. . . The weekly virtual “gratitude jar.”
This week, I’m expressing thanks for the natural foods movement in America, and the organic, health-food stores and restaurants that helped us all to eat better (better for us, and better for the Earth).
I’ve timed this post for Earth Day, because our food and the environment are so closely intertwined. How we treat the earth, how we till it, what we plant on it, which and whether we are applying chemicals, affects the soil and its natural communities, including all the organisms, from native plants, pollinators, birds, and yeah, us.
The natural foods movement has been pointing this out for more a century, a century that corresponds with our civilization’s increasing capacity for industrialized agriculture.
It goes back to religious groups in the late 1800s who practiced vegetarianism and temperance for physical and mental health. It goes back to Rudolf Steiner in the 1920s, with his spiritualized view of agriculture called anthroposophy. It goes back to J. I. Rodale’s emphasis on organics, starting in the 1950s and continuing into day with its institute. (Alas, the publishing branch of the company went the way of lots of other natural foods companies, being bought up and sold and merged into oblivion.)
Southern California and the Hollywood set made their contributions to health foods, too, undoubtedly spurred by their desire to remain youthful and desirable. Their fad diets included juices, sprouts, avocados, lots of dietary supplements, and so on.
In the 1960s, macrobiotics came on the scene, founded by George Ohsawa and promoted by Michio and Aveline Kushi. It was basically Japanese peasant food: brown rice and beans (adzuki and soy were big favorites), miso soup, seaweed, some fish. It was bland, because when you balance yin and yang in your food, you avoid anything strongly sweet and light or strongly savory and meaty. So, a flame-broiled cheeseburger followed by a milkshake are no-nos. Turns out the brown rice, which peasants ate because they couldn’t afford white (processed) rice, is healthier for its fiber and whole-grain nutrients. Macrobiotics was still going strong when I started paying attention in the 1980s.
And hooray for the hippies! All those ideals! We are indebted to them. They’d read about the dangers of America’s increasingly synthetic agricultural practices. They’d read Rachel Carson and knew that we have to be vigilant about pesticides and herbicides. Many of them remembered growing up on family farms and were concerned about what they were seeing, and reading about. (It was just the tip of the iceberg compared to how it is today. Geez, there are no fencerows and thickets anymore! They even mow the field edges like grass lawns. Farm fields used to be so much smaller. Weeds and wildflowers, birds and butterflies, used to abound in those thickets and other scruffy places. Now, huge farms have Roundup-Ready crops which they blast with herbicides, removing all non-crop plants from acres and acres and acres . . .)
But I digress. The hippies! Their communes, their experiments. I’ve read that their first experiments in organic and whole foods cooking were pretty awful. I’ve experienced some of it. I’ve actually had dishes like “tofu and Spike” and “tofu and sprouts” at potlucks (back in the day). Notoriously tasteless. And we were all catechized: Vegetarianism is moral. What kind of vegetarian are you? There were three kinds (at that point): ovo-lacto, lacto, and what we’d call today “vegan.” Was it okay to have honey? Were beekeepers enslaving bees and stealing their honey, so is that wrong? Brown rice syrup, or natural sorghum, seemed like a better choice.
Sometime in the 1970s there was a turning point. The cream was rising to the top. Each commune was finding individuals who excelled at making the food taste delicious. Think of Edward Espe Brown, cheffing at Tassajara Zen Center and writing his groundbreaking Tassajara Cooking . . . or Ruth Reichl, who started out working at the collectively owned Swallow Restaurant in Berkeley and rose to become the restaurant critic for the Los Angeles Times and then for the New York Times, then editor in chief of Gourmet Magazine. Influencing people’s thinking about food and sustainability the whole time. Think of Mollie Katzen and her Moosewood Cookbook and Enchanted Broccoli Forest; everybody had at least one of her books. And who else remembers The Vegetarian Epicure, with its whimsical line drawing on the cover, which promised to “bring vegetarian cooking to new gastronomic heights”? All that hand-lettering. These books were true labors of love.
These promised much, much tastier foods. The whole-grain bakery coops and health-food restaurants were turning out delicious foods, genuine treats. In addition to the brown rice and other whole grains, the soy products and other beans, the steamed vegetables, the overreliance on onion and garlic, they were looking around the world for spices, sauces, and recipes.
This is about when I got on board, when I was in late high school and college. Columbia had a cooperative health food store on the southeast corner of Hitt and Locust. Next to it was the Catalpa Tree Cafe, a vegetarian restaurant. On Business Loop 70, in that little business strip squeezed between the Loop and little North Blvd., east of Coats Street, there was Columbia Specialty Foods, which in the 1990s became Clover's, which is still going strong. By the mid-1980s, too, grocery stores were starting to pay attention. The Gerbes on Broadway had a large natural foods section.
At all these groceries, there were bulk foods in bins, which you scooped out for yourself. Carob, rice, beans, spices, brewer’s yeast, teas, and so on. (Gosh, remember kukicha twig tea?) There were also increasing amounts of prepared or packaged organic foods from national companies. Many of them still exist today (though now, after corporate acquisitions and mergers, often in much different forms). Santa Cruz Organics, Blue Sky and Hansen’s sodas, Arrowhead Mills, Eden Organics, Food for Life (Ezekial 4.9 bread is still available, though the flour is not, and I miss it); Yogi Tea (their line of products is quite changed these days, and I miss their carob-flavored tea); Celestial Seasonings (which you can buy nearly everywhere, though I’ve found their good ol’ flavors, such as Red Zinger and Morning Thunder, are hard to find in big mainstream groceries).
By the late 1980s, the corporate acquisitions and mergers had begun. There was money to be made! And in the 1990s, many of the idealistic cooperatives (community-owned food coops) were starting to fold. They couldn’t compete with places like Trader Joe’s, which sold what were apparently a full line of healthy or organic foods, but also gourmet treats made with white flower and white sugar, plus meat (sustainably produced), and alcohol.
My beloved Gentle Strength Cooperative in Tempe, Arizona, folded, thanks in large part to competition from the for-profit Trader Joe’s. The Gentle Strength board of directors was conflicted about the choice between sticking to the core mission of healthy, whole foods, versus moving forward with a business-minded savvy, selling the items, such as meat alcohol, that people wanted. By the time they went through their lengthy, contentious, consensus-building process and decided to move forward and be competitive, they had already lost. (There’s an enormous apartment building now, where Gentle Strength once stood; nearby is a slick, new, for-profit, Amazon-owned Whole Foods Market.)
Somewhere along the way, now, the natural foods movement has been watered down, appropriated, lost sight of its core mission. In addition to the white sugar, refined flour, meat, and alcohol, even the juices and other canned products have departed from the high road, using evaporated cane juice, or concentrated apple or grape juices as sweeteners, which are not much different from white sugar . . . they just sound better. A far cry from the natural brown rice syrup.
And the corporate buyouts are regrettable, too. Whole Foods is owned by one of our biggest twenty-first-century lords and masters, corporate behemoth Amazon; it went and tried to engulf-and-devour Wild Oats (which had itself engulfed-and-devoured Alfala’s Markets), but the FTC got after them, and someone else bought Wild Oats, and now Wild Oats is partnered with—brace yourself—Walmart.
As the acquisitions and mergers proceeded in the 1990s and early 2000s, the federal government decided it should create national standards for claims like “organic.” Naturally (no pun intended), big agriculture and food processing companies got involved and watered down the official definitions, so now we have to have a variety of confusing labels on our foods.
I saw an article awhile back in which a nutrition scientist at a large, public midwestern university did research into the nutritive quality and healthfulness of “processed foods.” She started by defining “processing” as anything that happens to a food item before it reaches the supermarket, such as picking an apple off a tree and rinsing it, or trimming bunches of grapes and portioning them into bags; or it could mean heating, cooling, or fermentation; or it could be mixing two or more kinds of foods together. With that definition of processing, her study inevitably ended up with “processed foods aren’t necessarily bad; many of them are quite healthy! My research shows that processed foods are not necessarily bad!” Her study, of course, can be pointed to by any number of corporate factory foodmakers, ultra-processors, food technologists, who will cite her out of context and proclaim that the businesses, providing cheap chips and cheese-doodles to the masses, are healthful.
And the health-food crowd seems to have decided that GMOs are the new devil, when in actuality, big corporations, their ownership of nearly all broad-casting media, their enormous advertising budgets, and their grip on government regulations, are much bigger threats to environmental health and human well-being.
So . . . with all this history, I have to proclaim that the locally owned, idealistic, crunch-granola, vegetarian places are complete treasures, so you should patronize them. Savor the fact that they exist. The vegetarian cafes, the cooperative food buying clubs, the health-food stores.
You’ll know you’ve arrived when you step in the door and inhale. I guess it’s the combined scents of the bulk foods and teas and spices, the carob powder, the fresh, organic roasted coffee, the nontoxic, lavender-scented bulk cleaning supplies, the essential oils (including the patchouli that cute babe of a shelf-stocker is wearing), the olive-oil bath soaps and candles, the hand-built wooden shelving units . . . and the produce section, with all its colorful fruits and veggies. If you’re in an especially older health-food store, you might also pick up a clean, musky scent of sweat, from the generations of hippies who donated their labor to the cause.
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