Vegetarian Food, Then and Now

I spent the last few weeks returning to reading Jonathan Kauffman's Hippie Food: How Back-to-the-Landers, Longhairs, and Revolutionaries Changed the Way We Eat. It gives interesting background as to how we came to embrace tofu, whole wheat bread, and carob. It's was also an interesting story of how the health food stores that we had in the late 60's and 70's became the Whole Foods chain.  It was also an interesting story of healthy restaurants.

I was interested in the co-operative nature of the health food stores and restaurants--not just co-operative in how people pulled together, but also co-ops in terms of financial agreements.  For example, you could be a member of a health food coop and get cheaper prices on food, or you could walk in and pay extra for the privilege of buying healthier foods.  Many of the restaurants began with a group of "owners," all of whom took turns cooking, cleaning up, and buying the food and supplies.

I remember a Mennonite co-op (or was it just a restaurant?) in Knoxville, Tennessee, where my mom and I would eat when we were out shopping.  It was tucked away in a loading dock kind of area near the big mall near our house.  You could get sandwiches on healthier breads that grocery stores had.  You could have sprouts on your sandwich, or avocado.  We'd been eating sprouts for at least 5 years when we first went to that restaurant, but I'd never had avocado on a sandwich before.

I went to school at Newberry College in Newberry, South Carolina, where there were no food co-ops or vegetarian restaurants.  The chicken processing plants that had given most residents their livelihood had just shut down, and the economic situation in the town was rather grim.

When I moved to Columbia, South Carolina for grad school, I lived in the Rosewood section, which had a health food store and the Basil Pot, a vegetarian restaurant with tables that were made from the big wooden spools that phone companies used to use.  That health food store has now become Rosewood Market, in a larger space a few blocks away, and it now includes a cafe.

Sadly, the Basil Pot has closed.  It moved from the Rosewood location to one closer to the University of South Carolina.  It went a bit more upscale, with regular furniture and tablecloths and such.  The food was always delicious.  I don't know why it closed, but the Rosewood Market has managed to maintain viability.

It's hard to think of restaurants that are completely vegetarian in the way that those restaurants of the 70's and 80's were.  But we have more options at "regular" restaurants than we did then.  And many towns have more ethnic options than they once had.  For example, in my old college town of Newberry, there's now a Thai restaurant.  Times had to change significantly for that development to happen.

I'm thinking of various dietary trajectories that we see today:  where will the keto plans take us as a nation?  My supermarket already stocks a variety of "milks"--some on the shelf, like the soy milks of my youth, and many more, like a variety of nut milks, in the refrigerator case.  And that's the case in smaller towns, like Columbia, SC.

I like having the variety, but I do worry about how little knowledge of nutrition so many of us have.  We eat the way we eat because a celebrity tells us to, not because we know that by eating these foods we'll get enough vitamin A, while those foods will give us other nutrients.

But I'm grateful that it's easier to eat healthy foods now:  easier to find them, easier to buy them, easier to prepare them, and easier to find them in restaurants.