From: altar@beaufort.sfu.ca (Ted Wayn Altar)
Subject: Re: Book review: Appetite for Change
Organization: Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, B.C., Canada
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 1993 17:49:58 GMT

Bill Maddex writes:

>Why am I reviewing a book that came out almost four years ago?  Because I just
>found a copy used for 1/3 of the cover price, of course.
>Anyway, the full info is:

>_Appetite for Change_, How the Conterculture Took on the Food Industry 
>1966-1988, Belasco, Warren J., New York, Pantheon (RIP) 1989.


"Right on man!"  "Enpower the people!"  "Grow your own!"

Seriously Bill, it does look like a good book.  Thanks for
the review and drawing our attention to a good read.

It is sad that Westerners have become so detached and
removed from nature that many of us have become entrained to
the sorry state of not being able to even cook for
ourselves.  What an achievement of the food industry!  It is
really astonishing that there has been successfully fostered
such a widespread dependency on processed convenient foods
that people have actually become habituated to even prefer
their taste over whole foods.  "You deserve a TREAT today,
eat at MacDonalds or microwave that TV dinner!"  Some
"treat"!  The result has been a whole population of people
that swear by the "better" taste of vitamin reinforced,
spongy white bread over whole grain bread.  Or consider how
people have become so tethered to the greasy and salty taste
of animals fats on practically all their foods that I'm
surprised that they don't add it to their orange juice.

Cyril Joad in 1953 said,

    "It will be said of this generation that it found
    England a land of beauty and left it a land of beauty
    spots"

Not even this much can be said about the availability of
good, tasty whole foods in our average supermarket.


>He starts out by giving you a somewhat boring personal account of his (and
>his wife's) becoming health conscious as grad students in the late '60s, his
>father having a heart attack being a galvanizing event.  He then moves to the
>story of food becoming an element of the '60s rebellion rejecting the entire 
>'straight' culture.  

Bill, I think you're maybe being too hard on the author for doing
what, after all, is a kind of counter-culture "confessio fidei"
in which one states at the beginning where one is "coming from".
Didn't they frequently ask in the 60's, 

	"Hey man, where are you *coming* from?"

This kind of personalized disclosure is, I find, useful for context
and to maybe even inspire others that the author's insights did not 
come from some mysterious arcane study or special power, but from merely
the thoughtful reflection of everyday events and ordinary life.
"You too, can be move to experience what I experience, think
what I have come to believe."  Having said that, I will concur that
sometimes these kinds of personal opening statements can be tiresome,
especially when coming from a narcisstic personality.  But even
that is useful to me, since then I know in advance what kinds of
quirks of thinking and self-centered outlook one might expect from
such a personality.   

Bill, I also think that in your review you were also being too hard
on good olde Francis Lappe, just as earlier you were too fast to 
dismiss Lewis REgenstein.  Just consider this as my "confessio
fidei"  ;-)


						ted

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