It’s another cursory book review — road trips are quite conducive to reading (or to listening to books, more accurately):
Michael Pollan's NYT review of Hippie Food by Jonathan Kauffman is titled “How We Got From Twinkies to Tofu" and while the Hostess cream-filled cakes are never mentioned in the book, the phrase does capture some of the narrative arc that Kauffman, a former food writer for the SF Chronicle, tells in his book: the story of how Americans stopped eating processed food and started eating "healthy." Of course, Americans have never stopped eating processed foods, and while tofu consumption increased during the pandemic, it's still on the plates of only a fraction of the population.
That said, Kauffman's argument — that the Sixties counterculture fundamentally changed how Americans eat — is a persuasive one: it's not just what we eat (including brown rice, brown bread, and granola), but how that food is grown (organic) and distributed (co-ops and farmers' markets) and, just as importantly, why this matters (Diet for a Small Planet features prominently, and Kauffman traces the intellectual ideas through Frances Moore Lappé's work and through a growing vegetarian movement to, yes, tofu). The book, which draws on extensive interviews with a cast of hippie cooks, farmers, commune-dwellers, restauranteurs, and activists, is quite delightful — I'll even forgive Kauffman for his kind words about one of the worst things that the counter-culture gave us: carob.
I’m pretty wary of the kind of history that writers like Pollan tell — sweeping generalizations propped up with a few choice anecdotes; that Pollan liked the book gives me pause. Indeed, this is a very white version of “the history of the politics of food,” but Kauffman does acknowledge this in a few places. Even so, it’s worth thinking about how our contemporary construction of “healthy eating” is intertwined — even loosely — with other ideas the hippies and others have promoted about “soil” and purity and… yeah. Yikes. That’s even worse than carob.