California’s summer calendar is packed with events commemorating 50 years of the hippie revolution of 1967 I am in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood, looking at a Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream shop that stands at the famous corner where artists, writers and musicians had gathered during the “Summer of Love”, in 1967. This gathering of about 100,000 people was the crescendo of an anti-establishment movement that had begun as a response to America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. It rapidly grew to questioning everything that was considered the established norm, in fields as varied as lifestyle, literature, fashion and music. They showed up wearing psychedelic shirts, bell-bottom pants, and flowers in their hair. And words like karma, kama sutra and free love were used liberally in discussions on spirituality and sex. Besides the chants of “make love not war”, there were also the first mentions of local and organic produce, attributes that largely define California’s culinary landscape today.

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