Appetite for Change: How the Counterculture Took On the Food Industry

340 Pages·2014·5.938 MB·English

by  Warren J. Belasco

APPETITE FOR CHANGE

APPETITE
FOR CHANGE
HOW THE COUNTERCULTURE
TOOK ON THE FOOD INDUSTRY
SECOND UPDATED EDITION
WARREN J. BELASCO
CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS
ITHACA AND LONDON
Copyright© 1989, 1993, 2007 by Warren J. Belasco
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts
thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the
publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East
State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850.
First published 1989 by Pantheon Books
Updated Edition published, Cornell Paperbacks, 1993
Second Updated Edition published, Cornell Paperbacks, 2007
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Catalogi11gi11P11blicatio11 Data
Belasco, Warren James.
Appetite for change : how the counterculture took on the food industry I
Warren James Belasco. -2nd updated ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 13: 978 0 8014 7329 6 (pbk.: alk. paper)
ISBN 10: 0 8014 7329 2 (pbk.: alk. paper)
I. Natural foods industry-United States. 2. Food industry and trade
United States. 3. Subculture United States. 4. Consumers United States.
I. Title.
HD9005.B44 2007
338.4' 76413020973 dc22
2006029851
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For Sonia, Nathaniel, and Amy

CONTENTS
PREFACET O THE SECOND
UPDATEDE DITION
1x
PREFACE
PART ONE:
REBELLION: THE MAKING
OF A COUNTERCUISINE
1. AN EDIBLED YNAMIC IS
2. RADICAL CONSUMERISM 29
3. RADICALT HERAPY:
THE OPPOSITIONAILD ENTITY 43
4. ORGANICF ORCE:
AN ALTERNATIVIEN FRASTRUCTURE 68
PART TWO:
PROCESSING IDEOLOGY:
THE MORAL PANIC
5. THE ORTHODOXD EFENSE:
THE WAR OF THE METAPHORS Ill
6. THE MESS IN WASHINGTON 132
7. THE PRESS:S HIFTINGT HE CENTER 154
CONTENTS
PART THREE:
MARKETERS: HEALTHY PROFITS
8. OPPORTUNISMI N THE
MARKETPLACE 185
9. STRADDLINGT HE CONTRADICTIONS 200
10. A HEALTHYF OODS PORTFOLIO 218
11. LOOKINGB ACKWARD,A ND FORWARD 243
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 257
NOTES 259
INDEX 315
VIII
PREFACE TO THE SECOND
UPDATED EDITION
T his is one of those book projects that starts as one thing and
then becomes something else. My work on it began in the
early 1980s, when the radical hopes and trends of the 1960s
had given way to the conservative ascendancy of Ronald Reagan and
Margaret Thatcher. Impressed and distressed by the apparent de­
feat of the counterculture, I originally planned to look at the recent
history of health food as a case study in what cultural studies schol­
ars call the "hegemonic process" -the way mainstream institutions
confront, handle, and tame subcultural dissent and deviancy. In par­
ticular, how does urban-industrial-capitalist society withstand and
even profit from discontent with urban-industrial-capitalist society?
It was a question that I had already addressed in a book on the early
years of the automobile, which first appeared as a tool to enable dis­
gruntled middle-class city people to escape city life and go "back to
nature," yet which soon fueled the rise of a powerful and, for awhile
at least, highly profitable industry. In this new work, tentatively ti­
tled "Retailing Revolt," I proposed to examine the similar fate of
blue jeans (originally an emblem of working-class resistance to bour­
geois fashion and culture), rock 'n' roll (like blue jeans, once a means
PREFACE TO THE SECO D UPDATED EDITION
of subcultural deviance), and the natural foods movement (a protest
against industrialized food). In each case, countercultural confor­
mity was channeled into what Thomas Frank calls the "commodified
dissent" of "cool" marketers such as The Gap, Time-Warner, and
Whole Foods.1
More or less by chance I started with the food chapter, which
soon became an entire manuscript about the counterculture's con­
frontation with the food industry. It does seem that many food stud­
ies thus begin not out of intrinsic interest in the food but in what
food can tell us about something else-gender, labor relations, class,
ethnic identity, imperialism, or, in my case, capitalist cooptation.2
The original question remained: how are insurgent impulses redi­
rected into socially safe consumption? But in the process of investi­
gating this case study of the culture wars, I also came to see that food
issues matter in themselves. And in the many years since starting
this project, I have put food at the center of my inquiry into the so­
cial, political, and environmental challenges that confront us. My
subsequent research has focused on the question of whether the
world will be able to feed itself in the future, especially if economic
development means that people will consume more meat. This
weighty issue also preoccupied many radical practitioners of what I
call the countercuisine, a coherent set of alternative food beliefs,
practices, and institutions:'
Like all examinations of history, my own perspective on this
story has been conditioned by my personal context. Three periods
are particularly important here. First, it was in the late 1960s that I
initially encountered the health foods movement as part of the
greater countercultural insurgency that induced so many Baby
Boomers to "go" vegetarian, organic, or even macrobiotic. Second, I
wrote most of the original draft of this book during the Reagan era
(1981-1989), when it was painfully obvious that, despite its subver­
sive implications, the countercuisine was no real match for dominant
political and economic institutions. The original preface thus opens
in 1989, when the hegemonic process had done much of its work.
x True, private food practices had changed substantially thanks to
countercultural pressure, but the conservative forces that controlled
the food system-and society in general-were stronger than ever.
Third, and last, I am updating this book in 2006, when the ability of
lifestyle liberalism to coexist with political reaction seems even more
obvious.
Ir was an article of faith during the Sixties that the personal was