Appetite for Change

by Warren Belasco

Demonstrates how American marketers appropriated the rhetoric and recipes of the 1960s counterculture, turning them into highly profitable products

Genres: Food, History, Nonfiction, Food History, Anthropology, Food and Drink, Cultural Studies

311 pages, Hardcover

First published January 3, 1990

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

I selected this book as yet another in a short line (very short) of food-related texts I occasionally check out with the faintest hope of informing better dietary choices (shall we say, it’s a rather slow season for us architects – even to the alarming degree that I now do much of the family grocery shopping… fortunately armed with excruciatingly detailed lists authored by the wife). Well written overall, the historical aspect of this story is very interesting. Belasco traces the “countercusine’s” rise from the days of Digger Papers, and subsequent commune organic-gardening societies. As the “underground” recipe books and what not multiply, the “squares” and food industry peeps take a defensive position against the “nuts” and “freaks” until they (or, indeed, the aging nuts and freaks themselves) figure out ways to subsume the concept of healthy dietary options into profitably processed grocery items. US citizens blindly rely upon government recommendations and studies regarding sundry chemical additives – a mostly floundering structure heavily compromised by the wallets and clout of the Pillsbury Doughboy, Ronald the clown, and their ambiguously conceived cohorts. Cynicism inevitably prevails with all the official flip-flopping and designations such as “natural” and “organic” are increasingly slathered across the packaging of Oreos, microwavable Salisbury steak and Frito Lites. A twisted cycle certainly.

The author isn’t as negative as my re-presentation probably implies. The fact that people generally acknowledge processed foods as not yielding the best nutritional benefits is something that was apparently less certain circa 1962. Options for dining have expanded exponentially and even Wendy’s host salad bars. Whereas Belascos does betray a bit of cynicism and is admittedly biased as he falls more firmly within the “fruit and twig” camp, I felt this to be an even-keeled historical account of the countercusine’s emergence over a twenty year period. He positions a typically underhanded Industrial Food Complex against a progressive countermovement often defined by inarticulate posturing (the short-lived organic food-based communes seemed as much about propitiating a male-centrist society as offering any real alternative structure; the women still handled the arduous task of food prep while the men exploited the free-love paradigm to get laid a lot). This is a development – or awakening – fraught with controversy, ups and downs, and indecisiveness.

Though this covers a twenty years period ending twenty years ago, strangely there doesn’t seem to be much change in outlook beyond more Farmer’s Markets and the Trans Fat bans (my wife recently bought "Omega 3 Peanut Butter" for God's sake!). Towards the conclusion, I had even forgotten that this wasn’t fairly new until he mentioned the “Reagan/Bush” administrations. What do I know? My dietary preferences align more with the house-on-wheels set than the patrons of South End bistros. Every third TV commercial this week uses Biz Markie’s one-hit song so maybe it is 1989! While posting this, I noticed that Goodreads lists an updated (2006) version so I suppose I would definitely recommend unless, like me, you rely upon a major library system - in which case you may have to wait until 2029 (“Biz Markie – Live at Foxwoods!”) to score a copy.

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm excited to be taking US Food History this semester with Warren Belasco, so this was his first assigned text. In Appetite for Change he traces the emergence of the countercuisine, as well as the reactions to and context of it, before discussing how its concepts were eventually mainstreamed.

It is very interesting to read it at this particular time as so many of the elements appear in the current alternative food movement, but not just the elements of the countercuisine, but also characteristics from the 1980s as well.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best thing about Belasco’s text is how he incorporates so many different pieces of history and culture into his analysis of the counterculture food movement, noting that these particular politics did not emerge in a vacuum from the rest of the American experience, but rather were surrounding by different patterns of dressing, working, making money—far from solely a food story, this is the story of a major cultural debate that defined an era. It is a key food text because it shows how much food is embedded in other parallel discourses—brown rice was not the only push toward antimodernity in the era, but was accompanied by musical shifts, political shifts, and discursive shifts—in short, food was a medium and metaphor for broader change. (28) He reminds us that the countercuisine was always inherently a political expression, a resistance to the industrial and capitalist control of the 1950s, and a way to imagine living life “without running the rat race” (30). Yet Belasco has a fair amount of healthy skepticism about the many different ideologies circulating within this movement—even as he notes that there were therapeutic (more like holistic) and anti-capitalist messages within the countercuisine, they often resulted in further discussions of the scales of righteousness involved in ethical food provisioning. Moreover, they did not necessarily have economic models for scaling up such ideologies into mass cultural change. This is where part II and III is so valuable, as Belasco shows the initial resistance of mainstream food processing to this messaging that would later become a strategic adoption and cooption of culinary preferences into a new kind of branding, putting “natural” and “healthy” on packages of only marginally different processed food. Rather than writing a singular ode to the vision of the countercuisine, he frames his analysis as one of constant negotiation and of a moment that shaped food into something new, but far from the original vision that the Diggers and their colleagues might have had in mind. No one this is a book so many food scholars wish to emulate.

[Jonathan Kauffman · Rating 5 out of 5]

A combination of academic history and cultural criticism, Warren Belasco's seminal work has been quoted in every single book and dissertation about the natural foods movement since its first publication.

[Signe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great history of food movements.

[Robert Hudder · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is good coverage and echoed everything that happened within my lifetime, the early days of the Killaloe/Wilno commune that rose and fell, the rise of Stephano's and the healthier food movement. I should have written it up as a blog post but with moving and everything, time got away.

I may have to get this one out again but it is quite cool to see how the whole California thing was mirrored really closely with what was happening in the Ottawa Valley.

[Tracy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Way cheaper than therapy for my years spent working in the natural foods industry. Warren Belasco will always have my gratitude for that. (Also, it would have been pretty great even without the section acknowledging how working in natural food is thankless and underpaid and inflicting of all sorts of psychic scars.)

[Cara · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting historical look at how counterculture food became mainstreamed.

[Ennis_Tennyone · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great - remember to get this back out and look up some of the cookbooks, etc. mentioned.