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

extremely useful to understand the US food culture. full of relevant details, though sometimes a bit long. the update should be a bit more complete to take into account the evolution of the last 20 years

gift for a person who is into cooking and does hearth side cooking at a historical house and loves to read about different cookingideas

The author's take on this book was too Marxist for my taste. To paint the food industry as inherently bad and the counterculture as inherently good precludes an objective study of the food business.

After I finished this book I finally understood the word told to Benjamin Braddock from The Graduate: "Plastics." I assumed the speaker was referring to some staid corporate job, but what I learned from this book is that the word "plastic" to the counterculture ear meant the inauthentic. Around the middle of twentieth century Americans were introduced to a whole different diet of foods. Its what we would call today processed foods but in the counterculture lexicon was dubbed plastic foods, e.g. Cheerios. The organic movement was suppose to be the antithesis of this industrial created food-like substance (to borrow a phrase from Michael Pollan's IN DEFENSE OF FOOD). It was grown on small farms and didn't use chemicals. It was suppose to be eaten in whole food form not processed, dessicated bits. The book is an eye opener on the origins of the organic movement, the consumer activism it spawned, and how corporations and their well-endowed marketing arms tried to steer consumers back to their products by mimicing organic foods, e.g. granola bars that are closer to candy than real granola. I highly recommend it.