Modern Living: The Kosher of the Counterculture

TELL me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are," said Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, the 18th century French gastronome. His aphorism is especially true today. The U.S., long the melting pot of a dozen national cuisines, shows signs of becoming stratified along culinary as well as philosophical and political lines. The blacks are proudly eating soul foods, the hardhats feast on as much red meat as they can afford, and the white-collar liberals seem to be keeping down their cholesterol with chicken and veal. The youth of Woodstock Nation? With almost religious zeal, they are becoming vegetarians. They are also in the vanguard of the flourishing organic-food movement, insisting on produce grown without chemical fertilizers or pesticides.

"Diet is very very central to the revolution," says Bill Wheeler, leader of a north California commune, referring primarily to a revolution in sensibility. But while the drugs, the clothes, the hair, the music and the language of the counterculture have become monotonously familiar, its diet has been relatively ignored. Counterculture food, while relatively bland, is nevertheless distinctive and pervasive. When Yale students played host to Black Panther supporters last spring, for example, they fed their thousands of visitors not hot dogs and Coke, but a special recipe of oats, dates, sunflower seeds, peanuts, prunes, raisins and cornflakes. Indeed, at Woodstock itself the free kitchens of the Hog Commune ladled out rice, carrots and raisins for all comers.

Fruitarians and Macrobiotics. Why the new vegetarian trend? It is inexpensive, for one thing. Moreover, the ecoactivists are concerned by the amount of DDT and other chemicals in meat. But there are more spiritual if not downright mystical reasons as well. "When carrion is consumed, people are really greedy," states California's Wheeler. Others maintain that food is the determining factor in "the biological conditions in man that produce wars, brutality and narrow thinking."

There is also the influence of Eastern religions, which is to be found wherever the members of Woodstock Nation gather. Yoga disciplines, for instance, have always included "natural" foods while proscribing meats, and some of the new vegetarians share the Hindu regard for all living creatures. A meatless diet is also considered more conducive to meditation and higher awareness. A few neo-yogis find that even vegetables are too mundane and go on to become fruitarian. "Fruit is probably the most spiritual food there is," says Craig Bennett, 23, a Southern California follower of the Indian guru, Rhada Swami.

Going beyond yoga, many cultural revolutionaries are adopting—or at least sampling—an imported version of the dietary discipline of the Zen Buddhists. That diet had been dubbed macrobiotic (from makros, meaning long, and bios, meaning life) by the late Japanese Author George Ohsawa, who wrote dozens of abstruse books on ancient Oriental diet and medicine and was the principal proselytizer for macrobiotics in Europe and the U.S.