The move to eat natural: New converts to organic food are sprouting up all over
The ideas are simple and appealing: we eat too much, mostly of the wrong things; our food comes to us not as nature intended, but altered by man during both growth and processing; and this tampering has produced increasingly bad effects on man and the ecology.
With this philosophical armament, a dedicated and growing band of people — most of them young — has taken to cooking and serving no-nonsense natural foods: grains such as millet, barley and buckwheat, and various sorts of seeds, beans, nuts and lentils.
>> Organic food: Hokum or healthy? (1972)
The old art of bread-baking is being revived. True devotees not only reject the instant world of brown-and-serve. They also insist, and will go to great lengths to insure, that all their food be grown organically, that is, without artificial help of any kind: no chemical fertilizers, no pesticides that linger in the soil. Meat must come from animals raised without benefit of antibiotics. Foods should be free of what they consider dubious chemical additives, whether for color or flavor or preservation.
To take care of these specialized demands, a nationwide subindustry has grown up.
Captions for page 2:
Staples of a 1970 natural food market: Around the crock of nuts (bottom) are (clockwise from left) cranberry beans, black beans, fava beans and millet. Around the large crock of azuki soy beans (top center) are (clockwise) unsulphured apricots, toasted kasha, sunflower seeds and red lentils.
Corn, sprouted wheat and sour rye loaves, leavened and unleavened — some with poppy, sesame or sunflower seeds and many based on primitive-style formulas — make dense, satisfying breads common to the new food thinking. Most here come from a commercial bakery in California.
At the University of California at Santa Cruz, students may choose an organic vegetarian menu. Table in front offers condiments such as kelp, yeast and bean curd.
