Health foods fads have been around a long time. In the late 19th century, Kellogg, the cereal king, had a famous sanatorium in Michigan. There he advocated whole grains, yogurt enemas, exercise, vegetarianism and abstinence from sex. But this only impacted a few people. Many were very famous (Henry Ford) and all were pretty wealthy.
When I was young, in the fifties, Mother was a pretty terrible cook, but she was, for her time, pretty weird. We had to eat whole wheat bread and didn't drink sodas. Aside from those snubbings of Wonderbread, and Coca Cola, our diet had a lot of packaged or canned foods. Betty Crocker was the kitchen goddess of the times. Delivery trucks brought us bakery goods and the milk truck brought us dairy. Dad had a garden for summer veggies and we had a few fruit trees.
In the late sixties, married and living in Oregon, we ended up going to Santa Cruz, CA to hear Adelle Davis at the great hippie bookstore. Her book shook our generation. "How to Eat Right and Keep Fit" That's what I think it was called. She taught a whole generation about vitamins and minerals and the advantage of fresh fruits and vegetables and brewers yeast shakes and yogurt and whole grains and making whole proteins from grain combinations. That kind of stuff.
Suddenly organic gardens and community gardens and agricultural type communes sprouted everywhere. We had little money but bought expensive vegetarian vitamins. The rest of the US culture was eons behind. On the road in the US you couldn't find a yogurt from sea to shining sea. We had to grind our own wheat berries to make whole wheat bread. I made my own tofu for heaven's sake! Long half day trips were required to go to the farms to get whole raw milk with the cream on top.
When I returned from England pregnant, US Customs confiscated my jar of Folic Acid. It was a prohibited substance by the food and drug folks. Adelle Davis had told me I needed to take it when pregnant. Turns out she was right about a lot of things. Now it is a top priority in prenatal vitamins.
There were pockets of awareness all over, but it took a very long time for the corporations to catch on. Thankfully now times are different. The very fancy places have the most organics. I can go into any city and find tons of healthy food. But the challenges have changed also. Coca Cola sells tap water for a dollar a bottle. Huh? Monsanto is polluting the planet and has started the seemingly unstoppable epidemic of GMOs. One would expect that food grown without pesticides, herbicides, growth hormones, antibiotics, unradiated and so on would be less expensive. But it hasn't worked out that way.
Back when we were eating Wonderbread and Twinkies, other countries had great local produce and meat and chickens raised in healthy environments. When I went to Italy as a young woman, I knew I was tasting food for the first time. It was so different, so good. Why had we been snookered into eating canned veggies instead of the real thing?
One one hand I can't applaud enough the spread of health food in the past 50 years. On the other hand I understand that for every gain, there seems to be a defeat. As always, the poor get the shaft the worst. And the corporations win round after round. The first line of defense is not to buy GMO anything while there is still a slight chance to turn things around. Same goes for polluted meant and eggs and fish and corn. Stop buying anything with corn syrup and other dangerous nasty ingredients. The bottom line is the first line of defense in any action against corporations.
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