Read Hippie Food How BacktotheLanders Longhairs and Revolutionaries Changed the Way We Eat Jonathan Kauffman 9780062437310 Books
Read Hippie Food How BacktotheLanders Longhairs and Revolutionaries Changed the Way We Eat Jonathan Kauffman 9780062437310 Books
Download As PDF : Hippie Food How BacktotheLanders Longhairs and Revolutionaries Changed the Way We Eat Jonathan Kauffman 9780062437310 Books
2019 James Beard Award Nominee
An enlightening narrative history—an entertaining fusion of Tom Wolfe and Michael Pollan—that traces the colorful origins of once unconventional foods and the diverse fringe movements, charismatic gurus, and counterculture elements that brought them to the mainstream and created a distinctly American cuisine.
Food writer Jonathan Kauffman journeys back more than half a century—to the 1960s and 1970s—to tell the story of how a coterie of unusual men and women embraced an alternative lifestyle that would ultimately change how modern Americans eat. Impeccably researched, Hippie Food chronicles how the longhairs, revolutionaries, and back-to-the-landers rejected the square establishment of President Richard Nixon’s America and turned to a more idealistic and wholesome communal way of life and food.
From the mystical rock-and-roll cult known as the Source Family and its legendary vegetarian restaurant in Hollywood to the Diggers’ brown bread in the Summer of Love to the rise of the co-op and the origins of the organic food craze, Kauffman reveals how today’s quotidian whole-foods staples—including sprouts, tofu, yogurt, brown rice, and whole-grain bread—were introduced and eventually became part of our diets. From coast to coast, through Oregon, Texas, Tennessee, Minnesota, Michigan, Massachusetts, and Vermont, Kauffman tracks hippie food’s journey from niche oddity to a cuisine that hit every corner of this country.
A slick mix of gonzo playfulness, evocative detail, skillful pacing, and elegant writing, Hippie Food is a lively, engaging, and informative read that deepens our understanding of our culture and our lives today.
Read Hippie Food How BacktotheLanders Longhairs and Revolutionaries Changed the Way We Eat Jonathan Kauffman 9780062437310 Books
"Jonathan Kauffman tells a fascinating tale that helps explain how we got to the place we're in today, with "health food" of the past simply being thought of as everyday food by millions of Americans today. As a regular consumer of many of the foods Kauffman discusses in the book, it was a blast to learn about their history and that of the people who popularized them."
Product details
|
Tags : Hippie Food How Back-to-the-Landers, Longhairs, and Revolutionaries Changed the Way We Eat [Jonathan Kauffman] on . <strong>2019 James Beard Award Nominee</strong> An enlightening narrative history—an entertaining fusion of Tom Wolfe and Michael Pollan—that traces the colorful origins of once unconventional foods and the diverse fringe movements,Jonathan Kauffman,Hippie Food How Back-to-the-Landers, Longhairs, and Revolutionaries Changed the Way We Eat,William Morrow Paperbacks,0062437313,AMERICAN REGIONAL COOKERY,COOKING / Regional Ethnic / American / General,Cooking/History,GENERAL,General Adult,HISTORY / Social History,History,History/Social History,History/World,Non-Fiction,SOCIAL HISTORY,SOCIAL SCIENCE / Agriculture Food (see also POLITICAL SCIENCE / Public Policy / Agriculture Food Policy),Social Science/Popular Culture,United States
Hippie Food How BacktotheLanders Longhairs and Revolutionaries Changed the Way We Eat Jonathan Kauffman 9780062437310 Books Reviews :
Hippie Food How BacktotheLanders Longhairs and Revolutionaries Changed the Way We Eat Jonathan Kauffman 9780062437310 Books Reviews
- I'm enjoying "Hippie Food" because it's the story of my young adulthood. Although the information is sometimes a bit muddled (particularly about macrobiotics), the book definitely tells the story of how my generation changed the way many Americans eat. I highly recommend it to vegan millennials, many of whom seem to think that their generation discovered soy foods, sprouting, and fermented foods.
Reading about the "Tassajara Bread Book", "The Book of Tofu", and so many other cookbooks of the 1970s took me right back to baking bread and cooking for my housemates in the communal house I lived in during college in Vermont. I was surprised to learn from "Hippie Food" that I was among many who, at the time, looked to the Time Life "Foods of the World" series of books for authentic ethnic recipes - withdrawing them from the local library one by one. After college I was involved with the macrobiotic community in my hometown. I helped to cook weekly dinners sponsored by the macrobiotic center, and participated in macrobiotic summer camps. And, although Kauffman gives us the impression that macrobiotics was so extreme a diet that some even died of starvation, I never met anyone in the community who was the least bit malnourished. As with so many other ideologies and philosophies, some simply went too far in their zealousness.
I was in at the beginning and have been living the organic, vegetarian, natural food lifestyle ever since. Having been there from the start its been particularly interesting for me to watch this all grow and evolve over the years. And although "hippie food" has often been mocked and maligned, it is the food that has literally nourished and sustained me in excellent health for over four decades. I still use many of the books mentioned in "Hippie Food", their pages stained and rumpled from so many great meals over the past 40-plus years. Sadly though, many of the original hippie food companies sold out to mega-corporations, and many of the foods have become nothing but trendy status items.
I do think that Mr. Kaufman did a great job of covering the whole scene as it progressed. I'm glad he included the chapter on the "hippie trail", as it came to be called. Our experiences traveling in India, Central Asia and North Africa definitely played a huge role for many of us, greatly influencing our diets and lifestyles. Thankfully, this book helps to shed light on my generation's idealism, adventurous spirit, and desire to bring about positive change even through something as seemingly mundane as food. - This book provides a great, journalism-styled historical deep dive into the origins of the crunchy-granola facets of contemporary cuisine. Kauffman based his account on hundreds of interviews, which is evident from the personal details and local atmospherics he provides throughout the various narratives that make up the book. He also skillfully weaves in historical context, providing the backstories of the various health foods and fads that fed into the natural foods movement embraced by the counterculture – including granola, whole-wheat bread, alfalfa sprouts, brown rice, and tofu.
Overall, the effect is a bottom-up approach appropriate for such a diffuse social movement. He gets as close to pinpointing the origins of hippie food – the chance encounters and powerful connections that brought it to life – as one could hope. Even so, as with all attempts to capture the emergence of the counterculture, things moved so quickly, and people shifted so suddenly to radically different lifestyles, that it remains difficult to comprehend in terms of strict causation.
Kauffman does provide crucial social context by continually pointing out how much it all depended on an abundance of cheap resources. The growth of the American economy created a lot of slack capacity highways and plentiful oil made travel by car cheap, regular airline travel worldwide made last-minute tickets cheap for the taking, the abandonment of center cities made rents in places like the Haight cheap, while the depopulated countryside made farmland cheap. Drugs were widely available. And of course, the expanding availability of a college education made talk – radical, intellectual, speculative talk – cheap (not necessarily in the pejorative sense). Catalyzed by the civil rights movement and, above all, the Vietnam War, the nation’s youth lived on the cheap while devoting themselves to organizing protests
This helps address not only the topic of hippie food, but the central paradox of 1960s history that the people behind the social movements appear simultaneously to have been radically aware – rebuking the injustices of the status quo – and obliviously entitled. Their radical adventures were, after all, enabled by the excess capacity of the society they rejected. The other open question is whether the shift in mainstream culture from the 1950s to the 1970s would have happened to some extent even without the radical vanguard; Kauffman points to the increasing worldliness of Americans, in such matters as cookbooks, as encouraging more creative eating generally.
Overall, in matters of food as in the reimagining of sex, environmental stewardship, and much else, the countercultural seems to have had a salutary effect in the long-term, whatever its excesses. - Comfortable to read. A very relaxed and smooth writing style, which I found appropriate for the topic. The subject of the book is exceptionally well investigated and explored and held my interest throughout. I felt the passion and appetite (sorry) for researching the subject of hippie food effortlessly translated into words. From interviews with more well-known people to those not-so-famous (more impressive and notable); I found the book to be an interesting study in history intertwined with the purpose I bought the book the influence a group had on our food before ‘natural’ was seized and exploited by Big Food.
Thank you Jonathan for your hard work and demonstrating your writing talent, much appreciated. - Started out very interesting then petered out - I expected more detailed information - by the end I had lost interest. Mildly entertaining
- Terrific as an audiobook! It’s like I’m listening to an intriguing podcast whenever I drive.
- Jonathan Kauffman tells a fascinating tale that helps explain how we got to the place we're in today, with "health food" of the past simply being thought of as everyday food by millions of Americans today. As a regular consumer of many of the foods Kauffman discusses in the book, it was a blast to learn about their history and that of the people who popularized them.
- Excellent book, gives a good perspective on the natural foods movement and how it got to where it is today.
- Well written, well researched and enjoyable read. Recommended for anyone who wonders how farmers markets and whole foods came to be.
Comments
Post a Comment