Hippie food

Introduction:

Normally I am able to write an episode in a couple of days over about three sessions of writing. Sometimes more, sometimes less. This episode falls into the “more” column. And yet, I’m still not sure I’m totally happy with it.

However, sometimes that’s how it goes when writing, especially when trying to write about complexity, with complexity. 

That being said, part of the work I’m doing myself as a writer through this show is resisting the urge for perfectionism or completion or a slick narrative resolution. The truth is all of these pieces are works in progress. The truth is they can all do with more thinking through. The truth is also we can all get so bogged down in thinking and working, that nothing ever is shared. However, without sharing and moving on to the next piece, delay renders an active writing practice inactive. Perhaps if I were crafting a column for the Times I would take a different approach, but for this audience I want to normalize imperfection and neutralize self-criticism. 

So in order to move on, I’m releasing the episode now. Late. Long. In progress. It is what it is. Perhaps, I’ll come back to it. Or perhaps the next piece will be better. 

“Hippie Food.” 

Hippie food. That’s what the food my mother made was still called in the 90s, when she enriched hot porridge with almond butter and flax seeds in our single family home in suburban Connecticut. 

She came by the naming rights honestly. Her first decade and a half of adulthood was spent living communally, first in Boston and later in rural Maine, where she and a gang of friends and lovers and visionary political dissidents were doing their best to create an alternative plane of existence atop a wild blueberry barren, literally building a new home away from the social crises of the late sixties and total seventies. 

Hair was long, skin tan, shirts few, and bras fewer. The house was built as fast as wages from itinerant jobs could be scrounged and materials salvaged and engineering books read. No later than one stage of building was mastered–foundation, flooring, walls–the next arose–windows, second stories, roofs. 

I understand, though no one has recounted this to me specifically but the hierarchy of needs attests to its truthfulness, that no sooner than an old school bus filled with beds was parked along the building site, a kitchen of sorts was established. With time as short as the short Maine building season and money spoken for by the lumberyard, the hard-working bellies of more than a dozen twenty-something’s had to be filled constantly with hearty meals made on the cheap with minimal equipment. And so my mother learned to cook grains bought in bulk and bulk them out with protein packed legumes and eventually vegetables harvested from the communal garden. Leftover grains from the day before became the base for the next morning’s bread, spread with roughly churned nut butters and topped with apples and cinnamon. So important was food to the mission of the group, many of them went on to found a co-op, still operating today in Belfast, which allowed them to buy in quantities necessary to feed the commune’s long kitchen table. 

It’s strange to think how my mother had later to adapt the scale of these recipes from enough to feed an entire commune plus whoever dropped by that night (and by all accounts there were always plenty of drop ins) down to the paltry amounts required by just me and my dad. 

But the bulgar and brown rice dishes persisted, even twenty years later and hundreds of miles from the Belfast co-op (though our bougie Connecticut market Hay Day sold items in bulk, I suspect more for the pleasing display of textures the grains, seeds, and nuts lent that corner of the store). As on the commune, most of my days started with hippie food: nut butter infused oatmeal or corn pancakes or scrambled eggs with home fries topped with Herbamare. My mother’s pantry waited at the ready with nutritional yeast, dried fruits, Knox plain gelatin, brown rice cakes, and sheets of dried seaweed. 

For many decades I felt nothing but embarrassment at the sight of her pantry. And don’t get me started at the shame I felt opening my lunchbox—somehow my mother knew how to transform even that American childhood staple of the PB&J into hippie food, with coarse bread, coarser peanut butter, and wild blueberry preserves, inevitably smushed (my fault, not hers) in a wax paper bag. 

There were a few moments when I felt like my family joined the food mainstream. I remember my dad and I seeing a plane skywriting “Drink Pepsi;” we immediately went out and got one for the sheer novelty. One summer Cheetos came out with a paw shaped product and for which the whole family, my mother included, went gaga. I couldn’t believe that both my parents would reliably buy bag after bag of paw-shaped, neon-flavored deliciousness, but just as normalcy was about to set in someone at Frito-Lay axed the paw shaped puffs, and the potential for social progress in the lunchroom was likewise discontinued.

I’ve gotten to the age that I can now think in terms of decades, but I’m also at a young enough age that I resist taking too longitudinal of a view for fear of phrases like “I remember when,” or “when I was your age,” or anything about trends in music, fashion, or make up. 

But from time to time it strikes me how ubiquitous are many of the foods my mother took such pains to locate or special order or travel to Asian groceries. Though I live in Mexico, I often send my kids to school with dried seaweed, Tamari soaked tofu, and a rice cake smeared with natural peanut butter. This is remarkable to me for about a dozen reasons, starting with the global availability of these items and ending with the enthusiasm with which my children greet each of these dishes. 

My children, needless to say, are fantastic eaters with sophisticated palates. In the last week alone they’ve consumed with gusto homemade pierogies heaped with onion and sour cream, a roasted broccoli and zucchini dish with a feta dressing of my invention, shrimp ceviche, and of course various Mexican dishes that even Mexican friends remark at with envy as my kids embellish eat place with every available topping, telling me that their kids reject everything but plain beans and warm tortillas. Thai food, sushi, any color of curry, Middle Eastern schwarmas and falafels—I can’t remember the last time my kids have rejected any type of food. They are without prejudice, as I once was, towards any food, no matter how nutritious, flavorful, or homemade. 

As much as I’d like to think my kids are preternaturally precocious eaters, I’ve begun to observe that complex flavors and natural whole ingredients are no longer the pariahs they once were. It’s no longer a marker of high social status to bring white bread, ham, and processed cheese; it’s quite the obverse. In fact those ingredients are largely banned from my childrens’ school. Last week, my third grader’s class made falafel from scratch, and regularly my fourth grader brings home kale she has tended from seed to harvest, and the trio that makes up my family commune begs in all sincerity for me to dredge them in garlic and bake them in olive oil.  

Hippie food. 

I’ve come around to it. 

But at the same time, I feel sometimes I’m a traitor to the hippie food movement. Because the Co-op isn’t just where you go for tofu and bulgar and apple cider vinagre, it’s Dr. Bonner’s office. It’s sulfate-free shampoos and rose water witchhazel. It’s beeswax lip balm an lavender filled eye masks weighted with rice. It’s an outlook on beauty that has accelerated from the long-haired, braless women featured in the black and white pages of the alternative press into the long-haired, braless women featured in the glossy look book of GOOP. 

I’ve come around to kale; but the farther into adulthood I traverse the less use I have for Dr Bronner. The magic all in one soap maker who has also found a space in Targets and Walmarts around the US doesn’t compete, I’ve found, with the magic of Botox and surgery. 

That’s right. I, along with America’s mainstream, may have come to now proudly ingest hummus, granola, and plant milks, but at the same time I’ve not felt inclined to keep a strictly organic beauty regime. There’s a cult of purity about food, and beauty, that just doesn’t resonate for me. Maybe because I wasn’t first exposed to whole grains, raw honey, tahini, or wild blueberries as part of some aspirational toxin-free diet; rather to me, those were the foods of frugality, cooking for a crowd, and eating as heartily as possible. What’s more, I know the healthy, sunkisssed skin and fit bodies spilling over the commune table aren’t simply purchasable at the farmer’s market; they were a whole lifestyle. And, because I have known many of those same people the three and a half decades of my life, I’ve seen that bodies don’t stay like that forever, no matter how much kale you eat. 

So what’s the point in kale if you’re not looking to feed a commune or boost your cred with Gwyneth? For the same reason my kids eat kale; it’s ricissimo when massaged with olive oil and roasted garlic then baked seasoned in Maldon’s sea salt flakes. To me brown rice has come to taste better than its stripped down, starchy white cousin.  Tofu is just too friggin flexible, not to mention cheap and shelf stable, not to throw into any dish. And, as I knew at 10 but was too embarrassed to admit at my New England public school, sheets of dried seaweed just have the most delightful crispy enormity to them as you stuff unwieldy rectangles into your mouth. 

The point is, I eat these foods now because I enjoy cooking them and eating them. The same must be said for how I’ve come to think about beauty. My mother and her friends spent too many years house building and wood hauling and whatnot to spend much time on makeup, and that remains largely true today, apart from a little hair dye and some tinted Burt’s Bees lipbalm. It’s not that I ever got the impression from them that makeup was bad, but it didn’t seem to be enjoyed or celebrated, not in the way that fashion and music were.

Recently my daughter expressed an interest in modeling and today she had her first experience with a professional photographer. I looked on from the sidelines as she found new and interesting ways to be in her body, presenting and withholding the angles of her elbows and shoulders and hips and knees and jaw and eyes. Its seemed to me a kind of dance that dwells in stillness facilitated by motion unobserved. I, who hadn’t the confidence to take a sandwich from a wax paper bag at her age, watched on as her gaze commanded the gaze of the beholder. 

A few hours later I posted a few pictures I’d taken from the sidelines. A chorus of my peers expressed their admiration for Vivienne’s confidence and experimentation. Then, and I should have expected it, came the opinions of a few generations above. How old is she again? Isn’t she awfully young to immerse herself in the world of appearance? Isn’t her shirt showing a little too much belly button? 

I can’t help but think what the generation above these hippies would have thought about their tan shirtless braless vegetarian bodies, had they been able to see them as easily as they can now see my kid. Isn’t her shirt a little too tight? Isn’t her hair too untamed? Isn’t she awfully young to dabble in this lifestyle?

Too many people disparaged hippie food, for too long. But they persisted and the world came around. 

I was disappointed to see the disparaging comments this week from people I’ve looked up to as trailblazers in feminism and racial justice and the environment and bralessness. I expect greater nuance from that generation as it encounters the generations of youth that have come after it. Because they’ve been proved right again and again that young people can and should be trusted with their bodies. Whether it’s fighting for gender equity, having access to safe legal abortions, telling bras to fuck off, or relishing the power and confidence of your body in front of a photographer. 

This week I’m getting a breast lift. I nursed three babies with all the joy in the world. But I love a nice pair of full tits–they’re the sexiest thing I can think of. And I want to have a full pair of my own again. I’m paying a trusted surgeon good money to bring them up and fill them out, and I can’t wait. My kids know I’m getting this surgery, just as they know about the abdominoplasty I had last year. They know that I can love myself, my body, and them, and still want to feel good in my body again. 

Hippie food won the fight. And it deserved to. Life is richer for having options. It seems to me that unstigmatized choice is nothing less than an extension of the highest of human ideals: freedom, a handful of Cheetos on the side of your quinoa salad bowl, or a handful of cosmetically enhanced boobs on the chest a feminist. 

But I see an ongoing fight about bodies and beauty and self determination. If I’m not wrong, it’s not too far off from the fight for trans rights, which any reasonable observer would recognize as one of the most consequential fights of our time. Too many people dismiss concerns about appearance and confidence in one’s bodily expression as self-involved vanity, figments of the imagination, or threats to others. While the hippies of yore could distance themselves from naysayers by moving hundreds of miles away and sharing news and photographs selectively in letters and calls home, the choices folx make today are often as immediately observable by their peers as by disapproving aunties to be affirmed or judged.   

I’m proud of my kid for putting herself out there. I couldn’t have done it at her age. I’m proud of my 20-something mother for mastering the art of cooking brown rice flavored with nori flakes for a crowd. I couldn’t have done that at her age. 

I see how much my kid looks up to her grandmother, without even knowing all of the reasons why this admiration is deserved. But I hope that admiration can be mutual, as an older generation looks back at the younger ones as pronounces their time in front of the camera as confidence rather than vanity. And I hope each generation can receive those before and after with nuance and empathy, rather than distrust and jealousy.  

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As I write this I realize I am so attuned to the gifts I am receiving–hippie food from my mother and self-confidence from my children–I realize I can’t quite put my finger on what gift I am giving each of them? What influence have I had to inspire, or caution, either generation I encounter every day? I know it must there. How can I see it? When will I see it? Might it only be apparent only once it’s so mainstream it’s hardly worth noting?

Surely one of the jobs of your children is to point out the deficiencies of their parents, so I’m not worried that I’ll miss that feedback when it comes. But I do hope that I will listen to that feedback when it does come, and not dismiss it out of hand or let it threaten me. Each generation gives the best it can. The Greatest Generation thought it was doing a service to their children by serving factory-processed foods, thinking that highly standarized and sterile foods would help their children go strong, and avoid the food insecurity they endured during the Great Depression. 

The hippie women who forgoed bras but held on to aprons, were practicing choice. Some went on to have children, others didn’t. Some have let their hair grey, others touch it up every month. Some are still vegetarians, others eat more hamburgers now than their younger selves could ever envision. 

This piece has been harder for me to write–hence the tardiness of its release. I kept feeling like I could wrap it up, resolve the narrative, bring together the themes of food, beauty, and age. Instead each time I sat down to write the final beat and I reread what I’d written the night before I found a new complication that pushed back resolution. This has happened a few times before on the podcast, the elusivity of resolution. But as I seem to need to continue learning, that’s simply the way of personal narratives. At least if you’re trying to keep them honest. 

But like many, I’ve been raised to expect resolution. After all on sitcoms you get one every 22 and a half minutes. 

But easy resolutions are like junk food. They feel good and you crave them, popping open bag after bag, episode after episode. But ultimately they’re empty story telling calories. 

Personal narratives on the other hand require time spent chopping, rinsing, sauteeing, braising, and sitting down with a fork and knife to eat. Personal narratives also necessitate doing more dishes and eating leftovers for a few days. 

But remember, it’s not a choice between exclusively consuming Angela’s Ashes or reruns of Bob’s Burgers. It’s a balance. It’s choice. That’s the beauty. That’s freedom. That’s feminism. That, to me, is hippie food.