My introduction to organic foods came as a college freshman late in the Jimmy Carter era. A roommate in my group house baked “brownies” whose main ingredients, substituting for chocolate and sugar, were carob and sorghum molasses. These came from a natural-food cooperative where she volunteered — an outpost of hippie commerce that her baked goods were meant to entice us into visiting. They didn’t, but morbid curiosity did.
The co-op was a dark hole-in-the-wall, full of barrels overflowing with whole grains. Walking the aisles, bulghur cracking under your shoes, you realized that the food came with a moral: Slough off convenience, comfort, and pleasure for a harder, more virtuous life. Inferior substitutes, like carob for chocolate, were the co-op’s stock in trade. There were clove cigarettes, sea sponges to replace the paper products of the Tampax company, and chicory root, an ersatz coffee not seen in ordinary markets since World War II. Indeed, you could say the co-op — in tune with Carter’s moral- equivalent-of-war energy policy — was offering the moral equivalent of wartime rationing. Well, I was the moral equivalent of a deserter.
I was reminded of that place a few days ago when the Bread & Circus hole Foods Market — a prosperous descendant of the hippie co-ops of the 1970s — opened just down the street in Arlington, Va. It’s clear that I wasn’t the only deserter.
For starters, Bread & Circus is a beautiful supermarket, inside and out. Striking architecture and interior design don’t come cheap. This is a well- capitalized publicly traded company. The hippies now prefer initial public offerings on the NASDAQ to herbal offerings on the summer solstice. And they have long since made their peace with caffeine. If there’s chicory for sale, it’s not prominently displayed. The 20 bins of coffee beans are hard to miss, however, and a corner of the store is given over to the de rigueur espresso bar.
There are still whole grains and bulghur, certainly, but clear plastic bulk bins — some 240 or them — have replaced the barrels. As you might expect, there are multiple brands of designer water, culminating with the self- proclaimed “Queen of Table Waters,” the German-bottled Apollinaris, which retails for $7.54 per gallon.
Most startling, though, is the abundance of meat — steaks, pork chops, even… veal. Which is not, to be sure, your ordinary tortured-calf variety. This is “Free to Roam” veal, as the label explains. Likewise, the sirloin steak is “Colorado Mountain Raised.” The pork “comes from exceptional suppliers in Vermont and Ontario.” And the lamb is “raised by an exceptionally eco-conscious stockman,” who “received a special award from . . . a group of leading environmental advocates that includes the Sierra Club.”
You pay a premium for these fine meats. Or rather, you pay a premium for the words attached to them. The food no longer comes with a moral. It comes with an alibi. This holds true not just for the meat but for all the indulgences that were once anathematized by the Bible of the hippie co-ops, Diet for a Small Planet.
White sugar? Try the Florida Crystals (R) Cane Sugar, which looks like white sugar and tastes like white sugar but “retains traces of some nutrients. ” Potato chips? Dig into a bag of Little Bear chips, made with ORGANIC POTATOES and Expeller Pressed Oil. While eating, you can read the alibi on the back of the bag: “Good For The Earth: Our Company vision has its roots in Nobel prize winner Dr. Alex Carrel’s statement that “soil is the basis for all human life.” We invite our customers to share our vision and stop treating our soil like dirt!” A cheesy snack for the kindergarten set? You’ll want the 100% Natural Cheddar Guppies, which “unlike lesser fish” (you know the ones they mean) “use the finest expeller pressed oil.”
Pondering the unsolved mystery-What exactly is an expeller? — I roll down the breakfast-cereal aisle, which offers “natural” replicas of America’s most famous brand names (all except, as far as I can tell, Cap’n Crunch). “Are You Up For Some Diversity This Morning?” asks the Heritage O’s box. Unlike, say, Cheerio’s, these are made “from the ancient grains Spelt, Quinoa & Kamut.” These I have to try.
Chewing on the Heritage O’s and their ancient grains, which I can now report are not quite as tasty as the o’s they imitate, I’m reminded of the ill-fated televangelist Jim Bakker’s Christian theme park and time-share condo development. Sprinkling some Florida Crystals (R) onto the Spelt, I hear the latest in Christian rap drowning out the Gregorian chant. The true church of high-fiber and protein complementarity has learned how to reach out. The answer is Ben and Jerry’s — the original alibi food — not carob.
At the Bread & Circus exit is a customer comment board, filled with testimonials (“the recycled cardboard napkins are fine”) and suggestions (” need more low-fat, healthy types of cookies”) and one customer’s poignant plea: “Please accept American Express.”
RICHARD STARR
