Natural Foods

Although Jordan does mention the hippies in her sidebars, I'm having trouble finding the hippie food (brown rice and vegetables) that was pretty common in Santa Cruz, Berkeley, and other university communities in the late 60s and 70s. It was a different period then and a whole different mindset: it was ok to be poor and not spend every waking hour earning a 6 figure salary and every weekend spending it. That was a time when there were no ATMs and grocery stores and supermarkets did not accept credit cards - they didn't even use barcodes yet! On the weekends, if you didn't have any money, you had to wait until Monday when the banks opened. That's how we didn't run up a credit card bill.

This was when there was still a Berkeley Food CoOp and the Monterey Market was in the small crowded store across the street. We are very fortunate here in Pittsburgh to have the East End Food CoOp, that smells just like the Berkeley CoOp did in the 70s. It must be the bulk food, herbs, and vegetables. That was also when WestBrae was an independent little operation on Gilman Street offering wonderful varieties of miso in wooden half barrels. I still remember the whole grain barley miso. A very heady concoction. The students in the married student housing in Albany had a cheese coop that bought cheese in bulk from the Cheeseboard and then divided it up amongst the members. I had done the same in Santa Cruz with a few other students: we would buy a whole wheel of jack cheese and divide it up.

UC Santa Cruz was nice in that it offered vegetarian selections at a few of its dining halls. In those times (the late 60s) students lived in dorms and ate in dining halls. There were no fast food restaurants and flex dollars on campus. The vegetarian food was very good: brown rice, whole grain breads, lots of vegetables, mushrooms and cheese. I don't see much of that now at universities (there aren't many "colleges" left either - they've all become "universities").