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.

In macrobiotics, calories don't count. Neither does scientific nutritional balance, a concept that in the Age of Aquarius seems to carry little weight. "The only nutritional rules we disregard are modern ones," airily explains Elaine Mensoff, 21, who cooks for a Boston macrobiotic commune. Instead, macrobiotics concerns itself with those ancient complementary and opposite forces yin and yang, into which everything in the world is divided, including food. Sugar and most fruits, for example, tend to be very yin, while meats and eggs tend to be very yang. The trick is to balance one's menus to maintain a 5-to-l proportion of yin to yang. Since brown rice in itself contains this ratio, it is the principal food of the diet.

A Concession to Desire. Macrobiotics can be dangerous. The diet became notorious five years ago when a 24-year-old Greenwich Village housewife named Beth Ann Simon died after losing 50 Ibs. Beth Ann had starved for nine months, rarely going off Macrobiotic Regimen No. 7 (only whole grain cereals), which is prescribed for special healing purposes and is intended to be followed for only about ten days at a time. Other fatal cases of malnutrition as well as scurvy have been traced to diet No. 7. Their yin-yang balance notwithstanding, brown rice and cereals alone are deficient not only in protein but in vitamins A and C.

Most macrobiotics, as Ohsawa's devotees call themselves, try to follow his other nine diets, which are graduated from six to minus three to include increasing amounts of fish and vegetables --organically grown--along with brown rice. In actual practice, a good many youthful macrobiotics also eat meat. Explains Michel Abehsera, author of the cookbook recommended by the Whole Earth Catalog: "Meat finds its way into the Zen macrobiotic diet quite simply as a concession to man's sensual desires."

Clue in the Candy. The farthest-out macrobiotic lore, which would come as a surprise to the Zen Buddhist monks themselves, is to be found in the culinary columns of underground newspapers, where readers are routinely warned against eating too much meat, dairy products or sugar. A columnist in the Los Angeles Free Press, for example, recently speculated that the University of Texas massacre a few years back was caused by too much yin--in this case sugar--in the killer's blood. The clue that supported his conclusion: chocolate candy was found in the pockets of the slain sniper.

Macrobiotics, like other panaceas, can be many things to many people. Some think that it confers superhuman strength. But many macrobiotics use the diet to become less aggressive and, above all, more spiritual. "It's not the food that is important so much. It is the understanding. Through your food you are trying to attain the order of the universe," says Jimmy Silver, a Hollywood macrobiotic enthusiast.

There are sexual ramifications as well. "If I eat yang I slip into my desire body," says Michael Bobier, owner of an organic restaurant and food shop in Marin County, Calif. "Yin food makes me more ethereal. Women often find what is soft and gentle in a man most appealing about him. It's much easier to be tender on a yin diet."

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 Levi-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.

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