From Brown Rice To Tofu, How 'Hippie Food' Became American Cuisine

Much of the food that was introduced to Americans by the counterculture in the 1960s and ’70s still influences what we eat today, food reporter and author Jonathan Kauffman says.

Here & Now‘s Jeremy Hobson talks with Kauffman (@jonkauffman) about “Hippie Food: How Back-to-the-Landers, Longhairs, and Revolutionaries Changed the Way We Eat.”

• Scroll down to read an excerpt from “Hippie Food”

Interview Highlights

On the origins of the hippie food movement

“It was sort of a funny patchwork cuisine that took ideas and ingredients from the health food movements from Southern California of the 1930s to the 1950s, from macrobiotics, which was a philosophy and diet introduced to America by George Asawa that was basically a Japanese peasant diet with a sort of spiritual bent. And then the counterculture’s own ideas about politics and how eating could be a political act. And then they