After growing up on hippie food, Andrew Barton made it his mission to update the cuisine’s most brash and extreme attitudes for the present.
Hot dogs and hamburgers aside, if there is a modern American cuisine, it grew from sprouts. Of what? Who cares! It grew from carob, nutritional yeast, tempeh, and other things mainstream America didn’t yet know were edible in the twentieth century, like seaweed. Cuisines change with time, and America’s has gone by a few names. In 2018, Portlander Jonathan Kauffman’s deeply researched book, Hippie Food, traced the cuisine’s roots, making a fascinating case that the counterculture grub of the ’60s eventually mutated into $20 Erewhon smoothies. At the end of last year, in a new book, Portlander Andrew Barton described the food he grew up with, and built much of his life around, with a different phrase: Free Food.
It’s a freewheeling memoir stuffed with photos, recipes, and writings from friends fashioned like a ragtag zine on a mission: figuring out what hippie food should look like in 2025. In it, we get most of Barton’s life story through essays, clipped journal entries, something someone once posted on Facebook. There’s a brief excerpt from Lauren Groff’s novel Arcadia. An epigraph from Agnès Varda hangs over a passage about gleaning fruit. Recipes are free of measured ingredients or bulleted instructions. Instead, paragraph-long conversations walk through cooking different kinds of vegetables. You’ll find notes on freekeh, millet, and fregola, and learn, a few times, what a pulse is. Specific dishes include a “Spicy Experimental Salad” (roasted potatoes with hot coriander yogurt) and a “Dahl Situation” (the curried Indian lentil stew). Scrapbooking his personal history with found text and foods, Barton juggles the joys and uncomfortable questions of a cuisine that is, at its very core, unrepressed.
It’s a whirlwind, but Barton is a good hang. As all these elements wash by, we learn he grew up in Eugene, Oregon, where Rain and River were such common names kids in school had to use their last initials: River F., and so forth. Eugene is also where Barton fell in love with the intangible thing that gives the book its title. Free food becomes both noun and adjective, a thing and an aura. Mantra might be the most fitting label. Ideally, free food doesn’t cost anything, but it’s also free of convention, untethered, uninhibited by cooking rules or cultural boundaries.
Barton’s parents were neither hippies nor squares, but things as radical in the aughts as food co-ops, juice bars, and farmers markets gave every Eugenian a contact high: hippies by proxy. Today, in his 30s, Barton is in search of the curious jolt he first found drinking carrot-ginger Genesis Juice at Sundance Natural Foods, warts and all. He wants to revive the homey love bygone Eugene institutions delivered: dense cheddar cheese, sundried tomato, and artichoke heart Pizza Research Institute pizza, arranged like a mandala; the glee in a post–Oregon Country Fair breakfast at veggie diner Keystone Café.
Bennington, the free-loving liberal arts college in Vermont—and the inspiration behind Donna Tartt’s The Secret History—was another awakening, culturally and culinarily. “I’d never consciously eaten a parsnip before,” Barton writes. New friends spent their summers WWOOFing in France. “[I]f you met me at a party at that time and asked, ‘What are you into?’” he writes, “I might have produced the answer, ‘Back to the Land.’”
The excitement of food as a means for political protest, however, has historically overshadowed the merits of eating like a hippie. Too often it has been a well-intentioned but short-sighted vocation. For Barton as well as Kauffman, who writes the foreword in Free Food, that spirit is what’s worth holding onto while weeding out the movement’s harmful penchant for appropriation. Originally, the cuisine’s clumsy mash-up of appropriated flavors was about agency, sticking it to The Man. The slogan swaggers with a distinctly ’60s mien. It practically conjures Mr. Natural himself, and with him the fetishization of Japanese foods by way of George Ohsawa’s macrobiotic diet, and other foodstuffs clipped from cultural context to veganize European dishes, like tahini “cheese” and tofu “scrambles.” Yet Barton sees modern potential in the spirit: the idea of food as a guiding light toward something other than a prescribed life under, you know, capitalism and all that.
Through his childhood in Eugene, Oregon, attending Bennington College in Vermont, and eventually settling in Portland, Barton found glimmers of what eventually became his theory of “free food.”
Post-grad, Barton worked through several attempts at utopia. He built farms and secret gardens and hosted pop-ups and wrote books evangelizing what he’d learned, including The Myrtlewood Cookbook and The Long Loaf. All of it he paints here—in a blazing, eclectically punctuated whiplash—with the faint notion that his dreams were always a little quixotic. Still, each vignette has its “anarchist super-volunteer” to build soil-sifters and its scruffy neighbor who runs a vegan hair salon to offer up his side yard to the cause. But actually achieving utopia requires serious dedication and sacrifice—a big ask for even the most die-hard hippie. One attempt to escape the grid with a like-minded cohort to a dreamy farm in North Hampton, New Hampshire, lands like a sobering crescendo: “one by one people decided they weren’t up for the full life-switcheroo that was required to commit to the project.”
Helen and Scott Nearing’s 1954 book Living the Good Life, a central text of the Back to the Land movement, has also been a bible for Barton. This are the faction of hippies more interested in building houses and growing food than dropping acid and following the Grateful Dead, Barton explains (though he admits the overlap is significant). Their subtitle, How to Live Sanely and Simply in a Troubled World, rings timeless; however, the methodology requires modernizing.
The Nearings were rural homesteaders and champions of self-sufficiency who fled civilization—though they fled to Vermont and then Maine, not Mars. Barton started in Eugene and ended up in Portland, swapping one brand of Pacific Northwest gorp for another. Across generations, they share the goal of a kind of fringe life, an augmented engagement with society, not total severance. In search of such a thing, Barton’s pragmatism in the kitchen slowly bled into his larger worldview. Shifting his day-to-day rituals proved more sustainable than a full life switcheroo. His instructions for the Good Life, a free food life, are the same as for cooking: Instead of strictures, Barton writes, “It’s more about how you carry yourself as you do it.”
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