Hippie Food: How Back-to-the-Landers, Longhairs, and Revolutionaries Changed the Way We Eat

by Jonathan Kauffman

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.

Genres: Food, Nonfiction, History, Health, Cooking, Audiobook, Cookbooks

352 pages, Hardcover

First published January 23, 2018

About the author

Jonathan Kauffman grew up in a lentil-loving Mennonite family in Northern Indiana in the 1970s. He went to college in the Twin Cities and then moved to San Francisco. After working as a line cook for a number of years, he left the kitchen for what seemed at the time like the more lucrative world of journalism.

Jonathan was a restaurant critic for 11 years in the Bay Area and Seattle (East Bay Express, Seattle Weekly, SF Weekly), where his criticism and reporting won awards from the James Beard Foundation, the International Association of Culinary Professionals and the Association of Food Journalists, among others.

He joined the staff of the San Francisco Chronicle in 2014. There, he covers the intersection of food and culture, whether that means the rise of cookie Instagrammers or the effects of gentrification on small, family-run restaurants.

Reviews

[Julie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hippie Food by Jonathan Kauffman is a 2018 William Morrow publication.

Informative and educational!!

This well- researched book delves into the way the sixties counterculture raised awareness and concerns about preservatives and other food additives, and changed our eating habits, incorporating brown rice, wheat bread, tofu, and organics into mainstream consciousness, and into supermarkets. These foods now grace our tables as everyday staples, a far cry from the white rice, white flour, and packaged white bread frequently used in households up to that point.

“Health in America is controlled by the refined food industrialists who support a multi-million- dollar business.” Adelle Davis

Why did the counterculture start eating foods like brown rice, tofu, granola, and whole-wheat bread in the 1960’s and 1970’s?

Tracing just how these fringe ideas and ingredients spread to so many communities felt like an impossible task, fifty years later. When I would ask former hippies why they thought natural foods had taken off all over the country at the same time, swear to God, half a dozen of them answered, “Magic”. Then I would start talking to them about what they themselves were during those years and the real answer emerged: travel.

As a child, I remember my parents buying that brick style block of Sunbeam white bread. It really wasn’t until much later- in the 1980’s that wheat bread became more commonplace, at least in my neck of the woods. Now, I simply can’t imagine ever buying white bread again. I haven’t eaten white bread in decades. I never gave much thought as to how or when these changes began to take hold, but once I started reading this book, I was surprised by the humble beginnings of organic and brown rice farming, and the history of wheat bread.

‘Gypsy Boots feel so fine, I feel so great. So, let me go open that gate. I just have a had tremendous date with a glass of milk and a soy bean cake. All my muscles are strong and loose, because I drink lots of mango juice. For scorns and frowns I have no use, cause I feel wild as a goose. Life is a game of take and give. The world is my brother and I love to live. So, what’s this living really worth if there isn’t any peace on earth.’

For the foodie, this is a fun and fascinating journey, written with a little wit and humor, and loaded with interesting trivia. Be aware, though, that if you are looking for a recipe book, this is not one. However, if you are into organics and healthy foods you will find this book to be very interesting.
I really enjoyed this book tremendously. It was a learning experience and I discovered so many things about whole foods, and the fun history behind the trends and how they eventually became our ‘new normal’.

[KC · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow! This was an extremely informative and utterly fascinating read on the conception of "hippie food". Divided into chapters that included the birth of macrobiotic philosophy, organic farming, health food restaurants; Moosewood, to food Co-ops, this book explored the how, when, why, and where of all things "hippie". I thoroughly enjoyed this book.

[Rosemary Atwell · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderfully enjoyable ride complete with a full cast of visionaries, eccentrics and cranks. See if you don’t pull down your much-loved and battered copy of the ‘Moosewood Cookbook’ to revisit your favourites after reading this.

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the book I've wanted to read for years on the food revolutions of the late 60s and the 70s, and how they gradually shifted the whole US food scene. Kaufman interviewed the aging flower children and farmers and restaurateurs who were there, he's funny, and he managed to make an organized and entertaining book out of a baggy monster of material.

[Prima Seadiva · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars
Library Audiobook reader okay, sometimes had a more sarcastic tone than I liked.

This was pretty interesting because I was one of those hippies who still eats "natural foods" and indeed made a career working with food in various ways.
What a flashback.

My original gateway was macrobiotics so that section was like a serious flashback of time, place and people. I got involved in macrobiotics via an ex husband. We spent some time in Boston going to Michio's lectures, I still recall Michio saying watch you will see in 15 years there will be brown rice, tofu and miso in the grocery stores, and he was right. I went on out to Hollywood (during the Manson trial what a scene, the city was totally freaked out) to study with Aveline. Hollywood mansion, fifty people group house, very regimented, very organized.
I had to laugh at the description of binging. I recall being pregnant and having serious cravings for vanilla milkshakes, walking into a soda fountain/ lunch counter one day to sneak one and there were 3 housemates chowing on spaghetti with tomato sauce.
From there I went up to San Francisco where I studied with Herman and Cornelia Ahara.
Macrobiotics was interesting, the food good if you were not obsessive but the rigid patriarchal view point and blaming the woman really wore thin. The combination of Japanese and Catholic guilt was not a happy one for me though it left me with a lifelong love of Japanese food and film.
I left my husband and also broadened out to include a wider view of good food. It lead to me relocate and start a lifelong career in cooperatives and teaching healthy cooking and good food.
The author does a good job of describing the arc of "health" foods and diets from early in the century to today.
The interesting thing to me is how some foods have become mainstream. The success of some of those early companies has led to corporate food buying out many once independent businesses. Holding firm on definitions of what is organic is now more important than ever as huge companies seek to increase their profits. Also excessive packaging and convenience has become more common.
As an old hippie I just don't trust the motives.

https://foodrevolution.org/blog/organ...

https://www.organicconsumers.org/camp...

Also there is still a issue of class and race divide in access to affordable good food. It's still often seen as the province of the affluent and once there is an interest in a food the prices shoot up. Avocado toast with a side of kale salad for $15 anyone?

Though a bit outside of the historical scope it would have been interesting if the author had spent some more time on this aspect.

[Jenn "JR" · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading "Hippie Food" was fascinating -- it revealed the history of so many of the food traditions that I have cherished for decades. The histories go back to the late 19th century when earlier proponents of eating healthier food challenged the increasing control of industry over the foods that people ate.

He covers a lot of territory: health and fitness aficionados who opened restaurants, how baking bread (esp brown bread!) and providing free food was a revolutionary act; the rise of brown rice and how that really changed the way people thought about food; communes and food co-ops, and how these things all form the foundation of the "new hippie food" we all eat today.

Kauffman skillfully weaves the links of the interconnections of the stories in a way that flows naturally and is exciting to read. He's got a great sense of humor as well -- with sly digs at some dietary experimenters' incomplete, at best, knowledge of nutrition.

People were creative, passionate and dedicated to changing the world through the way they eat and did the best they could to share their experiences and knowledge with everyone around them.

To be honest -- reading this book, I feel like I discovered the lost history of my people!

I want to get this book for so many people I know -- I recommend it to everyone!

[Michelle · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hippie Food is rigorously researched and entertainingly written, but falls short significantly in recognizing the contributions of non-whites in the popularization of brown rice and macrobiotics, vegetarianism and tofu.

Author Jonathan Kauffman notes in the introduction of the book:

"One of the uncomfortable, even painful, inadequacies of this movement, which became clear to me with each new chapter I researched, was how white it was....Over and over again, counterculture publications would ask: Why aren't we reaching nonwhite audiences? Many groups would make a cursory appeal and give up, or settle for one or two token members."

I would argue, to some extent, Hippie Food has ended up in the same boat. It recognizes and perpetuates the problem in one book.

It points to the fact that the United States was 87 percent white in 1970, according to US Census data, as if to explain the lack of non-white representation. Statistical insignificance is historical insignificance, apparently. Disappointing.

[Jake · Rating 3 out of 5]

"And you may ask yourself, well, how did I get here" - Talking Heads.
This book, which I won from a goodreads giveaway explains how we (in the USA, which is its focus) got from a place of canned foods, casseroles and processed meats to a place where you can buy organic greens and tofu in Wal-Mart and you can use Amazon Prime for discounts at Whole Foods. It doesn't tell you how you should eat (see Michael Pollen for that, he does a fine job) but just tells the story of the misfits, hippies, health junkies, anarchists, body builders, Seventh Day Adventists and others who made it possible to eat real food, strange food and real strange food anywhere in the land of the free.

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great! I was there. My boyfriend at the time pulled me into the basement Erewhon on Newbury St and stated we were on a bad eating trip. I was young and must have looked stupid as Root gave me a long lecture on how to cook brown rice. I had all of these cookbooks at one time. I don't have an obsessive personality, so I used a part of each and still do. To me the best part of that movement was "back to the land", where I went and stayed with all my gardens. We were so altruistic weren't we? Am I glad the supermarkets now have little plastic containers of yogurt and organic vegetables because of our drive for a better world? I guess. Kauffman does a great job with his research. It was interesting to hear the California back story. What I say is, eat good food not necessarily exotic. Thank you Johnathan Kauffman for thememories

[Jenn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have been a self-taught cook since the age of 12. Two of the cookbooks that were important to me as a young cook were early 1980s editions of hippie cookbooks, The New Laurel’s Kitchen and Whole Foods for the Whole Family. Before I ever baked a fluffy loaf of challah I struggled with a sticky loaf of whole wheat bread from Laurel’s bread chapter.
So when I came across Hippie Food I was eager to read how those dense, earnest foods came to be. Hippie Food delivers, with rambling chapters about co-ops, back to the land farms, tofu, and macrobiotic foods (I had always wondered what that was). I heartily recommend it to anyone who has an enthusiasm for slightly out of the mainstream health foods and history.

[Linda · Rating 5 out of 5]

I met my husband to be just before Earth Day at a food coop organizational meeting with the students and the American Friends Service Committee at Caltech. The book's story parallels our experiences with natural food, the back to the land movement and cooperative, democratic organizations. I still cook whole grains and buy organic foods. My son's first job while in high school was at a worker owned and run natural food store. It was a nostalgia trip reading about our contemporaries. The good things of the movement are still with us. Alas, corporatization has gobbled up the independent brands and stores that created and promoted awareness of organic food even though it has increased availability.

[LeAnn Locher · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this book but I love cultural anthropology and especially when we look to food for reflection of cultural shifts and norms. It's easy to think that the issues or new trends we face today are new and unique: they are not and can easily be seen originating from generations before us. I loved learning about the rise of the organic movement, granola, vegetarianism, co-ops, tofu and their integral connection to politics. It's from a white privileged perspective and the author points this out. It gets a bit long in places, but keep pushing through. So many brands I know and recognize come from the "hippie food" of the 70s: it was fun learning more about them. I have a new appreciation for Lundberg rice and the radical idea of eating whole wheat bread.

[Nancy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I won this in a Goodreads giveaway.
Thank God for the Hippie food revolution. Without it we would still be eating Wonder bread and Green Giant canned and frozen vegetables. I enjoyed reading how these people rejected the direction food production was heading in the 60s and we now are reaping the benefits. I was raised by gardeners (a huge garden) and would not of touched anything that was made by corporate farming but I realize I am not the norm in my generation so the swing back to organic and local is something good in today's society. Read this book and understand the baby boomers were more than sex, drugs and rock and roll.

[Katy]

I received my copy free through Goodreads Giveaway.

[Geoffrey Benn · Rating 4 out of 5]

We listened to the audiobook version of “Hippie Food” by Jonathan Kauffman while (appropriately) on a road trip up the Northern California coast. The book attempts to tell the origin story of the cuisine that will be familiar to readers who shop at food co-ops, visit vegetarian restaurants, or grew up with liberal parents from the baby boom generation. The book starts with a sort of pre-history by reviewing some of the major nutritional fads that swept the country before world war two – fads like raw food, vegetarianism, and macrobiotics that were swirling around in the zeitgeist when the counter-culture movement began thinking about the political implications of its food in the 1960s. The book then uses extensive interviews to trace the introduction of a variety of foods (whole-wheat bread, tofu, sprouts, brown rice, and granola) and food-related practices (food co-ops, vegetarianism, farmer’s markets, and organic farming) into the American food scene from the 1950s to the 1970s. The book is well-written with healthy injections of humor and skepticism over some of the more baldly pseudoscientific claims of the movement. Kauffman also does a good job with the challenging task of trying to connect the dots between the many independent stories and events that comprised a decades long movement that was by nature anarchic and disorganized. This is a great book if you eat or are interested in food and food politics, though you should be warned that you might wind up with some new cookbooks and cooking projects by the time you’re finished.

[Simone · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Tracing just how these fringe ideas and ingredients spread to so many communities felt like an impossible task, fifty years later. When I would ask former hippies why they thought natural foods had taken off all over the country at the same time, swear to God, half a dozen of them answered, “Magic”. Then I would start talking to them about what they themselves were during those years and the real answer emerged: travel."

I needed something for the 2020 Read Harder challenge item, "Read a food book about a cuisine you’ve never tried before," and honestly, I was having trouble coming up with a cuisine that I hadn't at least tried before. Someone in a group suggested this book, and given that I've mostly avoid alternative proteins my whole life, it seemed like a fitting assignment. I wasn't sure what to expect or if this would be too dry, but I was relieved to find it to be funny, engaging history of brown rice, macrobiotics, vegetarianism and tofu and more. Would recommend on audiobook.

Read for Book Riot's 2020 Read Harder Challenge item: Read a food book about a cuisine you’ve never tried before.

[Sian Lile-Pastore · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was totally my kind of thing! I love reading about hippie food and nutrition and the 60s and 70s and health food stores and so on! I really enjoyed reading this, but thought the writing could've been a bit better at times....

[Wendy Wagner · Rating 4 out of 5]

A nice overview of the history of "health nut" foods, mostly focused on the 1950s-1980. There are lots of oversized personalities and crazy food theories in here, which makes it a really fun read. But most of all, it's kind of amazing how little has changed in our thoughts on what makes food healthy--the real changes have been in what makes food *tasty*.

The ending, though, a recounting of the ways the anticapitalist counterculture faded away, is pretty depressing.

[Debra · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hippie Food is a scholarly but entertaining read.  Kauffman traces the influences of the very early health food movement, organic farming communes, macrobiotics,  and veganism.  

Can I just say "I had no idea"?    I guess I have always been aware that the 60s and 70s had influenced the way we eat, especially when vegetarianism is concerned.   This book goes way beyond the hippie movement and starts all the way back in the early 20th century with those finding the health benefits of raw food.

Hippie Food is not however about hippies exclusively.  While all the health food movements during the last century seemed to be lead by colorful characters, the gamut of leaders run from Zen masters to surfers to Seventh-Day Adventists to homesteaders.

As is often the case with a Cook the Books selection, I learned a lot.  I was reminded of another featured book way back in 2012, The United States of Arugula by David Kamp.   In that book I learned what life might be like without olive oil and goat cheese.

From Hippie Food, I realized what our world would look like without brown rice, any soy products, Farmers Markets, and organic foods.    On a frightening note, I was also given a glimpse into a world with white Wonder bread only.  (Shudder!)

Thank you, Seventh-Day Adventists for not letting whole-grain bread die and for converting many white flour recipes to graham flour in your cookbooks.  Where would we be if we only had white bread or the "staff of death" to fuel us (109).  (Bernarr Macfadden coined this phrase back in the 1910s according to Kauffman.)  The chapter entitled "Brown Bread and the Pursuit of Wholesomeness" was fascinating.   I really want to make Adelle Davis' Whole Wheat Bread or "Spirit of Love" bread (118).    Alas, whole wheat flour is hard to come by now so I had to pass on that idea.

Sometimes, I think I was born too late.  I can so see myself running off to join a commune or organic farming cooperative in the 70s for the sense of commuity and culture and passionate belief.  Kaufmann quotes Robert Houriet, a commune chronicler and traveler:

The self needs a community; a community needs a culture; and a culture---here's the rub---needs spirit.  Without it, a society falls flat like bread without yeast.

Somewhere the spirit lives; through the woods, over the hills there lies some unknown pond in the lap of mountains reflecting the infinite sky.  (188)

I've always been a Thoreau fan and this passage leave me wanting to explore Walden Pond.

I was really surprised to find that some of the hotbeds of many of these movements were located relatively close to our area like Fayetteville and Springfield.  Definitely a college-town thing.

This should have been a no brainer, but I did not realize that farmers markets were reborn from the organic farming movements in Vermont.  And, I would never have guessed that the soy milk in my fridge can trace its roots back to hippies in Tennessee.

Kauffman also chronicles restaurants and the parts they played in moving along health food and vegetarianism like California's The Aware Inn and the Health Hut plus The New Riverside Cafe in Minneapolis.   He also details the food cooperative rise and of course the birth of Whole Foods in Austin.

In his conclusion, Kauffman does bring it all together.   Hippie food is healthy and it's what we all should be eating.  Even the USDA now concurs.  "Hippie food had become the gold standard for nutrition" (284).

The foods that the hippies, back-to-landers, longhairs and revolutionaries promoted and championed are now mainstream.  These once foreign and strange ingredients are now in our pantries.  "They slip into the meals we throw together after a long workday" (287).   
"When brown rice reminds us all of our childhoods, then the hippie food revolution will finally be won" (287).    I think that time has arrived.

[Art · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first third of this book deals with food history before the hippie era of the late sixties.

Seventh Day Adventists led the vegetarian crusade for a hundred years. A vision guided followers to give up meat, milk and eggs. The sect founded a health sanitarium in Battle Creek, whose head physician, John Kellogg, made it famous. Kellogg, a vegetarian, created Granola before finding greater success with corn flakes.

Canning, freezing and other forms of food processing evolved in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From the World War II era came technologies that led to dry soup and pudding mixes. Meanwhile, supermarkets took over from mom-and-pop neighborhood stores.

In the modern era, Adelle Davis believed in getting nutrients from natural foods. She wrote Let’s Eat Right to Keep Fit and Let’s Cook It Right. Later, an antecedent for the ecology movement came from from Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson, which we studied in high school English. Then came The Diet for A Small Planet, by Frances Moore Lappé, which I read during my hippie odyssey. These predecessors paved the way for The Moosewood Cookbook, which sold over three million copies. One copy still lives on my kitchen bookshelf.

Food co-ops began in the mid-eighteen hundreds. In the late nineteen sixties and early seventies, restless kids opened a new wave of these stores. During the seventies, baby boomers spawned five thousand buying clubs and retail co-ops. Members signed up to volunteer for shifts. I, for example, volunteered on Saturday mornings. As the only healthy guy on that shift, I stocked the fifty-pound sacks of popcorn, potatoes and other heavy bulk foods to get ready for the midday rush. Also, volunteering to flirt with the girls. Storefronts published newsletters. I edited the one here.

The first Earth Day, almost fifty years ago, raised everyone’s consciousness about food, waste, energy and transportation, making a lifelong impact on me and millions of others. That same week, the predecessor of Milwaukee’s food co-op began as a buying club. Two clear signs within five days of a growing movement. During the early years, the store debated the merits of carrying caffeine, sugar and supplements. After all, our friends bought these commodoties at mainstream stores. In time, the co-op carried cruelty-free cosmetics, which displayed twenty feet from the union butcher. An irony that amused the purists among us.

During my hippie days in St Louis, my wife and I shopped at our first food co-op with bulk goods sold out of big cans on the oak floor of a storefront that served as a grocery for the generations of our parents and grandparents.

Over the years, three hundred stores in this new wave moved into larger quarters, with fifty of them expanding into multiple locations.

Today vegetarians account for five percent of the population, writes Kaufman.

By now everyone knows Whole Foods, which formed almost forty years ago through the merger of two for-profit natural food stores in Austin. The mainstreaming of natural foods. Although I was one, I never called it “hippie food.” It’s just what we ate as we learned about the merits of a better diet.

Kaufman’s anecdotes serve as a portrait of time. Three and a half stars. The book lacks the rigor and vigor of a full four-star book.

[Georgianne · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really really enjoyed this book. My husband and I attempted to be vegetarians back in high school circa 1973-4. We were again for 17 years after we were married because he read a Time-Life article on CAFO farming while we were standing in line at the grocery store. (We drove straight to my parent's house and gave all the meat we had just bought to my mom.) Each time it fell by the wayside for whatever reason; lack of support, lack of available ingredients, and maybe more specifically, the inability to find decent and cheap vegetarian food while we traveled around the country playing music with our young daughters. But the foods, the politics, and the cookbooks mentioned in this book all brought back memories of those earlier days. After a bit of a hiatus, we became vegans. Although, my husband eats fish now and again because he's not too thrilled with getting all his B12 from supplements. Anyway, it was an interesting read and filled in a lot of information gaps that were going on in the world that I either wasn't fully aware of or have forgotten over the years. And helped reconnect my old self's beliefs with my younger self.

[Jenifer Jacobs · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book brought me back to my childhood. Much of the descriptions resonated with my memories (particularly the part about "a generation traumatized by carob". I am sure my parents, who were part of the food revolution (and never left it!), would understand even more than I do. It actually gives me hope for the future, in seeing the arc of how the backlash of the the 80's and 90's eventually manifested in the globalization of organic and local food. And, as always, it makes me grateful that (although I sometimes really longed for twinkies), I was raised on healthy organic food from my first moment of existence. Thanks Mom!

[Amy · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.75 rounded up. Started off with audiobook, which was a bad idea. It’s like having a text book read to you. It was boring and felt very wandering. When I switched to print, I didn’t quite know where I was and ended up re-reading a good chunk because it hadn’t sunk in. Then I’d get to a part that sounded familiar and realize I’d already heard it…

The print version was better for this topic but still felt a bit redundant. I had some issues with level of detail. Read for tasty reads but would not have chosen it otherwise. Side note: I had (or have) many of the cookbooks mentioned here. The ones I jettisoned, I got rid of for good reason.

[Karl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Densely packed with tons of well researched info on how organic food, co-ops, etc went from bizarre oddities to mainstream. Things like brown rice, whole wheat bread, tofu were alien to us all until the movement lead by the “hippies” ( and people like my mom) decided they were sick of buying processed crap from The Man. Makes you want to even healthier. Vermont gets a nice well deserved shout out for its leading role in this movement.

[Maria Tavierne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Man I could go on and on about this book. FOOD. IS. POLITICAL. I found some solace in learning about food trends as a direct reaction to the political landscape in the 50s.. then the 60s… then the 70s… and so on and so on. So many food trends we still stand by in 2025 were created in 1950 (and I mean created because there was zero scientific research to back the claims, and there still aren’t). All in all this is my fav type of non fic book and I find the history of food just so fascinating

[Katie · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a fun book about food and culture and a bit of anthropology. While I was (and am, ahem) much too young to have been around in the early days, I definitely used the original Moosewood cookbooks, Laurel's, etc. and have been a member of various coops throughout my life. It's a "revolution" I am sure I'd have been a part of, had I been around during that time.

[Melissa]

I enjoyed this book. I appreciated that it didn't treat the subject of veganism (when it was mentioned) with disrespect and recognized that hippie food has come a long way, to be incredibly tasty & easy to make.

[Ash Stockman · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an entertaining look at the history of the natural food movement in the US. Fascinating to see how the movement originated. I appreciated that the author addressed how race and class played a part in who participated/was invited into the movement.

[Charlotte Chan]

This was such a fun and interesting read! Strongly recommend to anyone into health and wellness. Also brown rice DOES remind me of my childhood.. has the hippie revolution won???

[Bethany · Rating 5 out of 5]

“More difficult to be a food revolutionary while it’s never been easier to shop like one.”