In the late 1960s and the early 1970s, young baby boomers adopted a diet unlike anything they had grown up with: Heavy bean-and-nut loaves, avocado-sprout sandwiches on whole-wheat bread, the ubiquitous stir-fried tofu over brown rice. This talk will explore how and why this generation came to embrace these foods, how they learned to make them palatable—arguably, some may say—and then how they spread these foods across the country through communes, co-ops and cookbooks. Los Angeles, not surprisingly, was one of the great centers of influence for this new cuisine, but hippie food emerged in tiny towns across the Midwest as well as college campuses and major cities

Jonathan Kauffman is a columnist with the San Francisco Chronicle who focuses on the intersection of food and culture. A child of the lentil generation, a former line cook, he was a restaurant critic in the San Francisco Bay Area and Seattle for more than a decade before joining the staff of the daily newspaper in 2014. His restaurant criticism and reporting on food issues have won awards from the James Beard Foundation and the International Association of Culinary Professionals. His book, Hippie Food: How Back-to-the-Landers, Longhairs, and Revolutionaries Changed the Way We Eat, William Morrow, 2018, will be available at a reception following the program.