Lecture 34: Counterculture—From Hippies to Foodies
people realize that a shiny red apple, simply because it looks good,
doesn’t necessarily mean it’s good for you. In her book, Carson
promoted the idea of returning to simpler ways of farming more in
harmony with nature rather than torturing it to get what we want. This message resonated nicely with the health-food movement that
wanted to turn back the clock and return to older, simpler, and what
they thought were healthier ways of life—by growing and eating
“natural” foods, which meant food grown without chemical fertilizers
or pesticides, without artifi cial preservatives or additives, without
artifi cial coloring, and with the minimum of processing possible. Macrobiotic diets, which involve eating only whole foods and
a progressive narrowing of foods until you fi nally live mostly on
brown rice, became trendy. Veganism, or using no animal products
whatsoever because such products exploit animals for the use of
man, was also something new. Another important book, Diet for a Small Planet by Frances
Moore Lappé, made essentially the same argument that the ancient
Roman Plutarch made but in more explicit terms: If the population
continues to grow, which of course it does, then eating meat is a
remarkably ineffi cient way of using land because you need several
acres to support a cow, and that same land planted with grains
provides many more calories. More people can be fed on a vegetable
diet, which the author saw as a solution to feeding poverty-stricken
people around the globe. Perhaps coincidentally, the health-food movement also looked to
time-tested ancient eating practices of non-European peoples. The
strange and ironic thing about health food is that people outside the
very small counterculture became interested in it, and people began
to shop at health-food stores. They did so for essentially the same
reasons as the hippies: They were afraid of processed, artifi cial foods. Unfortunately, where there’s money to be made, someone will move
in with a big scheme and invest a lot of money, so the major food