If I don't give greenie/hippie/organic food culture a fair hearing, perhaps it's due to the bad start I had, back in the 1970's, when I was first exposed to it.
The first time I ate at a P.C. restaurant was at the famous Moosewood restaurant in the Finger Lakes region of upstate NY. I went away shaking my head that you have to be rich to be a hippie. Every morsel of food you put in your mouth, even the plates and silverware, were imbued with ideological purity. It didn't help that the waitress was a stereotypical college-town hanger-on who could make a man lose his appetite for a week.
I remember being indoctrinated by an idealistic young man about the advantages of a food co-op: you spend your money on food there, rather than packaging, advertising, and warehousing. This was an appealing argument. So then, why did veggies cost twice as much at the hippie store as at Walmart?
By now, nutritional science should be fairly well understood, and so the public should have no interest in it. But just look at all the food cults, fads, and phobias! Those who believe in the Whig Interpretation of History need to explain how this shows that the average person today is less superstitious than the past.Signs in the grocery stores allay the fears of shoppers by authenticating food as Certified Organic. These even bear the imprimatur of a state agency. (Some people must be troubled that this vital issue hasn't been federalized yet.) Something about this is reminiscent of orthodox Jews and their taboos against unclean foods. I wonder if somebody's sociology thesis has looked for a correlation between liberalized Judaism and organic food, as an emotional and cultural substitute. Kosher for hipsters.
What was the appeal of food cults to baby-boomers circa 1970? Were their lives so dissolute regarding sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll, that they needed to be puritanical in some "new" direction in order to prove how superior they were to their parents' generation?
The Indian tradition of vegetarianism is as famous as any. Apparently the Buddha never had the experience of the young Benjamin Franklin, an idealistic vegetarian. On his sea voyage from Boston to Philadelphia, at the start of his career, he became famished. When he saw men on board cleaning fish with other fish in their stomachs, he went away enlightened (and full).
You might hope that Greek intelligence would have been free of food phobias, but alas, the Pythagoreans prohibited beans as well as flesh. It's hard to believe that the Romans would have prohibited anything, food-wise. No wonder they ruled the world.
The Christians, much to their credit, abandoned the ancient tribal taboos of the Jews. Perhaps a sect whose most sacred ritual turned a Ritz cracker into the body of Jesus thought that it had superstitions enough.
Then Mohammed lapsed back into Mosaic food taboos and even added one of his own, al-kuhul. This is good marketing psychology for a new religion; it needs to show that it is morally superior to the competition. Fortunately for Believers, he didn't know of kahve or tobacco, so their lives still had some meaning. In fact the Turks might be said to have developed the coffee culture.
The Protestant schism didn't bring any hard and fast prohibitions in the kitchen. But one can't help but think that they looked at the booming spice trade with the Indies as the work of the Devil.
Joseph Smith, in founding Mormonism, showed his earnestness by banning coffee and tea. Fortunately caffeinated colas had not been discovered yet. The Second Great Awakening in America kept bacon off the breakfast table and gave us corn flakes instead.
But these examples are merely picturesque compared to what the modern Imperium is soon going to do to us. Unlike the superstitions of the past it will have all the modern controls at its disposal, including government agencies full of --not nutritional scientists-- but Nader-ite lawyers. Soon, giving a soda pop or some french fries to a minor will earn you the draconian penalties that leaving out a child safety seat will earn you today.
