An Interview with Lt. Colonel Stan Luther

Stanley R. “Stan” Luther, grew up in Oklahoma, Kansas, and Idaho during the era of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. He joined the US Navy during World War II and later joined the Air Force to become a pilot. During his 28 years in the Air Force, he flew everything from bombers and transport aircraft to fighter jets and reconnaissance planes in Vietnam. In 1969, he was awarded the Bronze Star.

With over 13,000 hours of flight time, Stanley R. Luther knows his way around an airplane. After serving as an attaché to Madagascar, Stan retired to the Pacific Northwest where he worked as a community college professor, flight instructor, and air ambulance pilot. He lives in the Rogue Valley of Southern Oregon where he enjoys a view of the local airport.

Working with Daniel Alrick and Julie Kanta of Plumb Creative, Lt. Colonel Luther has, at 96, penned A Lifetime in the Atmosphere is a memoir that takes readers on an extraordinary journey.

Ed Battistella: Thanks for your service and congratulations on A Lifetime in the Atmosphere. When did you decide to put together a memoir of your life and career?

Stan Luther: Years ago. It was mostly about my career. I wanted to make sure I got the Cuban Missile Crisis in there, it was the driving force. I didn’t have a serious plan, I thought someday I’ll write a book. Once that (the CMC) happened, I figured hey, I gotta tell this story. It had a life of its own.

My late wife Nellie had a lot of interest in family history and saved a lot of photos and papers. I had given speeches and talked to the news media about my time in the service and experience flying, but my own interest in writing a book was approximately 10 years ago, when Nellie was progressing into Alzheimer’s and I had time to start curating those records.

Ed Battistella: This month is the anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and you were a Lieutenant Colonel and one of the B-47 jet pilots on alert at the time after President Kennedy announced that the Soviets were deploying ballistic missiles in Cuba. Tell us about that experience?

Stan Luther: Well, being on alert in a B47 made it pretty close to the skin when we were called into a room to watch President Kennedy on TV. Nobody spoke. We all looked at the TV and you could hear a pin drop. We just looked at each other afterwards and just silently thought this might be it. For eight years, our mission had been to train for bombing runs with nuclear weapons, preparing for the unthinkable possibility of war with the Soviet Union. I directed a team of five aircraft to the municipal airport in Columbus, Ohio. The urgency of the situation meant that we were airborne before anyone at the Columbus airport was informed of our impending arrival or the reason behind it. Each of our aircraft carried a menacing payload of thermonuclear bombs, each packing 20 megatons of firepower, ominously nicknamed “Big Ugly.” These weapons were nothing short of monstrous, barely fitting into the bomb bay. The increase of nuclear readiness to DEFCON 2 on October 24th raised the tension and anxiety considerably. B-47s remained grounded to conserve fuel while B-52s patrolled the skies around the clock, carrying thousands of nuclear weapons. For about three days, we remained on alert until tensions finally deescalated as the USSR agreed to begin removing its missiles from Cuba on October 27.

Ed Battistella: For a farm kid from Kansas and Idaho, what was the attraction of flying? How did you get interested in aviation?

Stan Luther: I was a farm boy during the Great Depression when conditions were arid during the Dust Bowl and almost impossible for a farmer to make a living. That didn’t make farming seem appealing. More importantly, I did not want to stay at home working for my father. Interest in flight came immediately, just in my blood, as soon as I saw a plane fly overhead in the plains I knew I wanted to get inside one of them. This unyielding passion led me to incessantly pester my father until he relented and took me to the airport. He told a flight instructor that the only way to get me to be quiet about flying was to take me up for a lesson. As soon as we were in the air, it felt right. Amidst the whir of engines, the rushing wind, and the exhilaration of flight, I discovered an affection for aviation that resonated deeply within me.

Ed Battistella: You visited Vietnam in 2015, many years after the war you served in. What was that experience like?

Stan Luther: It was a trip back through time. Revisiting the old bases brought back a lot of memories, and crossing into the North Vietnam I was able to have civil conversations with Vietnam guerrillas who were my enemies during the war. The kinds of guys I was directing F4s to bomb into submission. They were fascinated and wanted to know the details. It tells you something about war. When I was on combat missions, I was focused on the objective, but I would think later and especially over the years about those guys down below my plane and what I would have thought and done if I was in their shoes, so it was a good conversation for me too. What used to be South Vietnam exuded prosperity, vibrancy, and warmth, while, even after all these years, the North maintained a lower standard of living, and the demeanor of its people—especially in Hanoi—appeared more somber. People on the street wanted to discuss the war, asking about my role, the aircraft I flew, our assignments, and whether we had faced enemy fire. It seemed as if they couldn’t get enough of my stories.

Ed Battistella: For several years you were a military attaché in Madagascar. What did that entail?

Stan Luther: My attaché training encompassed a wide array of skills and knowledge, from report compilation to the application of various technologies. I learned to operate effectively in a diplomatic environment, navigating the bureaucratic intricacies of the Department of Defense’s military assistance programs. The job encompassed a wide range of responsibilities, from drafting reports on military and political developments within the country to providing crucial support to the U.S. Ambassador and other embassy staff. We attended numerous diplomatic functions, further strengthening our ties, and played a pivotal role in coordinating U.S. military assistance to Madagascar. Additionally, we had the privilege of piloting our designated C-47 passenger aircraft, affectionately known as the “Gooney Bird,” which allowed us to conduct official business across the country and support the embassy’s transportation requirements. It was a great assignment, and the Malagasy people were wonderful.

Ed Battistella: A question for Julie. I’m tremendously impressed with the quality of the book, the design and the quality of the many photographs. Can you say something about Plumb Creative and the work you do?

Julie Kanta: Thank you! I started out in graphic design in 2006, founding Plumb Creative in 2009 doing branding and websites. But when I was a kid, I would make my own newsletters for family members, so I’ve really always loved both writing and design. When I graduated from SOU in 2014, my capstone was a “Living Legacy” project: combining written memoir with photographs. Eventually that became a beautiful book for my mother. I love combining the written word with visual design, bringing stories to life and preserving people’s memories. I think my experience in branding has really helped me with making projects as beautiful as they can be on top of a good story. My perfectionism helps with the editing process as well, ha ha. So I also have the ability to see the project as a whole, ensuring each piece is going to capture the spirit of the story. I care about quality, both as a final physical product and that my client’s voice has come through. I believe that everyone’s story is worth preserving, and I’m proud to be a part of it.

Ed Battistella: I also have a question for Daniel. What was the experience like of working with Stan? What impressed you most?

Daniel Alrick: I’d like the reader to imagine how much of the book was composed from Stan and I on our hands and knees on his living room floor going over notes and archival material. Some of it was formal sitting side by side at his iMac typing, usually me composing a passage and he giving notes, sometimes the opposite. But usually it was recorded wide ranging meandering conversations that were transcribed and made literary, or Stan’s firsthand notes that were stashed away, or his tape and video recordings, or fresh handwritten yellow pad pages that Stan would write and I’d rewrite and he’d review, and then we would rewrite again. And then in the final edit Julie helped make our tome of inserts more flowing.

What impressed me the most was Stan’s ability to contextualize. He had an idea that the Cuban Missile Crisis section of the book was the most important, and larger than him. And so from that I came up with the idea of structuring the book in flashback with the Cuban Missile Crisis at the beginning, illustrating the stakes his life as a cog in the wheel during nuclear war would rise to. But from that Stan then realized that there was more texture to gain from his lived experience as one of the dwindling members of the “Greatest Generation.” But not in a corny or sentimental way. On the contrary, Stan wanted to convey a generational lesson in all the complexities of that, as someone who is still learning at 96 years old.

What I hope we succeeded at is giving the texture of a life lived, along with Stan’s themes of duty, sacrifice, love, and pursuing one’s dreams. A lot of autobiographies simplify things, or they get bogged down in minutiae. I wanted to realize a collective dream between the three of us of what Stan’s life was like.

Ed Battistella: Thanks for talking with us.

 

 

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What I’m Reading

All the Sinners Bleed by S. A. Cosby

Just discovered S.A. Cosby. All the Sinners Bleed is a fast-paced story of an African America ex-FBI agent turned sheriff. Titus Crown has moved to his hometown in rural eastern Virginia. A school shooting starts a chain of events that reveals the ugly secrets of his town. Great story and pointed commentary on race, religion, and small-town politics. Cosby’s Blacktop Wasteland and Razorblade Tears are on my list.

Seldom Disappointed by Tony Hillerman

A wide-ranging memoir that takes us from Oklahoma to World War II to  newspaperdom, university life and the best-seller list. There are some poignant observations on war, ironic tales about being a reporter, and later a university administrator and professor at the University of New Mexico, and helpful advice about being a writer. The title is an accurate description.

The Peoples Tongue ed. By Ilan Stavans 

I reviewed this collection for Choice, so check it out there.

Small Mercies by Dennis Lehane

I’ve been a Dennis Lehane fan since A Drink Before the War (and still miss the duo of Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro). Small Mercies has echoes of that first book in fact, with race, class, and gang violence figuring in the story. The action takes place in 1974 at the height of tensions over court-mandated busing in South Boston. The unlikely protagonist is Mary Pat Fennessy, a life-long Southie resident who’s lost two husbands (one dead, one divorced) and a son (to drugs). Now her daughter, Jules goes missing and Mary Pat goes ballistic, taking on the gang that runs Southie. She needs to find out how Jules was mixed up in the killing of a young Black man whose car broke down and why she has disappeared.

Lehane captures the emotions and language of generational poverty and racism in his portrait of 1970s Dorchester and creates in Mary Pat Fennessy an unlikely avenger. The story and the morality play fit seamlessly.

Teach From Your Best Self  by Jay Schroder

Teaching is one of the careers with the highest burnout rate—more so now that ever. Jay Schroder, a twenty-four-year veteran teacher—recipient of the Oregon Council of Teachers of English High School English Teacher of Excellence Award, shares his experience and his understanding of burnout and resisilency.

. Grounded in research about the profession and personal experience, he offers ways to thrive as a teacher so that your students thrive—ways to reflect on your own “hurtspots” and overcome them. Most teachers are not ninjas, but they can learn a lot from the way of ninja to achieve maximum impact with minimal effort. to be extremely to be able to improvise as circumstances changed. It’s a great, helpful read for the teachers in your life.

Elena Knows by Claudia Piñeiro

By the Argentine crime fiction writer Claudia Piñeiro, it’s the story of Elena, a woman with Parkinson’s disease who is trying to uncover her daughter’s murder. The police have ruled it a suicide; the Catholic church has labelled it a sin; and the “whore of an illness” makes her investigation painfully arduous. The structure and style of the book are ties to Elena’s illness and, like the best noir, it offers social commentary as well as a mystery.

Fishing for Fallen Light by John Forsythe

John Forsyth’s Fishing for Fallen Light is the sort of project that every educated person  should take on in their later years. Forsyth is a retired physician with a long-standing interest in philosophy and here he offers an intellectual memoir of sorts, tracing his readings, conversations, and thoughts and concerns about truth (and Truth and TRUTH). It was prompted by the events of January 6, 2021, and by the continual lies of Donald Trump (who takes over the book for a time).

Forsyth begins in a unique and clever way, with a fifty-some item annotated bibliography of what he has read on the topic, given the readers some scholarly context. Then he turns to a more or less chronology of philosophers and others thinking about truth and reason, from the Greeks to people like Sissela Bok, Daniel Kahneman, and Johnathan Haidt.  Finally he applies his thinking to gain an understanding of why people resist or are impervious to the truth. It was an engaging and personal study by someone who has thought deeply about Truth and cares about it, and it will make readers think about their own conceptions of truth.

Hanging the Devil by Tim Maleeny

I’ve been a fan of Tim Maleeny for several years now, since reading his Jump and Stealing the Dragon. For my money, he’s probably the funniest mystery writer I can think of. In this book San Fransisco-based Cape Weathers and his much tougher ninja-partner Sally Mei try to protect an orphaned Chinese girl and help a roguish Interpol agent foil an attempt to steal back Chinese art treasures. There’s another ninja to challenge Sally, genetically-engineered macaques, state-sponsored art forgery, and gangsters aplenty. If you like your crime fiction served with a smile, this one’s for you.

The Village Healer’s Book of Cures by Jennifer Sherman Roberts

Jennifer Sherman Roberts’s debut novel, The Village Healers Book of Cures, is set in seventeenth-century England, is her debut novel, and based on an actual witch hunter in England, a smarmy character named Matthew Hopkins. (The real-life Hopkins was responsible for the death of 300 women.)

Mary Fawcett is a village healer,  a woman who cures ills with recipes handed down to her and her own empathy and acumen. When a husband on one of her patients is murdered, Mary comes under suspicion by Hopkins. Together with her young brother and her new friend, the mysteriously scarred alchemist Robert Sudbury, Mary must uncover the mystery of the witches’ symbols on the body. The Village Healer’s Book of Cures is a tense, well-paced and brings in some interesting history and some clever plot twists. Bonus: Jennifer Sherman Roberts is an expert on medieval recipes and she weaves in healing recipes with each chapter (but don’t try the at home).

 

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An Interview with Jennifer Sherman Roberts, author of The Village Healers Book of Cures

Southern Oregon writer Jennifer Sherman Roberts holds a PhD in Renaissance literature from the University of Minnesota, as well as master’s and bachelor’s degrees from Villanova University and the University of California, Berkeley. She is also a facilitator for Oregon Humanities, leading community conversations on the topic “Conspiracy Theories: Truth, Facts, and Tinfoil Hats” She has also taught at southern Oregon University and worked as the Interim Executive director of Josephine Community Libraries Inc. She lives in Grants Pass, where she is a debut novelist, fierce library advocate, occasional knitter, and aspiring mead maker.

Her debut novel, The Village Healers Book of Cures, is in seventeenth-century England, is her debut novel. Based on actual witch hunt in England, it’s a surprisingly modern tale of murder, revenge, alchemy, and evil.

Ed Battistella: I really enjoyed the Village Healer’s Book of Cures. How did you come up with the idea?

Jennifer Sherman Roberts: Oh, I’m so glad you enjoyed it!

The idea for the novel sort of crystalized when I was doing a conversation project with Oregon Humanities called “Stone Soup: How Recipes Can Preserve History and Nourish Community.” We were discussing a seventeenth-century healing recipe for “The Biting of a Mad Dogge” that required crabapple be harvested at a certain time of year, and one of the participants pointed out that it sounded sort of witchy. That gelled in my mind with a blog post I was writing about Witchfinder General Matthew Hopkins, et voila!

EB: There were several nice plot twists, including one involving the smarmy witch hunter Matthew Hopkins. That character was based on a real person, I understand.

JSR: Yes, and a horrible one at that. Though there have been many witch hunts and many witchfinders, he is probably the most notorious, having written a witchfinding manual called “The Discovery of Witches.” He began hunting witches in his hometown of Manningtree in England when, according to his own account, he overheard women talking about meeting the Devil in the forest. Witch-hunting became a profitable trade for him, as towns would levy a hefty tax for his services.

The method he used most for “discovering” witches was the pricking test. It was thought that witches had a “witch’s mark” (often considered a third nipple used to suckle the Devil) that would not bleed when pricked, so these poor women were poked all over with pins, needles, and even daggers.

By the time he ended his witchfinding career, Hopkins was responsible for the death of 300 women.

EB: Each chapter starts off with a brief recipe for curing some ailment, like dried mistletoe for convulsions or powdered goats blood mixed with ale for kidney stones. When I got to the end of the book, you answered the burning question I had, whether these were real historic cures or one’s you made up. Where did the recipes come from?

JSR: I found the recipes in digitized collections ranging from the Folger Shakespeare Library in DC to the Wellcome Library in London. They’re all open access, so anybody can read them. The handwriting can be difficult, though, so I also looked at an online research project for transcribing the recipes called “Shakespeare’s World.”

EB: Have you tried any of them? Have modern researchers looked into this?

JSR: Oh, heavens no, not by me! I have a healthy respect for the potency of herbs and would only want somebody with a whole lot of experience and training to make them. Lots of researchers have duplicated food recipes though, and the results are fun and delicious. I once made a “hedgehog pudding” with my kids—I was horrified when I saw the name of the recipe, but then I read on and realized it wasn’t made from hedgehogs but rather was a pleasant kind of vanilla pudding molded into the shape of a hedgehog with toasted almonds for the prickly bits.

EB: There were several nice turns of phrasing in the book, like the earlier use of the term “cunning woman?” Did your academic training give you an ear for the earlier language?

JSR: It’s funny you should mention that, as the book was originally titled “The Cunning Woman’s Book of Receipts” (changed because another book was recently published had too similar a name). As I hope I described well enough in the book, cunning women were healers, advice-givers, and dealers in small charms. I’ve read a lot about cunning women and how they played so many roles in the community, and yet came under such suspicion.

Having read so much from the period, I think I have an easier time replicating the cadence and rhythms of 17th century English. As a novelist, though, I have to be careful that it doesn’t sound too stilted to a modern reader. That’s why, for example, I use contractions in the novel. To be absolutely faithful to the language of the time would mean pulling the reader out of the story. It’s a fine balance and a bit of a dance doing both.

Where I think my research most affected my language–where I was able to let the formality take over–was in the trial of Agnes Shepherd. I had read so many transcripts of which trials that Hopkins’s accusations and 17th-century legalese came more naturally.

EB: More generally, what was the research like for the book?

JSR: Oh, I loved the research: The history of the English civil war, humoral medical theory, the use of medicinals and herbals, and as much as I could absorb about everyday life in a small 17th century village. I also read a ton about witches (particularly Owen Davies’s amazing work) and alchemy.

I’d written some blog posts about these recipes for the academic blog The Recipes Project. I’m fascinated by how the recipe books from that period are a jumble of food, perfume, and medical cookery. We’ve separated and codified each of those areas in the modern world, and seeing them side by side, I think, leads one to thinking of the ways these discrete areas intertwine.

I’m fascinated, too, by how the recipes seem to resemble some alchemical instructions and healing potions while presaging modern chemistry. I thought about that continuum while writing Mary, who has a deep thirst to know about the efficacy of her cures.

EB: One of the things that struck me early on was your comment that healers are motivated by wanting to understand as well as to cure. I had never though of their motivation that way. How did that realization come to you?

JSR: My take may be modern, and it may be that I’m imposing that thirst to discover the causes of things on my characters, but I don’t think so. The novel is set during the beginning of the Scientific Revolution, after all—not long after Francis Bacon famously called a new way of understanding knowledge. I think that drive to understand can’t have just been exclusive to the elite and aristocratic. I figured surely a woman hunting for herbs and cooking for long hours would want to know whether—and why—they worked.

The medical ideas that had been circulating for centuries—especially of the four humors (yellow bile, black bile, phlegm, and blood) —point to a desire to understand the fundamental working of these materials in the body, and indeed the recipes reference phlegm, blood, and bile. We have lots of evidence that men were thinking in these ways, but since almost all women were forbidden to circulate their own ideas in writing, we can’t share their thinking as easily. I guess this is my way of imagining what it must have been like.

EB: Is there a moral of the tale for today’s readers?

JSR: Oh, that’s a great question. The novel grapples with the fear of knowledge and the prejudices that are allowed to possess communities. Of charlatans and villains and cowards. But it also, I hope, explores the many varieties of love and belonging. Personally, I think there are a lot of parallels with scientific, political, and cultural controversies happening now—not least of which is a recasting of the phrase “witch hunt.”

But I leave that up to the reader.

EB: If you were casting this story as a movie, who would you get to play Mary?

JSR: Oh, I’ve had a running cast in my head since the beginning! For Mary, I’ve imagined Emilia Clarke (of Games of Thrones/ Daenerys Targaryen fame). I’ve also imagined Fiona Shaw as Agnes.

EB: Have you got plans to bring Mary Fawcett and Robert Sudbury back for another book?

JSR: I’m not sure. There’s definitely more to their story, and there are characters in the novel I’d love to explore more. We’ll have to see what the demand is, I guess!

EB: Thanks for talking with us. Best of luck with The Village Healer’s Book of Recipes?

JSR: It’s been a pleasure. Thanks so much!

 

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An Interview with Christina Ward, author of Holy Food: How Cults, Communes, and Religious Movements Influenced What We Eat—An American History

Christina Ward is an independent cultural historian of food and food history, exploring what we eat and why we eat it. She is the author of American Advertising Cookbooks-How Corporations Taught Us To Love, Spam, Bananas, and Jell-O, and Preservation-The Art and Science of Canning, Fermentation, and Dehydration.

She is a contributor to Serious Eats, Edible Milwaukee, The Wall Street Journal, Food & Wine magazine and more. She also rode around town in the Oscar Meyer Wienermobile with Padma Lakshmi on the hottest day in July of 2019 for “Taste the Nation.”

Her current book is Holy Food: How Cults, Communes, and Religious Movements Influenced What We Eat—An American History (September 26, 2023).

Ed Battistella: I’ve taught courses on the language of food and on the rhetoric of cults, so Holy Food was a really interesting book to me. How did you think to combine the history of spiritual movements with the history of food?

Christina Ward: Food and religion are the twinned obsessions of my life. I remember as a young child being fascinated when I heard people saying they could or could not eat something because of their religion. I grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin—a very Catholic city—and there were kids in the neighborhood “giving up” foods for Lent. The notion that someone’s god (or gods) would care about what a person eats set me down this path. It took five years of active research and writing to get Holy Food to “book”, but I’ve been thinking about how food and religion are intertwined for decades.

EB: What does the history of food tell us about culture?

CW: Based on my research, I think humans tend to “sacralize” foods we enjoy and elevate their significance in ways that help us identify our community of like-minded people. The food itself is often inconsequential—the recipes from these groups show that many are following trends and fads—it’s the notion that specific foods have importance assigned to them that makes an item part the culture. The foods themselves are benign, it’s the meaning we give it. While not entirely a closed loop, our food reflects our culture, and our culture reflects our food. There is a built-in tension between what and how to eat and how we interact with our culture. That includes religious culture. In the US, we often view food through a judgmental lens–teasing among friends and family when someone in the group adopts a different eating pattern to the extreme of “dosing” vegetarians and vegans with meat. In mainstream America, rejecting a type of popular food is often viewed as a judgement against American culture.

EB: What was it about the Great Awakening of the nineteenth century that brought about so many food fads, I guess you could call them?

CW: The advances in tech sped everything along. A mechanized printing process allowed for an exponential increase in newspapers, books, and tracts. New religious ideas, coupled with food prohibitions and ideas for a new type of diet flooded the country. The Book of Mormon was printed in 1830 and has remained in print to this day. By early 1844, apocalyptic preacher William Miller’s tract about his divinely revealed system for calculating the end of the world had reached 500,000 people.

Access to cheap printing also allowed many groups to publish cookbooks which had the double-pronged goal of teaching new converts about a group’s diet and act as an attractant for potential new believers who were interested in the food. For groups like the Seventh Day Adventists, which was formed out of the chaos among Millerites when the world did not end in 1844, their vegetarian cookbook became a lodestone for numerous groups embracing vegetarianism.

EB: You discussed the Nation of Islam diet in Elijah Muhammed’s How to Eat Live. How did that come about?

CW: Rarely discussed is how much of a role personal taste of a group’s leader plays in their cuisine, but it happens. For the Nation of Islam, food became a core concern under the leadership of Elijah Muhammed. His philosophy was partially informed by the “Tuskegee Idea” that Blacks should form separate and self-sufficient communities and never rely on white people for anything. Muhammed felt the processed foods made by white-owned corporations and sold to the Black community were a method of poisoning and controlling Black bodies. He advocated for a spartan diet of one meal a day of mostly grains and vegetables with fish and chicken proteins as acceptable in small amounts. He imbued NoI food culture with political meaning as well by forbidding foods associated with southern enslavement of Black people. Specific beans were allowed while others prohibited. He felt that overuse of salt was making people sluggish. While not every member of the NoI followed every dictate in How to Eat to Live, enough people followed most of them. Adhering to Muhammad’s diet results in a healthy body to this day. The NoI breakdown of 50% vegetables, 30% bean proteins and grains, and about 20% meat proteins is nearly the same macro breakdown of what is recommended by USDA nutritionists.

EB: One of the fascinating things for me was hearing about how many of our common foods got their start as specialties of religious communities, things like strawberry shortcake and veggie burgers, which then made their way into the mainstream and becoming commodified. Are we still seeing that with today’s cult foods?

CW: Absolutely yes! Tofurkey was developed at The Farm Community in the 1970s and is sold throughout the US in mainstream chain grocery stores. The Kettle brand of potato chips is owned by the 3HO group founded by Yogi Bhajan. Celestial Seasonings Tea’s founder was a devoted adherent of the Urantia Book. I’m sure that there is a small group somewhere in the United States that will come up with the next big food brand in the coming decade.

EB: Holy Food has 75 historical recipes for things like Rejuvelac, Moor Salad and Dilly Bread, and you’ve updated and tested all of these. Do you have a favorite? And a least favorite?

CW: I have a sweet tooth and am partial to desserts! Shaker Apple Pie is good and surprising because it uses rosewater as its main flavoring agent instead of the now familiar cinnamon. The Apple-Corn Cookies are great. They’re gluten-free but delicious even if you’re a wheat eater. On the savory side, the House of David’s Walnut Loaf is quite good as are Tassajara’s Nut-Buttered Beans.

The misses for me are entirely about personal taste as well as food allergies. I can’t eat fish or any meat and relied on chef friends to test and refine those recipes. I know they did a good job but that will be up to folks who try those recipes out. Of the recipes I tested, the ones that were really disgusting I left out of the book. One of my goals was to include foods that modern eaters could make and potentially enjoy. Eating what these groups did helps give more insights into their lives and beliefs. The worst item tested was from the True Light Beavers who had a recipe for Mock Chopped Liver Pate made from mushrooms and other ingredients. My initial thought from analyzing the ingredients was that it would taste pretty good; it did not. One of the few foods that honestly made me gag.

EB: Holy Food is a very visual book. You’ve got photos of spiritual leaders, communes, and cookbooks and on just about every other page. How did you manage to track down all those great images?

CW: Holy Food is not an academic book (though I researched and wrote it with academic rigor) and is for general readers. I feel that images provide another form of information for readers to fully understand what people believe.

I think it’s also too easy to take the cheap shot and mock people who followed religious gurus or charlatans. As a researcher and cookbook collector, I’ve felt that there is too much great visual language lost when we don’t see contextual images. Seeing pictures of people laughing at Jonestown adds nuance to the story we think we know. Seeing George Washington Carver as a vigorous young man standing in a field of his hybrid plants communicates so much about him. Moreso when most images of Carver online and in books depict him as an old man.

I spent time (maybe too much time) in museums and libraries seeking out images. Oftentimes finding one image would lead to others. Pictures of Nation of Islam founder Wallace Farad (sometimes Fard) are notoriously rare. On an unrelated trip to Detroit, I visited the main library who holds the Detroit Free Press photo archives and within minutes—and with the invaluable assistance of the librarians—I found an image of Farad. Even the librarians were thrilled. And of course, in the case of many of the 20th century groups, they have images of their members and founders. Most groups were happy to share images. That they were willing to share was based on my approach to the material, I tried to refrain from judging any group or their beliefs unless those beliefs were coercive and destructive.

EB: If you had your own cult, what would the cuisine be like?

CW: I mentioned that I’m a vegetarian with a sweet tooth, so my cuisine would be most similar to the Hare Krishna diet but with more cakes, pies, and cookies. I would also sacralize chocolate into a ritual that gives me the authority to eat a few candy bars per day. Not a very healthy diet but when one declares themselves godhead, anything goes.

EB: Thanks for talking with us.

CW: Thank you for your interest! My hope above all else is that readers marvel at how relatively small groups and individuals have an outsized influence on our modern food.

 

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