Whole Grains - healthy foods - a way of looking at things

Hippie Love and Whole Foods

When I was too young to babysit, I had a job babysitting for a hippie family down the street. There were two two-year-old twins and their older sister, who might have been five. I can’t remember playing with them, or interacting with them at all. What I do remember is they had a low bookcase with lots of books for kids, including the plain-talkin’, illustrated facts-of-life book “Where Did I Come From?” (by Peter Mayle), and a small photo album of their naked, pregnant mom, month by month, and then in childbirth with the twins. Shocking! Fascinating! Hippies are so wild! And they eat the weirdest stuff!
Along with the hippie sex books, I was obsessed with their kitchen and pantry, filled with fragrant plants, dried herbs and glass jars of… what? What were those things? I took every chance I could to sneak tastes of every little thing I could, most of it unrecognizable to my white bread, Velveeta cheese culinary awareness. I crunched dry, brown rice, gagged on carob, chewed extra long pasta from an extra long canister, and was amazed that someone would have a whole jar — A WHOLE JAR — of sunflower seeds! You didn’t even have to do any work to eat them! There were strange, chewy cookie like things, and brown bread with birdseed on top. Babysitting in the hippie house was my first inkling of what sex was, outside of sneaked peaks of Playboys, and it was my first experience with whole foods.
After many adult years of a fairly average (read not so healthy) diet, I became a whole grain freak. I tried to emulate the hippie kitchen, with jars of dried fruits, nuts, grains and, yes, sunflower seeds. I duly consider most white items in the food pyramid poison. Without much thought I banned white sugar, white flour, white potatoes and white rice from our home menus.

Love this article from Lime.com. It brings back the memories of early issues of Mother Earth News, Euell Gibbons, bulk foods, Kefir (how hard it was to find), learning to bake bread and make yogurt,,,

Sure there was a war going on, but there were marches and protests and underground papers. There are many parts of those years we long for.