CUISINES AND CULTURES - THE SIXTIES - REVOLUTIONS IN COLOR

The 1960s was a decade of political, social, and technological upheaval throughout the world. People protested civil rights and social injustices, and the war in Vietnam, a former French colony. It was a social revolution that changed the way history was written and changed food writing, too. Before the 1960s, most history was “from the top down” or “great man”—about what important people, usually white men, had done. In the 1960s, people of other races, classes, and genders began writing their own history “from the bottom up”—about how the masses of ordinary people had changed history, too.

“Black Is Beautiful”

African countries revolted, shaking off their colonial masters. And African-Americans pointed out that 100 years after President Lincoln freed the slaves in the Civil War, they still couldn’t vote, serve on juries, attend schools with white people, or sit at public lunch counters.

In 1963, hundreds of thousands of Americans of all races, ages, and genders marched at the Washington Monument and heard the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King tell the world, “I have a dream” that people will be judged by what’s inside them, not by the color of their skin, while millions more saw him on television. Black men shook off a hundred years of being insulted by being called “boy” and started addressing each other as “man.” The new slogan for black pride was “Black is beautiful.” Because of the Civil Rights movement, advertising icons like Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben got face-lifts to look more like professional people and less like happy slaves.

Americans continued their love affair with speed in cars, airplanes, and food. At first, if you wanted food you had to go to a restaurant. Then you could call ahead and the food was ready when you got there. At some restaurants, you didn’t even have to go inside—there was a drive-through window. In the 1960s, food got even faster—the restaurant came to you. Domino’s Pizza was the first fast food delivered to your door. And Julia Child came to your television.

Cordon Bleu and White House— Julia Child and Jackie Kennedy

In 1961, after years of writing and recipe testing, and eleven years after graduating from the Cordon Bleu, Julia Child, along with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, wrote Mastering the Art of French Cooking. It revolutionized Americans’ relationship to food, especially French food. Julia Child’s purpose was to take the mystery out of French cooking, to make it accessible to anyone in America, and she did. The kitchen on Julia Child’s television program looked like an average American kitchen because it was hers, designed by her husband Paul. She cooked on an electric stove top, used average kitchen knives and ingredients that could be found in any American supermarket. Quiche and other French foods became extremely popular.

In 1963, Julia Child revolutionized the teaching of cooking when she appeared on Boston’s public broadcasting station WGBH as “The French Chef.” In 1966, her picture was on the cover of Time magazine, which called her “Our Lady of the Ladle.” The television programs Julia Child and Company, Julia Child and More Company, and Dinner with Julia followed. In 1981, she was one of the founders of the American Institute of Wine and Food (AIWF). In 1989, she wrote The Way to Cook, the first cookbook offered as a main selection by the Book of the Month Club. She was one of the founders of the James Beard Foundation and, with Jacques Pepin, of the new culinary history program at Boston University. Her name is on an award for Best Cookbook given by the International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP), which she also helped to found. Her numerous books are on the shelf of every professional and amateur cook in America. Her kitchen is at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. Her pots and pans are at Copia, the American Center for Wine, Food, and the Arts. Her generosity and commitment to food were everywhere. Although Julia Child made it possible to cook French food without special equipment, a hardware store owner in Sonoma, California, north of San Francisco, liked special equipment. Chuck Williams went to France and brought equipment back to his store. It was immediately popular, so he opened another one, in Beverly Hills, then more. As a character on a television show remarked, “Once you’ve discovered fire, it’s just a short hop to Williams-Sonoma.”

French food reached Washington, D.C., too, in 1961, when John Fitzgerald Kennedy ( JFK), the young, good-looking Harvard-educated, Irish Catholic senator from Massachusetts, and his wife, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, became president and first lady. The White House became a social focal point of the United States. The Kennedys hired a chef who was trained in classical French cooking, René Verdon. Jackie, as she became known, was of French descent and had spent her junior year at Vassar in France. When the couple attended state dinners in France, she spoke to the guests in French; when they went to South America, she gave speeches in Spanish. Unfortunately, the First Lady was not fluent in German, so when Kennedy went to Berlin and gave a speech to show solidarity with the people of Berlin, which had been split into two cities by a wall the communists built, he said, “Ich bin ein Berliner.” He thought he said, “I am from Berlin,” which would have been “Ich bin Berliner ”; what he really said was, “I am a Berliner”—which is a jelly doughnut.

The Green Revolution — Farming

In the 1960s, overabundance caught up with Americans—obesity became a problem. Weight Watchers held its first meeting in 1963. Other diet organizations followed: Overeaters Anonymous, patterned after the Alcoholics Anonymous program; Australian Jenny Craig; a Christian Weigh Down Diet, which urged its members to get “slim for Him.” Millions of Americans were going to health clubs and drinking diet soda — Diet-Rite, Tab, Diet Pepsi, Fresca. In 1975, dieting even reached beer when Miller introduced Lite Beer. The slogans were “Thin is in” and “You can’t be too rich or too thin”—except for the increase in eating disorders first identified in the nineteenth century, like anorexia nervosa and bulimia.

However, millions of people in the world were starving. The industrialized nations saw food as an issue of national security: underfed populations in other countries could revolt and change the global balance of power. Science had nearly wiped out malaria by spraying with DDT, invented a liquid vaccine that prevented polio, and cured infections with antibiotics like penicillin and sulfa. After these medical miracles, what was left? Miracle food—genetically engineered soy, and dwarf rice that had a short growing time, a phenomenal yield, and would grow anywhere in Asia would stamp out famines like the one that killed approximately twenty million people in China between 1958 and 1961. The United States, the largest grower of rice in the world, built the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines.

In 1965, Ferdinand Marcos was elected president of the Philippines on the slogan, “Progress is a grain of rice.” The technical name of the rice was IR8, but it was called Than nong, after the Vietnamese god of agriculture. It not only grew much faster, so it could produce two crops each year, it also yielded more rice per plant. This was the beginning of the Green Revolution, the plan to feed the world by applying science and genetic breakthroughs to farming.

The Blue Revolution—Aquaculture

The same intensive farming was taking place in the water, with salmon, shrimp, mussels, tilapia, and trout. Aquaculture, too, had its proponents and opponents. Supporters claimed that fish farming would increase yield and help feed the world. Opponents pointed out that farming some fish — like salmon, which eat other fish—disrupts ecosystems as smaller fish do not provide food in their own ecosystem because they are captured to feed larger fish somewhere else. Opponents also question the quality of the farmed fish, which become fatty swimming in pens instead of the ocean, and have to be dyed to look the way they do in the wild. Nevertheless, fish farming “is probably the world’s fastest growing form of food production... Some people believe that, by 2030, aquaculture will supply most of the fish people eat.”

The Anti-White Revolution—Counterculture Cuisine

The social revolutions of the 1960s included food revolutions. In 1962, with the publication of biologist Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring, about the consequences of using pesticides, some people began eating with a consciousness about the environmental consequences of where their food came from and how it was produced. The new buzzword was ecology — recognizing that all living things were connected. In a “Back to Nature” movement, some Baby Boomers revolted against industrialization by living on communes patterned after Israeli kibbutzim and doing manual labor. They grew fruits, vegetables, and herbs, milked farm animals, and in a gesture of political solidarity with nature and the civil rights movements, revolted against white things, especially white foods: “Minute Rice, Cool Whip, instant mashed potatoes, white sugar, peeled apples ... and, of course, Wonder Bread.” Instead, they baked bread with whole grains, ate brown rice and brown eggs.5 Corporate responsibility and accountability were born here, too, as the Baby Boomers demanded to know which corporations had ties to the military-industrial complex and the Vietnam War.6 When this counterculture cuisine crossed over to the cities, it took the form of salad bars, herb tea, and whole grain bread. In the language of the 1960s, this “raised the consciousness” about environmental issues—so much that Earth Day was first celebrated on April 22, 1970. By the 1970s, corporate food producers, restaurants, and supermarkets realized that there was money in counterculture cuisine.

Space-Age Technology

In 1969, at the same time that the “back to nature” movement was growing, technology put American astronaut Neil Armstrong on the moon. Space-Age technology changed American kitchens. WWII radar led to the microwave oven. The Raytheon Company produced the first commercial one in 1947, the Radarange. Like the first computers, which filled an entire room, these early microwaves were enormous. Tappan’s first domestic model, in 1952, “stood five and a half feet high... [and weighed] 750 pounds.” And cost thousands of dollars. It was not until 1967 that Amana sold a viable microwave for home use at $495. By 1975, microwaves “outsold gas ranges.”

Tang—powdered orange juice—went into space with astronauts and into American kitchens. A revolutionary new line of popular cookware was advertised as being made of the same material as rocket nosecones. Corning Ware, introduced in 1958 by the Corning, New York, Glassworks Company, could go from freezer to oven to direct stovetop flame without cracking or burning. The white square or rectangular pans with the little blue cornflower design looked good enough to double as serving dishes, then you popped them into the dishwasher.

By Linda Civitello in "Cuisine and Culture - A History of Food and People", John Wiley & Sons, USA, 2008, excerpts pp. 335-339. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.