Lecture 34: Counterculture—From Hippies to Foodies
and trying things that they would never have dreamed of eating
in previous decades. All sorts of exotic new cuisines—including
Indian, Japanese, Sichuan, Moroccan, and Thai—came into fashion. For the most part, these cuisines require fresh ingredients, so instead
of using premade curry powders or chili powders, people wanted
to be more authentic by making real garam masala or using fresh
chilis. In other words, in an effort to be authentic and prepare these
dishes as close as possible to the way they are made in restaurants
or abroad, people were forced to discover new, fresh ingredients
like cilantro, kaffi r lime leaves, plantains, and guava. Related to these developments was a campaign for real beer and
the emergence of microbreweries. People came to realize that the
mass-produced beer was really lacking in character and bore little
relation to those that began to be imported from Europe, which had
deep, malty notes; bracing hops; yeasty notes; and real local fl avor.
Microbreweries started popping up, and people began to realize the
subtle differences among types of beer and ale. All of that began to change when people saw huge profi ts looming
on the horizon. Just as with the health-food movement, some
companies sold out completely, either by changing their product
so that it could be mass produced or by renting out space in larger
breweries to increase scale. Even worse than selling out was that
the huge brewers started selling their own cheap imitations, usually
just their regular beer colored with brown syrup. A parallel development, analogous to what happened with beer,
also took off in the world of cheese making. In reaction to mass-
produced, rubbery, “pasteurized processed cheese food,” a few
small dairies started experimenting with new kinds of cheese.
They started with goat cheese because it’s very easy to make and
inexpensive to keep goats. Soon, all sorts of other cheese makers
started popping up, making excellent blue cheeses as well as
aged cheddars.