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In 1966, I was fifteen, living in Vancouver, B.C., and listening to a drumbeat coming up the coast from San Francisco. My girlfriend had a sister in her early twenties, and Nancy (not her real name) turned out to be one of Vancouver’s early hippies. Nancy let me stick around and listen as her friends tested, and eventually mastered, the new ideas coming out of California.
The budding anthropologist had a ringside seat! I got to hear people argue why society was wrong in almost every particular. Fascinating! (I had had no idea.) This was culture turning on culture. Hippies against the middle class. Revolutionary zeal versus bourgeois stolidity. Wild acts of imagination versus, well, bourgeois stolidity. Best of all, these ideas were really going to antagonize my dad. Excellent.
Eventually, I got to see a second, tragic face of the revolution. Some of these early hippies descended from drug use into drug abuse, and then into heroin, and then into prostitution, and then, in some cases, into suicide. If the early days of the cultural revolution had swept me up, this dreadful end impressed me more. Perhaps human nature wasn’t malleable; perhaps the social order wasn’t improvable; perhaps utopia wasn’t just around the corner, after all. This was a philosophical bucket of cold water for a kid just out into the world. What follows is tinged by this cynicism.
Hippies were shock troops in tie-dye, come to dismantle the consumer culture of the 1950s. They took aim at everything prized by Susan’s parents. Those shirts and dresses? Ridiculous. The suburbs: tedious and conformist. The split-level homes: laughable. The cars: vulgar, showy, wasteful. The resorts: punishingly unspiritual, the perfect opposite of an ashram. The clothing… all those miracle fabrics, artificial colors, and life-of-their-own buoyancy. And what could be worse than “dry cleaning”? Coating yourself in polyester that was itself coated in tetrachloroethylene? What could be weirder?
For me, the best anthropological guide to the hippie revolution is a magnificent book by Donald Katz called Home Fires. This is a nuanced, unblinking treatment of the fate of the Gordon family. These days the counterculture is sometimes remembered as youthful high spirits and kooky good fun. But Katz shows the destructive fury the revolution unleashed on the Gordons. What began as a relatively happy, hopeful family living the good life on Long Island ends in disarray, damaged by a series of now-familiar misadventures. One of the Gordon children met with heroin addiction, tried prostitution, and contemplated suicide.
In some ways, the revolution portrayed here looks like a Western version of the Great Leap Forward being staged by Mao Zedong five thousand miles away. Children turning on parents. Youth cadre seeking to erase the traditional past from archives, temples, and homes. But of course, the Gordons were not the least bit Maoist. These Gordon children were not mesmerized by a totalitarian. They volunteered for the movement that destroyed their family.
Hippies were especially vociferous about food. It helped them make the case against American culture: The adulterants, the preservatives. The alienation of a natural substance from its natural state. The intervention of industry and marketing. The food of the 1950s was an obvious crime against nature. It was an indictment of capitalism (and whatever it was Susan’s parents were doing in the backyard).
Had I been paying attention, I could report the hippie approach to food from my own experience. But I wasn’t. What were the chances that I, as a middle church Canadian Protestant with Scottish, English, and American origins, would be anything but insensible when it came to the culinary? Happily, Jonathan Kauffman was paying attention and I have made his wonderful book Hippie Food my guide.
Kauffman looks at what food was like before hippies. He examines The Good Housekeeping Cookbook from 1963 and finds the majority of its recipes relying on food that came in boxes and cans. (Turkey Cashew Casserole called for canned meat and condensed cream-of-mushroom soup.) The “installed base” of ’50s cuisine was formidable. To make reform harder still, hippie alternatives like tofu and tempeh were regarded with “suspicion and disgust.” Organic farming was considered a “delusional act.” Granola and yogurt were “foreign substances.” This American food was well armored against hippie innovation.1
Eventually, hippie food prevailed. But Kauffman shows why this was not inevitable. Indeed, this food was, in some ways, so odd and unappetizing, it should probably have failed. Kauffman, bless him, does the anthropological thing: he asks people. The hippie food trend, it turns out, acted as both a provocation and a consequence of many other trends, including the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, and new ideas about ecology, women’s liberation, black power, and personal exploration. It was especially instrumental in helping people make the transition from ’60s politics to ’70s culture. At one moment, it was driving the revolution; at another, it was a caboose in tow.
But of course, food was merely one piece of the counterculture. Crafts were also key. In the late ’60s, a tidal wave of weaving, sewing, baking, canning, knitting, potting, planting, and carving was underway. Making things by hand at home, whether for your own or a neighbor’s use, was virtuous work in a hippie community. Growing things counted too. Gardens flourished. Wall hangings, cork curtains, macramé baskets, tea cozies, found-in-an-alley art, plants, Indian textiles, Peruvian rugs, candles, and lots of cats—these were the signatures of the hippie household. All were auditioning for a place in the artisanal culture to come; only a few of them would make it. (Cats, sure. Cats go with everything.)
Hippies were hostile to technology. They regarded engineers as soulless bastards who wanted to subdue nature, equip for war, flatten city neighborhoods, create assembly lines, and otherwise enable the military-industrial complex. For hippies, technology was almost always the enemy. Rumor said a commune in the interior of British Columbia came up with a tech-free solution for stopping the truck after its brakes wore out. They ran it gently into a tree.
Of course, many hippies had overtly political aims: ending war and securing civil rights among them. But eventually, their aesthetic became more purely cultural. Todd Gitlin tells us that at a meeting in Berkeley in 1966 people stopped singing a union anthem, “Solidarity Forever,” and started singing the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine.” For Gitlin, this is evidence of a rapprochement of the political and the cultural, but it can also be seen as a premonition of the coming transition. Eventually, hippies would take their leave of the political, persuaded that they could do with culture what they could not do with politics.2 As Stuart Brand overheard Ken Kesey say, it was important to observe the difference.3
The end of the hippie revolution was ugly. The price in suffering was high. If there is a single culprit, it was surely hard drugs. As Joe Samberg notes from his experience on San Francisco’s Telegraph Avenue, the drugs designed to open the gates of consciousness eventually gave way to heroin. “All that stuff about consciousness was just sort of dropped.”4
For other folks, the end was merely sad. Erika Anderson remembers her experience on The Farm in Tennessee as a “failed dream.” For others, even the dream disappeared. These were kids who had read William Blake, listened to the Doors, and adored the Merry Pranksters, only to end up cleaning motel rooms in really dangerous parts of town.5
And sometimes, the end was simply weird. Take, for instance, the fate of Father Yod, who in 1969 founded The Source, one of the first vegetarian restaurants in Los Angeles.6 One day in 1975, without training, experience, or explanation, Father Yod went hang gliding off a thirteen-hundred-foot cliff in Hawaii. He died nine hours later.
Still, the rudiments of the hippie contribution to the artisanal revolution are all pretty clear. The concern for transparency was fundamental. “Ingredients had to arrive in the kitchen looking like they were pulled out of the fields, not a package.”7 Removing intermediaries from the food world remains a core artisanal objective, as does getting rid of the branding and the marketing. Less is more. First, do no harm.
But there was one thing the artisan would not inherit from the hippie: the passion for aggressively altering consciousness. Caffeine is their god. Perhaps a little biohacking. An exquisite Gruyère? Soft drugs, maybe. Hard drugs, not at all.
On the whole, artisans also did not embrace the hippie hatred of capitalism. On the whole, they are okay with property, okay with capitalism, okay with technology. Artisans want to transform capitalism, to scale it down, make it less transactional and more social, less about economic wealth and more about communities flourishing. It is hard to imagine an artisan imitating Abbie Hoffman throwing dollar bills from the visitors’ gallery of the New York Stock Exchange.8
Like hippies, artisans are not fans of hierarchical distinction. They don’t cotton to elites. Neither artisans nor hippies aspire to empire building or social climbing. On the other hand, artisans are not quite as egalitarian as hippies were. They are especially prepared to acknowledge, and ever so subtly defer to, those who have taken their artisanal practice to uncommon heights. Master bakers and master brewers hold exalted status, and they carry themselves accordingly. They may treat us as equals in conversation, but everyone knows this is a gesture of kindness.
Artisans are more practical about politics than hippies were. They have no particular interest in communal undertakings. To be sure, there are some intentional communities that embrace a socialist logic. But most artisans prefer that old Yankee saying: every tub on its own bottom.9 Individuals must stand on their own feet. Generosity is welcome. It’s an effective way to build community. But it’s optional, not obligatory.
In a sense, Kauffman’s question remains unanswered. How did hippie ideas and ideals find their way from personal chaos, dissolute communities, and disagreeable foodstuffs into the mainstream? It’s hard to say exactly. But they did. As a diffusion event, the long-term triumph of the hippie movement is astounding. It managed to go from thousands to millions of enthusiasts in not much more than a decade.10 Even after the political movement fell away, its contribution to American culture lives on. When parents refuse soft drinks for their kids, when parents refuse fast foods for themselves, when schools refuse processed food for their students, that’s the legacy of the hippie.
The end of the hippie movement was achieved in large part by punks and preps. Punks scorned the naïveté, the political cluelessness, the tender-hearted refusal to come to grips with the world. Preps scorned the sloppy sentiment, the refusal of social distinction, the woolly fashion sense, the hope that utopia could be achieved with music and drugs. Both disliked what they took to be the hippie’s hollow piety.11 But if the movement was dead, some of its ideas were locked into American culture, waiting there for the return of the Artisan.