If you walk five blocks north from the Whole Foods in Berkeley along Telegraph Avenue and then turn right at Dwight Street, you’ll soon come to a trash-strewn patch of grass and trees dotted with the tattered camps of a few dozen homeless people. Mostly in their fifties and sixties, some still affecting hippie styles of hair and dress, these men and women pass much of their days sleeping and drinking, like so many of the destitute everywhere. Here, though, they also spend time tending scruffy little patches of flowers and vegetables—a few stalks of corn, some broccoli plants gone to seed. People’s Park today is the saddest of places, a blasted monument to ’60s hopes that curdled a long time ago. And yet, while the economic and social distances separating the well-heeled shoppers cruising the aisles at Whole Foods from the unheeled homeless in People’s Park could not be much greater, the two neighborhood institutions are branches of the same unlikely tree.

Indeed, were there any poetic justice in the world, the executives at Whole Foods would have long ago erected a commemorative plaque at People’s Park and a booth to give away organic fruits and vegetables. The organic movement, much like environmentalism and feminism, has deep roots in the ’60s radicalism that briefly flourished on this site; organic is one of several tributaries of the counterculture that ended up disappearing into the American mainstream, but not before significantly altering its course. And if you trace that particular tributary all the way back to its spring, your journey will eventually pass through this park.

People’s Park was born on April 20, 1969, when a group calling itself the Robin Hood Commission seized a vacant lot owned by the University of California and set to work rolling out sod, planting trees, and, perhaps most auspiciously, putting in a vegetable garden. Calling themselves “agrarian reformers,” the radicals announced that they wanted to establish on the site the model of a new cooperative society built from the ground up; that included growing their own “uncontaminated” food. One of the inspirations for the commission’s act of civil disobedience was the example of the Diggers in 17th-century England, who had also seized public land with the aim of growing food to give away to the poor. In People’s Park that food would be organic, a word that at the time brimmed with meanings that went far beyond any particular agricultural method.

While the economic and social distances separating the well-heeled shoppers cruising the aisles at Whole Foods from the unheeled homeless in People’s Park could not be much greater, the two neighborhood institutions are branches of the same unlikely tree.

In Appetite for Change, his definitive account of how the ’60s counterculture changed the way we eat, historian Warren J. Belasco writes that the events in People’s Park marked the “greening” of the counterculture, the pastoral turn that would lead to the commune movement in the countryside, to food co-ops and “guerilla capitalism,” and, eventually, to the rise of organic agriculture and businesses like Whole Foods. The moment for such a turn to nature was ripe in 1969: DDT was in the news, an oil spill off Santa Barbara had blackened California’s coastline, and Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River had caught fire. Overnight, it seemed, “ecology” was on everybody’s lips, and “organic” close behind.

As Belasco points out, the word “organic” had enjoyed a currency among 19th-century English social critics, who contrasted the social fragmentation and atomism wrought by the Industrial Revolution with the ideal of a lost organic society, one where the bonds of affection and cooperation still held. Organic stood for everything industrial was not. But applying the word “organic” to food and farming occurred much more recently: in the 1940s, in the pages of Organic Gardening and Farming. Founded in 1940 by J. I. Rodale, a health-food fanatic from New York City’s Lower East Side, the magazine devoted its pages to the agricultural methods and health benefits of growing food without synthetic chemicals—“organically.”

Organic Gardening and Farming struggled along in obscurity until 1969, when an ecstatic review in the The Whole Earth Catalog brought it to the attention of hippies trying to figure out how to grow vegetables without patronizing the military-industrial complex. “If I were a dictator determined to control the national press,” the Whole Earth correspondent wrote, “Organic Gardening would be the first publication I’d squash, because it’s the most subversive. I believe that organic gardeners are in the forefront of a serious effort to save the world by changing man’s orientation to it, to move away from the collective, centrist, superindustrial state, toward a simpler, realer one-to-one relationship with the earth itself.”

Within two years Organic Gardening and Farming’s circulation climbed from 400,000 to 700,000.

As the “Whole Earth” encomium suggests, the counterculture had married the broader and narrower definitions of the word “organic.” The organic garden planted in People’s Park (soon imitated in urban lots across the country) was itself conceived of as a kind of scale model of a more cooperative society, a landscape of reconciliation that proposed to replace industrialism’s attitude of conquest toward nature with a softer, more harmonious approach. A pastoral utopia in miniature, such a garden embraced not only the humans who tended and ate from it but “as many life kingdoms as possible,” in the words of an early account of Berkeley’s “people’s gardens” in an underground paper called Good Times. The vegetables harvested from these plots, which were sometimes called “conspiracies of soil,” would supply, in addition to wholesome calories, an “edible dynamic”— a “new medium through which people can relate to one another and their nourishment.” For example, organic’s rejection of agricultural chemicals was also a rejection of the war machine, since the same corporations—Dow, Monsanto—that manufactured pesticides also made napalm and Agent Orange, the herbicide with which the U.S. military was waging war against nature in Southeast Asia. Eating organic thus married the personal to the political.

	page 3	|	5