Where Food Is God

(An excerpt from the article)

American health food is usually said to have started with a Presbyterian minister: Sylvester Graham, who first lectured on the virtues of vegetarianism during the 1820s. (He is remembered as the namesake of the graham cracker.) It really got going in 1863 when Ellen White, a leader of several hundred Christians who called themselves the Seventh-day Adventists, said that God had revealed to her that "Grains, fruits, nuts, and vegetables constitute the diet chosen for us by our Creator." The Adventists became vegetarians, and by the turn of the century, two members, cereal moguls John Harvey Kellogg and C.W. Post (who once marketed cornflakes as "Elijah's Manna"), had laid the groundwork for the U.S. health-food industry. According to William Shurtleff and Akiko Aoyagi—authors of Bibliography of Soy Sprouts: 655 References From 3rd Century A.D. to 1991, among other soy-based titles —the Adventists popularized soymilk, soy cheese, and meat substitutes made from spun soy fibers. They also founded Worthington Foods, now America's largest manufacturer of veggie burgers and fake meat.

Initially, the emerging science of nutrition, more than spirituality, spread the good word about health food to the general population. Particularly in Southern California—which Shurtleff and Aoyagi identify as the health-food movement's most important early hub—adults embraced "living foods" with the goal of retaining a youthful vitality, inspired by best-sellers such as Gayelord Hauser's Look Younger, Live Longer. From the 1930s to the 1950s, California gave America everything from the grapefruit diet to the late fitness guru Jack LaLanne. Vitamins appeared on a U.S. health-food store shelf for the first time in San Diego—and they began spreading nationwide thanks to the groundbreaking research and vitamin evangelism of Henry Borsook, a Caltech biochemist.

Still, spiritual movements exerted a culinary influence. In 1930s San Francisco, a Seventh-day Adventist named Ella Brodersen ran what might have been the city's first vegetarian restaurant, the Health Way Cafeteria. Near Santa Barbara, Alan Hooker, who had moved to the town of Ojai to be near his guru, Yogi Krishnamurti, opened the Ranch House restaurant in 1956—which would lead some people to call him "the grandfather of California cuisine," a precursor to famous chefs such as Alice Waters and Wolfgang Puck. Los Angeles became home to yoga pioneer Paramahansa Yogananda. As Hollywood chef Akasha Richmond put it, "by the 1950s, it was the Mushroom Burger, served at Yogananda's SFR India Café, that made the veggie burger popular in Hollywood." Then came the California New Age food explosion—and Jim Baker.
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