When I start working on a book, it’s like setting out on an ocean voyage without a map. I get a theme, an idea, some kind of coherence on a subject,* then start.

When I built my first house in Mill Valley in the early ’60s, my friend Bob Whiteley and I laid out the foundation lines in chalk on the ground. “What do we do now, Bob,” I asked.

Bob said “This,” and took pick and shovel and started digging the foundation trench.

It’s been my M.O. all my life. When I don’t know what to do, I start. Things (usually) sort themselves out in the process. (I know, I know, I’ve said all this before…)

This book is about the tools and techniques Lesley and I have evolved in building a home and growing food (and creating a bunch of things) on a small piece of land over a 40+-year period.

I started by writing it in chapters: The House / The Kitchen / Kitchen Tools / The Garden / Garden Tools / Chickens / Food / Foraging/ /Fishing / The Shop / Shop / Shop Tools / Roadkill / Critters…What we’ve learned; what’s worked, what hasn’t…

Then I went through some 50,000 digital pictures and picked out 7-800 photos, printed them out contact sheets (12-up) and started organizing them under the above categories.

Next step: starting to put pages together; I am totally excited. I have (kind of unknowingly) been gathering material for this book for decades.

Now I gotta get out of here. Not only is it a gorgeous fresh spring day, but it’s my time of the year. Tauruses are feelin good…

HIPPIE FOOD
How Back-to-the-Landers, Longhairs, and Revolutionaries Changed the Way We Eat
By Jonathan Kauffman
344 pp. William Morrow. $26.99

Review in today’s NYTimes by Michael Pollan

For a revolution that supposedly failed, the counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s scored a string of enduring victories. Environmentalism, feminism, civil and gay rights, as well as styles of music, fashion, politics, therapy and intoxication: In more ways than many of us realize, we live in a world created by the ’60s. (Though, as our politics regularly attest, some of us are rather less pleased to be living in that world than others.) Jonathan Kauffman’s briskly entertaining history, “Hippie Food,” makes a convincing case for adding yet another legacy to that list: the way we eat.

Kauffman has more in mind than the menu items that the ’60s served up: the tofu, tempeh and tamari, the granola and yogurt, the nut loafs and avocado sandwiches on whole wheat bread with their poufs of alfalfa sprouts that “smell as if a field of grass were having sex”; hard as it is to imagine now, all of these foods were radical novelties before 1970 or so. But the counterculture transformed much more than the American menu; it also changed the way we grow our food and how we think about purchasing and consuming it. “Eating brown rice was a political act,” he writes, just as much “as wearing your hair long or refusing to shave your armpits.” How this curious idea came to seem right and true (and to outlast the hairy armpits) is the historical question at the heart of “Hippie Food.”

Kauffman, who was born in 1971, comes at his subject as a child of children of the ’60s: He grew up on brown rice and quite likes it. A former line cook and food critic in the Bay Area, Kauffman is now a reporter for the food section of The San Francisco Chronicle, and his book is the work of an enterprising journalist who has interviewed many in the cast of hippie farmers, cooks, communards and food artisans who together forged what Kauffman asks us to regard as a new and “unique, self-contained cuisine.”

“The food Americans were eating in the mid-1960s resembled nothing that any civilization on Earth had ever eaten before,” Kauffman reminds us. By then, a series of food-processing innovations developed during World War II — powdered soups and juices, cake mixes, dehydrated coffee, etc. — had infiltrated American food culture, which lacked the deep roots that might have allowed it to withstand the influences of marketers, faddists, kooks and ideologues of every stripe. Americans, Kauffman notes, have long displayed “a queer eagerness to abandon the culinary wisdom of the generations that preceded them.” In the ’60s that meant eating things your parents had never heard of; if they ate white bread, you ate brown.

Read More …

Seaweed on drying rack (blades of bull kelp). I dry it, grind it into coarse powder and put on most everything.

Last (rainy) Friday night, 5 of us (Dipsea running friends) went over the bridge to San Francisco and had dinner at the R&G Lounge (specializing in deep fried fresh Dungeness crab). then to Vesuvio’s bar next to City Lights, which has had like 70 years of good vibes; Patrons that night looked like good people. Pic below is of a little tableau on the wall with miniature figures, maybe 26″ wide by 16″ tall (can you see the ghostly image at top left?) (Photo by Jakub)

I’m sort of taking a month to get reorganized with my work and at the same time reintegrating myself with the physical world, after a couple of years of being injured, then recovering from shoulder surgery — let me tell you the details — just kidding. Suffice to say I’m hiking more, clamming (tuning up my 12′ Klamath boat with vintage 15 HP Evinrude outboard for saltwater exploration and fishing, trying to remember to stretch. It’s so easy to get sucked into sedentary pursuits, like sitting in front of screens and neglecting the body in which the mind is, after all, housed.

I’ve done very little blogging in recent years about what’s going on my life, partly due to Instagram and partly because after 5000+ blog posts, I realized it wasn’t bringing in any income — so I slacked off on blogging.

I’ll be spelling out my future plans, including a new blog — my take on the ’60s –in my forthcoming GIMME SHELTER email newsletter, something I send out every few months to about 600 people. If you want to be on the mailing list, send me your address at lloyd@shelterpub.com.

Highly recommended breakfast, lunch, in Elk, south of Mendocino on Highway One.  That’s Louie and me last week.