The health food store near the Fawkner Street corner closed for ever one afternoon in the early 1970s. The health food boom had begun. Begun? With a closure? The paradox was simple. Whereas the original health food store sold bulk grains, dried fruits, nuts, flours, unwrapped loaves and cheeses to first-generation eastern European migrants, the health 'boom' left staples in its wake.
Amid the new-found mobility of the 1950s, post-war children tired of their migrant parents' villagey habits, and turned to supermarkets and shopping malls, often walking greater distances across endless acres of car parks than had their forebears to the corner shop. It was yet another age of progress, not to mention irony. Snake-oiled with health claims verging on promised immortality - eat yogurt and live to 108 like the Bulgarians - manufactured food products made anything not so produced look like the quaint output of some gnarled grandma in a bucolic stone cottage surrounded in the unpaved muck by oinking muddy pigs and flocks of feather-shedding poultry.
Plastic was the game-changer. Hermetic packaging, stamped with quasi-religious exhortations and warnings pushed the home-grown rusticity of the past into a not-so-fond memory of the germ-ridden epidemics that haunted western populations until the mid-twentieth century, with nostalgic reruns such as the one we had a few years ago. While many sub-cultures continue to recall and promote the lost arts of home growing and cooking, any observer spending ten minutes watching the output through the checkouts at a supermarket will know that the world's most loved home chefs are Nestle, Modelez, General Mills and Unilever.
Today, devoid of population-slashing diseases and epidemics, health food - still bedevilled by outrageous Barnum-like claims - has morphed into an ‘aspirational lifestyle choice’: an appallingly meaningless three-word phrase I can't believe I just wrote.
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From a recent article with key words redacted so you can fill in your own favourites:
"Drinking ________ with _________ added has been touted as a cure for everything from cance to acne to boosting your immune system to helping skin heal more quickly."
"Influencers claim ________ steeping ________ in hot water for ten minutes ... and then drinking the results will help you go to sleep faster."
What could be a more compelling motivation than gaining immortality, or at least a small part of it? In words attributed to P. T. Barnum, there's a sucker born every minute.
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