Your Fig Bar Is So Stale...

My sister Anna recently turned me on to the Facebook group Your Mom Is So Berkeley. It includes a multitude of hilarious posts about the singular experience of growing up in Berkeley during the 1960s and 1970s. Reading it I learned that my family wasn’t the only one that tossed out its television, bought used clothes at Value Village, and spent summer vacations camping in a VW bus.

A surprising number of the posts are about food. My fellow citizens complain about brownies made with carob (considered more healthful than chocolate), powdered milk (it was cheap, because you can’t really be a hippie if you have money), and a ban on grapes (in support of the United Farm Workers boycott).

The food posts are notable, because long before the Gourmet Ghetto sprang up on its north side, Berkeley had a thing about food. This first food revolution wasn’t about taste, though. We ate as we did for spiritual, political, and health reasons: Eating flesh resulted in bad karma. Raising cattle for meat contributed to world hunger. White bread made you sluggish.

The Berkeley Co-op—a worker- and shopper-owned grocery store that opened in 1939 and lasted until 1988—became a center of this movement. The cooperative wasn’t just a politically correct concept, it also stocked politically correct food. The grocery chain lowered itself to carry such items as sugary cereals, but it marked them with a red tag noting their high sugar, salt, or fat content. The Co-op offered bulk food, of course; my dad never failed to stop at the bin filled with whole-wheat fig bars, the only store-bought cookies readily available in our house. We always shopped at the Co-op, and always gave our member number (21821), but never in my memory received a dividend.

The early food revolution spawned a couple of highly successful cookbooks, Laurel’s Kitchen and Diet for a Small Planet. Both books, born in Berkeley in the 1970s, offered a full suite of vegetarian recipes. But they were also, or even more so, about the authors’ political and spiritual journeys. Each book dedicates as least as much ink to personal growth and preaching as it does to cooking.

We have moved past those hippie days, but the 1970s food revolution never quite died. It simply acquired a sense of taste. Chez Panisse, the pre-eminent Berkeley restaurant that arguably launched the Gourmet Ghetto, features organic, locally produced foods not only because they taste better, but because it’s good for the environment. My hometown is still eating its way to a better world.