From: mad4@ellis.uchicago.edu (Bill Maddex)
Subject: Book review:  Appetite for Change
Reply-To: mad4@midway.uchicago.edu
Organization: Pranksters for Peace
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 1993 00:14:16 GMT

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.

The author is (at the time of publication anyway) a prof of American Studies
@U MD Baltimore, and fortysomething.

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.  This starts w/the Diggers setting up free meals in the
Hashbury and proceeds to Alice Waters and Diet for a Small Planet.  Throughout
this, his focus is on health aspects of diet.  Even when discussing the rise
of organic agriculture in communes his gives only brief attention to the
eco/spiritual side of things.  Although he relates Francis Moore Lappe's
story about talk show hosts only wanting to talk to her about the health
consequences of the changes she advocates, he does the same thing.

The most interesting part of the book is the second section, "Processing
Ideology:  The Moral Panic," in which he discusses the shifting views of
our relationship w/nature that lead many people to wonder whether food
should come from labs rather than kitchens.  He well gives a sense of the
attitude a lot of people had about the proliferation of additives and so
on in food, that they were "plastic," and that food was just one more 
manifestation of how removed American society had become from nature.  He
documents well the scare this put into a lot of food industry giants.  He
documents equally well the effective cooption of this attitude by the food
industry after it realized that the public would buy stuff that said 'natural'
on the label.

He also gives you some sense of the bad side of hippy food--the kind of glop
that the blerb of every new veggie cookbook says it shows is no longer
necessary.  A lot of the bad side of this, he claims, is due to stoned cooks
and refusal to use Julia Child.  This may be right, but some people can cook
great food while stoned; I'm more inclined to lay the blame on Lappe, but
what the hell, it's his book.

I liked reading this book, but I found a lot of what he said conflicted w/my
own memories of the early '70s.  Granted, I was born in '67, but I've got a
good memory, and I grew up surounded by the people he's talking about.  My
father was the last faculty adviser for SDS @OR, and we used to go visit his
students out @a rural commune.  A lot of my grade school/Hebrew school 
teachers were or still are hippies.  We went to a lot of world hunger events
where we heard Lappe inspired talks and ate complimentary protein.  (GAG)
Most of the veg kids I knew in grade school were definitely of the spiritual
type.  My dad still loves to tell the story of a heated argument among the 
parents group when my sister was in grade school between "the Twinkie 
advocates and the brown rice cake crowd."  He says people were pretty vehement
in their advocacy of Twinkies, which jibes w/Belasco's claim that the 
mainstream regarded natural food as a moral effront.  On the other hand, one
of my heroes (a dairy farmer, which is proof that nobody's perfect I guess,
still, the Springfield Creamery does now sell soy yogurt and an awesome
vegan frozen thang) was already in the process of becoming the big natural
yogurt manufacturer on the West Coast.

It's an interesting book, and if you're either a compulsive reader or a 
food maniac it's worth checking out.  

Billy Magic

Ignorance of your culture is not considered cool.
					--The Residents 
Newsgroups: rec.food.veg