Born Dropped Out: The Hippie Kids Stories
Caleb Clark has interviews of children of hippies displayed in short video clips.
A hippie interface for documentary video. Be free! Explore these unedited short videos of children of hippies answering the same 20 questions in self-interviews. This is an experiment in new interfaces for documentary video as part of an ITP Masters Thesis by Caleb J. ClarkLink
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I know four genuine hippie kids—I knew their parents—and the one common complaint is...FOOD. According to them they all ate some nasty-tasting shit in the name of healthful diets.
For anyone interested, I have a blog about my own experiences being raised by hippies called Hippie Kid Memories (HippieKidMemories.com).
yeah buddy66, they probaly ate some nasty-tasting shit... like tofu, veggies, & sprouts. I can't believe they were not allowed to eat awesome food like mcdonald's and coca cola and dairy queen !
>For anyone interested, I have a blog about my own experiences being raised by hippies called Hippie Kid Memories (HippieKidMemories.com
Nice. I added it to my thesis links page - caleb.
Re the food. Yeah, it sucked mostly. But I wasvery healthy and at a crucial time in my physical development. Now I can eat junk food, and I do sometimes, but I'm actually glad I had a good foundation growing up. Truth be told, I'd rather have brown rice now then white rice. I thought I'd never say that!
@curtismayfield
Or, say, your mother's horrific attempts at making homemade "McRibs" on a galvanized-rubber, pounded-out-from-whole-wheat-flour gluten base. Urg. The memory itself is enough to make my stomach curdle.
Or the infamous "sauerkraut soup" that even the dog wouldn't go near. Hell, even the ants scattered and never came back where she threw it out onto the lawn.
Or eating nothing but home-canned applesauce for days because being a hippy meant having no money, but at the same time not giving "The Man" the satisfaction of applying for food stamps to feed your kids.
Yeah, growing up as a hippy kid meant a childhood full of nasty, nasty food. Not always, mind you, but more or less regularly.
I know an excellent vegan restaurant that can make things taste just like meat. Is that cheating?
Egg Foo Yuck
actually it's a Chinese Buddhist sort of place. I never ask so as to not spoil the illusion.
"You can't get more liberal than... liberal." Huh? WTF mate?
And no Tak that's not cheating it's just eating.
And since it's been mentioned, applesauce is the shit, wish my mom would send me some.
Takuan, sorry, that wasn't in response to you - I was talking about my own unfortunate experience with hippie cuisine as a child. (Homemade bread and a massive garden largely made up for it.)
I have no problem with vegan food. One of my favorite ice cream places makes about half its flavors vegan, and they're AWESOME.
I was a hippie kid.
Parents were vegetarians and Gramma was not.
When I went to see Gramma, she fed me meat.
Hippie kid here. It was a pretty cool childhood and I wouldn't trade any of the experiences for the world. Although I'll admit it was pretty unstable and that does carry over into my adulthood (I generally don't plan life past about 26 hours into the future). Truth be told I grew up being exposed to stuff that at the time would have me taken away from my parents (drugs, nudity, weird people, artists, etc). And let's face it if a child was found living in that environment today the child we be taken away, the parents would be arrested and we'd be seeing 24 hour CNN coverage along the lines of "FREED HIPPIE CHILD: FLOWER NIGHTMARES".
Oh, and the food, pretty good as I remember it. Lots of stir-fry, refried beans/tortillas, rice, pasta with whatever we grew in the garden. It's not always about the type of food being prepared. Tofu/granola type stuff doesn't have to suck. My experience having lived off and on with a dozen or so different vegetarians and vegans is that some people JUST CAN'T FREAKING COOK. And some of those people think that food isn't supposed to be enjoyed, to them it's fuel. So to them a normal meal is a bowl of brown rice, and adding sliced carrots or a splash of soy sauce gives it an explosion of flavor.
As an adult, I like health food, even the "old school" type health food as opposed to the processed, microwaveable Whole Foods stuff.
However, I think kids in general are a lot more sensitive to flavor and texture, and tend to have a lower tolerance for weird or funny tasting food. Some things I remember disliking as a kid:
Organic peanut butter - this was just ground up peanuts, but I desperately wanted that sugar/peanut/oil/preservatives slurry that was JIF or Skippy
Organic cheese - The terrible, flavorless cheese of my childhood has lead me to love and covet that yellow Kraft "cheese-food product".
Kale - Seriously, fuck kale.
My tastes are exactly the opposite on each of your three examples, Zikzak. But then, I discovered real peanut butter, real cheese, and kale, later in life, and did grow up on good old American processed cheese.... never cared for peanut butter. And always preferred fresh fruit to anything else... so maybe not a completely normal childhood food experience.
Hey, I was raised by conservative scientists who voted for Goldwater. You think that parsnips that have been boiled for five hours are tastier than tofu? We ate old-fashioned, home-cooked, WASP food three meals a day and it all tasted like cardboard. At least hippie kids probably got a little garlic occasionally.
Hmmm, I was born in 1970, and my hippie mom fed me Burger King, fruit flavored A&P soda, Cap'n Crunch, and Hostess Fruit Pies.
I was born 1962 to a Hippie mother and a father that was a cop, needless to say they didn't stay together long. When they divorced I lived with my mother in vermont in the winter and with my dad in arizona for the summer. I went from eating spiralina and yeast water in the winter and mc donalds all summer. Later when I was 9 my mother joined a commune where I spent most the rest of my childhood. To rebel against my hippie family I joined the military and cut my hair short. Not just any part of the military either, I joined the Nuclear Submarine Force, better know as the silent service. There was thousands of adventures within those years and I look back at it as if was a twisted Mark twain adventure. I do not regret my life nor do I wallow in the pity me for what I have gone through, I take my life as a library of experience.
It was 1972. My family was camping in Ashland, Oregon while my father pursued some vague Academia sort of thing. There were several groups of hippies that passed through or lived in the camp. One group consisted of one old dude with a bunch of younger women a few of whom had babies. They traveled on a painted up school bus and creeped me out. The family I got close to were from Santa Barbra and they had one of those cool little round campers. The family was made up of a mother and father, one girl my age, a bunch littler blonde ones, a guy whose father was some kind of ambassador or something in the far east and the guy had a bunch of this thai stick, the first I had ever smoked and that is a story in itself. His girlfriend was a braided blonde california beauty. Any way, all the kids smoked this opiated stick and it was so trippy. Also, the kids used to come and beg or steal our food all the time. My mom eventually started buying extra of things so she could have enough. Their hair was uncombed and their clothes were dirty. They were really inappropriate as far as social behaviors. I have thought about that family a lot, especially the girl who was my age. At first I wanted a Mom and Dad like that, the freedom, the doobie but later I wanted to save her and take her with me so she could have food and stucture, and learn how to behave in public. There was the initial appearance of peace and love with this hippie group but, in the end, one saw desperation in the eyes of the children. Their lives were out of control.