly younger than me.
Anyway. Read it! You’ll learn a ton, even if you already know a lot, because somewhere in there, you’re going to go, _so that’s how that feud got started_! It is truly the answer key to understanding weird minefields scattered around in land of food activism.
Also, I _loved_ learning more about biodynamics. Wow, that is just a whole lot more unusual than I had realized.
Seventh Day Adventist contributions to the cause are covered lightly. I was a little surprised at the list of restrictions attributed to Ellen White. There were more on that list than I had realized; I don’t know how accurate Kauffman was, however.
#32
ETA: The backstory on Lappe and her book! Her work with the Ballantines to expand it from a pamphlet! Her media strategy! More about the Farm. OMG if I’d know all this about the Farm, I might have been a lot less willing to read what Ina May Gaskin had to say about breastfeeding and natural childbirth. Which would have been sad, because that woman _definitely_ knew what she was writing about. I loved the idea of Shurtleff and Laurie Sythe Praskin on The Farm corresponding about soy milk and tofu and other soy foods.
Also, wow, Ehrlich was such an idiot, but he sure had an enormous impact on people. Also, I had no real understanding just how dystopic the worldview of the communards / back to the landers really was.
I made this book last as long as I could. I really did! I did lots of side research on the people he wrote about. I cooked some of the food he talked about (great to read the backstory on the Lundberg brothers, and how they came to grow the organic brown rice that is the only organic brown rice that consistently tastes good to me). I looked up various organizations he mentioned, to see which ones were still around. I savored. It was glorious.
I’ll probably reread it.
I am not vegetarian, much less vegan. I never have been. But I’ve been consuming soy milk products since I was a couple months old, because I have a long-standing cow milk allergy. It has waxed and waned over the years — my mother and pediatrician had a plan to find a threshold that if I stayed beneath it, I wouldn’t get _too_ sick (I’d just catch every cold that went around and never let it go and wind up taking antibiotics for the secondary infection that developed. Little things like that.). My teenage years, however, put me in the path of Steve’s Ice Cream when that was still an amazing thing, and my first job with FICA taken out of it involved a manager who liked to go next door to the place that sold fudge at the mall and bring some back for whoever was working that day. Bad things to do to someone who consumes some dairy, but falls off a cliff digestively speaking when consuming a little too much.
Years ago, I (tried to) read a book about private law that was just appalling. It was interesting, because Jewish dietary restrictions mean there is a lot of private law out there enforcing rules on producers of kosher food. I’m interested now because I’m Jewish, but because Kosher Parve / pareve means “I can eat that safely”. Similarly, I love vegans, because they make baked goodies and other things that I can safely eat. And while I eat meat (I had a BLT for lunch), I don’t have to eat it all the time. I’m pretty happy with a lot of different kinds of foods, as long as I don’t get sick.
Unlike the private law book, Kauffman did a fantastic job on research. And his structure is brilliant: the first few chapters develop early health food culture in the US through specific foods: a catch all chapter on fruits, seeds, nuts and early SoCal health stores, gurus, and restaurants, followed by Ohsawa, macrobiotic and brown rice, then whole grains, tofu, and finally, a chapter on the back-to-the-land and rural commune movement. The integration of international cuisines and foodways into vegetarianism in the US and finally, a chapter on food (and other) co-ops. As you can see, the structure gives focus to what might otherwise be a meandering — and entertaining, but difficult to make sense of and retain — series of chronologically ordered anecdotes about the many contributors to the dramatic change from the four food groups of my childhood, to the various plant centered diets today.
There’s a great list of sources / bibliography at the back, if you want to read more about particular trends / participants. And so, so, so many people described are connected to or their own names are brands that are familiar to anyone who has shopped at health food stores, Whole Foods, or the “natural foods” section of a supermarket. From Bragg (of cider vinegar and amino acids) to Mackey (of Whole Foods), from Ohsawa (Whole Foods still sells an Ohsawa branded variation on soy sauce), through the Lundbergs, Ed Brown of Tassajara, Katzen of Moosewood and many, many more, it’s wonderful to finally have an answer key to explain how all those shelves got populated by all that stuff that we had to figure out how to cook without any useful explanation from a family member.
Well, apparently Kauffman grew up with this stuff. I’m assuming he’s slightly younger than me.
Anyway. Read it! You’ll learn a ton, even if you already know a lot, because somewhere in there, you’re going to go, _so that’s how that feud got started_! It is truly the answer key to understanding weird minefields scattered around in land of food activism.
Also, I _loved_ learning more about biodynamics. Wow, that is just a whole lot more unusual than I had realized.
Seventh Day Adventist contributions to the cause are covered lightly. I was a little surprised at the list of restrictions attributed to Ellen White. There were more on that list than I had realized; I don’t know how accurate Kauffman was, however.
#32
ETA: The backstory on Lappe and her book! Her work with the Ballantines to expand it from a pamphlet! Her media strategy! More about the Farm. OMG if I’d know all this about the Farm, I might have been a lot less willing to read what Ina May Gaskin had to say about breastfeeding and natural childbirth. Which would have been sad, because that woman _definitely_ knew what she was writing about. I loved the idea of Shurtleff and Laurie Sythe Praskin on The Farm corresponding about soy milk and tofu and other soy foods.
Also, wow, Ehrlich was such an idiot, but he sure had an enormous impact on people. Also, I had no real understanding just how dystopic the worldview of the communards / back to the landers really was.