Hippie Food: How Back-to-the-landers, Longhairs, and Revolutionaries Changed the Way We Eat (paperback)

Those who lived through the 1960s and 70s probably have a fairly clear image of what "hippie foods" are, though younger folk may take them for granted, and perhaps even as a birthright. Organic vegetables? Hummus? Tofu, seitan, brown rice, avocados, lentils? Hippie food.

IACP- and James Beard award- winning author Jonathan Kaufman, who grew up in a Mennonite community in Indiana in the 1970s eating hippie food, unpacks recent culinary history to learn how an unusual group of Southern California health nuts, macrobiotic pioneers, food co-op members, and social revolutionaries started a food movement that transformed what Americans think of as normal fare.

It's a tale that includes grandiose personalities, utopian visions, spiritual wanderlust, sometimes shaky science, and a uniting conviction that there had to be something better than mass produced consumer foods and conventional agriculture. Kaufman's recounting is colorful, full of sharp details about people and places, many gathered from figures who were active in the movement. Wonderfully, the book includes footnotes and a bibliography.

Paperback.