The Day Hippies Learned to Love Granola
Woodstock. Billede af Derek Redmond

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Food

The Day Hippies Learned to Love Granola

It all began at Woodstock. Maybe.
Alexis Ferenczi
Paris, FR
NB
translated by Noémie Bonnet

This article originally appeared on MUNCHIES France.


One morning in August, 1969 at Woodstock, a man sought the answer to a singular problem: How do you feed thousands of starving festival-goers?

"Good morning. What we have in mind is breakfast in bed for 400,000."

The person screaming into the microphone wasn't Joan Baez or Jimi Hendrix, but Hugh Romney—more widely known by his nickname "Wavy Gravy". He was the head of Hog Farm, a hippie commune. His declaration was met with widespread applause and cries of joy from the crowd of festival-goers who'd come all the way to Bethel, New York and were starting to get seriously hungry.

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Imagine: You're at a music festival with nearly half a million people. You've barely heard the music because you're over half a mile away from the stage itself. From a distance, all the artists look like tiny ants. You've smoked quite a few joints and finished off the crackers you brought with you. You were convinced you'd find food on the premises, but were told the stands were empty. It's a bad trip waiting to happen.

These days, it's impossible to think of a music festival without food—Coachella with no kale salad? Lollapalooza without a single Parmesan-dusted French fry?

On Saturday, June 10 in the Bois de Vincennes, the largest public park in Paris, We Love Green will be offering its festival attendees an assortment of pop-up stands. Trendy Parisian restaurants and well-known haunts will offer menus that foster the event's eco-responsible spirit.

READ MORE: Inside the Moroccan Cafe Where the Rolling Stones Got Stoned

When you think of festival food, Bertrand Grébaut, the head chef of Septime, or Thierry Marx, France's leading molecular gastronomy chef, probably aren't the first people that come to mind. But they're the brains behind the food component of We Love Green 2017.

Screenshot from the movie 'Woodstock' by Micheal Wadleigh. Image courtesy of Warner Bros.

Smithsonian Magazine has also taken an interest in what festival attendees ate back in 1969, in an article entitled "How to Feed 400,000 Hungry Hippies." Woodstock wasn't just "three days of peace and music," as went the political manifesto at the height of the hippie movement.

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Woodstock was also a story about food, and that story begins long before the start of the festival, when Michael Lang, the event's co-organizer, began to realize the scope of the task at hand. "At first we thought that locating a food vender would be a no-brainer and that this would be a big profit for us. As it turned out, the large food-vending companies, like Restaurant Associates, which handled ballparks and arenas, didn't want to take on Woodstock. No one had ever handled food services for an event of this size. They didn't want to put in the investment capital necessary to supply such a huge amount of food, on-site kitchens, and personnel, plus transport everything upstate," he writes in the book The Road to Woodstock.

Another still from Wadleigh's "Woodstock." Image courtesy of Warner Bros.

While Lang expected 150,000 attendees, an estimated 500,000 showed up to dance in the mud and trip out on LSD. In the meantime, the festival had reached out to Food for Love, an organization run by three guys who had zero cooking experience. It's no wonder the stands weren't ready by the start of the festival, and were quickly overwhelmed afterward.

A system of chips was meant to help avoid money-related issues, but ended up plunging the hippies of Bethel, who'd only brought cash, into a state of profound despair. The lines were much too long and, and as supply ran out, prices went up. Lang remembers that the price of a hot dog jumped from $0.25 to $1.00, and it was a scandal. The second night of the festival, a few attendees who were particularly disgusted decided to set fire to two food stands.

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That's when Romney intervened. The following day, microphone in hand, he announced to the audience, "It's not gonna be steak and eggs, but it's gonna be good food and we're gonna get it to you. We're all feeding each other. We must be in Heaven, man!" He also had a few words for the hamburger vendor whose stand went up in flames, and encouraged attendees who "still believe that capitalism isn't that weird" to go buy the few remaining burgers that hadn't been completely charred.

Screenshot of festival-goers at a food stall from Wadleigh's "Woodstock." Image courtesy of Warner Bros.

Romney and his commune Hog Farm, which had originally been called upon to help out on-site, organized with volunteers to hand out brown rice, vegetables, and most of all, granola. In the VH1 documentary Behind the Music: Woodstock, Romney deems the festival to be at the epicenter of the love story between hippies and cereal blends. "They had never seen granola before, and we brought it to them in sleeping bags in Dixie cups."

Romney managed to bring thousands of granola bowls to festival-goers, especially those who'd been starving themselves for two days so as not to lose their spots near the stage. According to James E. Perone, author of Woodstock: An Encyclopedia of the Music and Art Fair, the vegetarian and macrobiotic dishes served on site weren't to everyone's liking.

"An emergency appeal for food went out from the organizers, but members of the Hog Farm have always contended that there really was no shortage of food at Woodstock. Attendees simply did not bother to go to the wooded area where the Hog Farmers had set up their kitchen."

Which is too bad, because granola would benefit from this spotlight long after the festival had ended. And it's no surprise, given its status as an ecological, non-industrial dish that counterculture kids could easily put together in their shared kitchens. "By the 1970s, granola trended big time. Giant food companies like Kellogg's and General Mills jumped on the bandwagon, mass-producing boxes of their own branded versions of the new cereal," explains Libby O'Connell in The American Plate: A Culinary History in 100 Bites.

When word of the food shortage got out, Romney wasn't the only one who took action. Nearby villages also rallied to supply sandwiches, water, and canned foods. Smithsonian Magazine points out that some food was even parachuted onto the site with an army helicopter. Alison Spiegel, journalist at the Huffington Post and author of Peace, Love and Granola: The Untold Story of the Food Shortage at Woodstock, spoke with several festival attendees who had different experiences with the food there. Those conversations led her to conclude: "One common thread is that everyone remembers very little about the food except for two things: The food ran out fast and everyone shared what they had."

Woodstock's philosophy of sharing, generosity, compassion, trust, and open-mindedness corresponded to the way of life of the people who'd gathered there. And just like the rain, the mud, the drugs, and the music, the food was just part of the experience.