Modern Living: The Kosher of the Counterculture

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Organic Drugs. For many, yoga and macrobiotic diets have become a substitute for drugs. Says Ron Johnson, who runs the Clear Moment store in Bloomington, Ind.: "Now that drugs have sort of fallen off, the new diets are the things. The kids think it increases their awareness." Says Hanna Kroeger of the New Health Foods store in Boulder, Colo.: "The young are beginning to realize that drugs aren't real. They thought it was a shortcut to the spiritual. But the 18-and 19-year-olds are turning back. They put themselves into preparing food now." Even some of those who have remained on drugs have been influenced by the organic-food fad. They make it a point to use only those drugs that grow naturally —like marijuana, mescaline or peyote —and avoid LSD, amphetamines and other manufactured products.

Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss has shown that a society's cuisine is a language into which it unconsciously translates its structure. Thus frozen foods, packaged foods, TV dinners, fast-food franchises, preservatives and additives all stem from a culture that made pragmatism, step saving and time saving virtues in themselves. Because there are different values and plenty of free time in the new culture, gardening (organically), grinding wheat, baking bread, preparing yogurt and making a quiet ceremony of cooking and eating are all parts of the scene. Rabbi Arthur Green, member of an experimental community in Cambridge, Mass., has even suggested that "maybe in our day keeping kosher should mean eating natural foods and keeping away from cellophane and TV dinners."

Coming Full Circle. For the more earnest of the cultists, the kitchen has become a holy place, as it is to the Hindus and the Buddhists. Says Elaine Mensoff: "We do reverence to the food by keeping the kitchen orderly. I try to create my food as a propagation of life. It is a responsibility, because when I'm down and cook, the whole house is down." Elaine is aware of the irony of thus venerating woman's role in the kitchen in the age of feminine liberation. "We have come full circle and are doing the things our mothers did," she admits, "but our motivation is internalized."

Meanwhile, like other facets of the counterculture, the new diets are filtering into the suburbs via the teenagers. Rows of unfamiliar foodstuffs are appearing in middle-class cupboards: brown rice by the bucketful, as well as packages of aduki, granola, gomasio, ginseng and miso. Worried mothers are on the phone to each other whenever one of their children threatens to "go macrobiotic," for they have only the vaguest notion of what that means. Going organic poses another kind of problem, for that will mean that the Thanksgiving turkey must be imported from an organic farm for a dollar a pound. Even a formal wedding may nowadays be followed—to the dismay of hungry friends and relatives—with a feast of brown rice, nituke vegetables and Mu tea, ceremoniously prepared by the young bride herself.