Food Revolution

Line, Marty and Paul’s mother was not very interested in cooking. She was a superb baker. She always started with the best ingredients and taught her kids to bake exquisite pies, cookies and delicious breads full of interesting grains (some they ground themselves). But for meals she provided the meat, potatoes and vegetable diet common to the post-war era. After a few years in which she researched Adele Davis’ ideas, she went back to using the prepared ingredients and frozen foods which were so available at the time. This was especially true after the older kids went to college and she began full-time teaching. The younger Mikkelsons recall that almost every recipe she used called for a packet of Lipton’s dried onion soup!

Throughout the 1950’s and the early 1960’s, big gardens played a part in the Mikkelsons’ lives. In Montauk, a fictional town in northeast Iowa, a half-acre garden was attached to the parsonage. Though planting in the spring was exciting, everything from the usual vegetables to sunflowers (to feed the big cardinals and bluejays in the winter), corn and peanuts, the kids’ enthusiasm for weeding and hoeing was tepid. The bounty from the garden was never wasted, however. Many of the vegetables were partially cooked and frozen for eating in the winter. Dad planted apple trees at each parsonage, but the Haroldson parsonage had no garden. Only a rhubarb patch.

Line’s cooking develops from living around so many people who came up from the South to work in Chicago. She learns how to cook okra, collards and fried chicken, to fry up hoecakes and make delicious cornbread. Money is short, and Line becomes expert at getting the most for her money at the new food co-ops run by activist groups. From ex-Texans, she learns how to soak and cook beans, refry them and wrap them with onions and tomatoes in tortillas.

Marty learns the romance of cooking from a year-long stay in Oxford with a family whose European values dictate great food every day. When she moves to Berkeley, the exposure to fresh and raw vegetables educates her palate even further. She doesn’t like salad, but she finds that no California meal is complete without it.

When Line joins Marty in San Francisco, they become even more excited about food. Any Saturday that someone with a car turns up, they go out to the farmers' market on Alemany Boulevard in the southern part of the city, and buy the fresh produce of the season. They were not necessarily vegetarians, but the cookbooks of the time celebrated the peasant meals that world travel was introducing to people with a desire to live lightly and well on our fragile earth.

Vegetarian Gourmet Cookery by Alan Hooker, which appeared in 1970, contained recipes influenced by Indian and peasant cuisines all over the world. Frances Moore Lappe’s Diet for a Small Planet came out in 1971, showing how to get complete proteins needed for health using particular vegetarian and sometimes dairy combinations. Laurel’s Kitchen, by Laurel Robertson, Carol Flinders, and Bronwen Godfrey first came out in 1976, again providing much information about vegetarian nutrition. The Moosewood Cookbook, completely hand-written and illustrated by Mollie Katzen, came out in 1977, reveling in the “health food” cooking of the restaurant collective she was part of in New York. Versions of all of these books are still in print and tattered copies can be found in my sisters’ and my kitchens even today!

It is hard to convey how exciting this revolution was, as today farmers’ markets abound and everyone at one point or another gets excited about real food. To the Mikkelson kids, however, who grew up on canned and frozen foods, packaged meats and Betty Crocker baking mixes, the idea that you could start from scratch and everything would taste better, and perhaps make you healthier, was heady indeed.