Letter from the Editor: Now and Then

Now and then you read a book, hear a song or even taste a food that decidedly takes you back in time. Perhaps to a summer day in the Bay Area when fresh-picked berries fulfilled their sweet promise, and the juice from an apricot or peach drizzling down your chin was only met with a giggle, and a knowing smile from your pals.  

While we looked ahead to celebrate our Summer of Local Love circa 2019, I came across an inviting new book by San Francisco Chronicle food writer Jonathan Kauffman titled Hippie Food: How Back-to-the-Landers, Longhairs, and Revolutionaries Changed the Way We Eat. In it, Kauffman guides us on a romp through American food history from a counterculture rejection of the post-war industrialized, processed, artificially flavored, homogenized food to what are recognized as today’s mainstream food staples, including organic produce, brown rice and the revered high-art cuisine of avocado toast and yogurt granola parfaits. Kauffman seems to delight in the notion that the most enduring legacy of the ’60s and ’70s counterculture revolution might just be found on your plate and in your glass today. 

I was never an official flower child, or born into a counterculture family. What I did have was a California family eager to embrace local ethnic cultural offerings, eat from backyard citrus and other fruit trees and seek out healthy natural foods and easy-to-grow flavor-makers like peppers and berries. In that way we were lucky. Fresh-picked ingredients, including the beloved avocado, for Friday night burritos were enjoyed with a blended array of smoothie concoctions long before the days of Jamba Juice. In that way, we benefited from California’s bounty and the “hippie-championed” appetite for less processed, seasonal and local ingredients found at burgeoning markets, co-ops, specialty ethnic stores and in our own backyard. 

It is in that spirit we usher in this Summer of Local Love, filled with memory-making delights of the top local picks of summer, and stories to evoke your senses with fun food and drink journeys across the Bay Area. Enjoy! And now and then, remember to take the time to share your table, support a fresh-thinking business and thank a free-thinking grower or culinary artisan for continuing to make your slice of the world a healthier, more sustainable, more socially and environmentally conscious place. The food revolution and evolution marches on.