Gaskin has a vision he says the cities are part of the problem. By the height of it, he was drawing 1,000 people who listened to him and ultimately followed him to Tennessee. Marine Corps veteran who taught these Monday night classes in Haight-Ashbury, helping his followers channel Eastern and Western religion. Stephen Gaskin, of San Francisco, was a U.S.

In that very same moment, the Back-to-the-Land movement catches traction and one of the places that the “long-haired hippie freaks” – I say that playfully because that’s the way they were spoken of with disdain – one of the places that the men and women of San Francisco traveled to was the American South. The Great Migration had been driving people north for generations. Edge: If you think about that moment during the civil rights movement when it was made clear by way of protests and demonstrations that the South might be a place to quit the South might be a place to leave. But you write in the book that there were hugely important hippie farming communities in Tennessee and other points in the South. When we think of hippies in the 1960s and 1970s, we think of California we think of Woodstock. What I want to talk to you about are people we don’t necessarily associate with the South. It is a history of the South told through food, starting with incredibly powerful stories during the civil rights movement – stories that literally made me cry. where they became farmers, and the innovative foods that resulted from their work.įrancis Lam: Let’s talk about your book, The Potlikker Papers. Edge, author of The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South, about the eastward migration of a West Coast hippies to the fertile land of the southern U.S. Host Francis Lam talked with Southern food historian John T. In the 1960s and 1970s, many counterculture “hippies” left the big cities in search for a different life, one focused on and tied to the land.

The Potlikker Papers by John T. Edge