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Culture and Society
The Food Co-Op: After The Revolution
“It’s not the hurdles that hurt horses,” a friend once said. “It’s the hammer, hammer, hammer of the hard highway.” And that’s kind of the way it is these days at Chapel Hill’s oldest and largest food cooperative.
June 1974
Chewing It Over
Yom Kippur. The Jewish Day of Atonement. Along with my family, I used to fast, on this holy day, to expiate my sins, to assure that God would mercifully grant me yet one more year, during which, along with my family, I might sit every night before the TV, eating enough fruit and cookies to feed the whole block.
June 1974
Out Of The Bed And Into The Frying Pan
It’s so strange to sit here listening to you talk of how fat you were, comparing your past and present dimensions like some baseball record.
June 1974
Food Stamps In The Land Of The Free, Where Nothing Is
News item: North Carolina is listed as one of the states where the food stamp program is underused. Social workers say they can’t seem to interest eligible families to come in and sign up.
June 1974
American Cheese
American cheese on white bread. Dry and joyless. Wholly unsatisfying yet, as a bus station refreshment, wholly appropriate. The bread is without flavor or soul, edible foam rubber, hardly the staff of life. The cheese is mostly chemical. But we are far from the farm.
June 1974The Politics Of Food
It’s very difficult for me to write about food — so many trips and so much worry, joy, and compulsion. My first impulse is to go into a Yiddish tragic-comedy about the whole thing, but not now. My second impulse is to go into a long talk about all the changes in my own feelings and habits surrounding food, but that doesn’t seem right either.
June 1974
What Money Can’t Buy
In order to come together with people that share common interests, we have traveled around the U.S. for the last five months, hitchhiking with very little or no money and carrying only what we could stuff into our pockets. We shared with many people.
May 1974The Chapel Hill Syndrome
I’m not down on Chapel Hill. With me it’s a matter of finding out that I don’t have to live there in order to be up. I have not always felt this way. In fact, I had a bad case of what I call the Chapel Hill Syndrome.
May 1974
The Traveler Returns: Home, More Or Less, At Last
Going home, as if home were still a possibility, or, like those other shadowy and relative values of our age — love, honesty, rationality — nothing more than a momentary echo of something past, and nearly forgotten, a smudge on the map, a torn page from the history book, when families stayed put, when the heart was forever, when politicians were statesmen, when faith was an arbiter at the edge of learning rather than a substitute for reason.
May 1974
