Sprouting grains at home kicked off a new organic food shift in 1970

Grains sprouting and bread baking were the start of organic food in 1970

By the start of the 1970s, health food wasn’t an entirely new concept, nor was it mainstream. But it was gaining momentum. Around the country, a wave of mostly young Americans started pushing back on industrialized food and turning toward something they saw as cleaner, simpler and more natural. Supermarkets weren’t quite on board yet, but co-ops, bulk bins and back-to-the-land cookbooks were beginning to fill the gap. That shift was about thinking about food in an entirely different way.

A 1970 article spelled out what was happening: More people were turning away from processed food, and looking for ingredients that hadn’t been treated with chemicals or additives. That meant grains like millet and barley, dried beans, unsulfured dried fruit, and loaves of dense sour rye packed with seeds. Some came from home kitchens, some from small bakeries, but the goal was the same — no shortcuts.

Sprouting grains at home was one of the first steps. You didn’t need a garden or a lot of equipment. People soaked wheat or beans in jars, drained them, and left them on the counter until they started to grow. At the University of California at Santa Cruz, students could choose a fully organic vegetarian menu that included things like kelp, tofu and nutritional yeast — foods that weren’t common in most dining halls at the time.

This kind of food came with its own rules. No pesticides, artificial flavors, nor preservatives. No antibiotics in meat. In many cases, that meant skipping meat altogether. Since most grocery stores didn’t carry what these new eaters wanted, food co-ops and small natural markets filled the gap.

Below, we’ve pulled together photos and pages from that 1970 article showing grains sprouting, bread baking, and the kinds of ingredients that were showing up in kitchens that year.

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.