The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 11 September 2007
by Lucy Horton
Millet loaf. Tamari stir fry. Carob and honey. Low mucus diet. All are relics of the same experimentation with food as with lifestyles and drugs in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Young people forming what they saw as visionary communities also wanted to break with the processed food they were brought up on in the early 60s. Most of the communes eventually collapsed under the weight of their own popularity, or in waves of interpersonal conflicts. Some of the food stuck around. In this funky cookbook, Lucy Horton outlines many of the recipes she picked up on a nationwide tour of 43 communes in 1971. There is a combination of cultural choices and limitations that help define the character of these recipes. Many of these kids were living on little money, they wanted to live off the land, some lived on food stamps, others on trust funds. Most wanted to define a sort of cuisine based on responsibility to the earth and their ideas of good food for humans. So, the recipes lean heavily on basic greens and grains. Many of them are designed for large groups, and most have an ad hoc feeling to them. However, what the reader finds here will also include primitive versions of what have become staples of a natural or organic diet. There is instruction on making tofu, for example, and the wonders of stir fry cooking, all of which seemed so new back then. Horton also mentions many of the dietary issues the communards were rebelling against, and, depressingly, many of those issues remain. We still have heavily processed foods, foods that promote obesity, and we're even using a higher tonnage of pesticides on our food than in the days after Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. More than forty years later, the movement has not succeeded in supplanting traditionally toxic food products. Eating like this is still seen as somewhat outside the norm, despite its proven health benefits, and the popularity of such organic kitchens as Chez Panisse.
While most of the recipes aren't terribly appealing, given what has developed since 1971, the book is still a valuable window on the times. Horton tells many brief tales of her journey around the country, and her descriptions of life on the communes are immediate. The reader can get a real feel for the chaotic communal kitchen in Horton's book. We read of the rides she hitched up and down the Pacific coast and back across the country. We witness the occasional bacchanalian event to celebrate a birthday or a solstice. Horton describes the character of the different communes and how they relate to the world. These make the book worth reading as a short tour of the communes, even if the reader has no intention of cooking any of this funky food. A lot of fun.