Rolled oats (Recipe: apple-pear-cranberry crisp)

In the 1960s, my parents called me a crunchy-granola head.

They weren't wrong.

I wore Earth Shoes. I memorized the poetry of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Kenneth Patchen. I shopped at a health food store called Erehwon, the opposite of Nowhere. I gave up chicken for tofu. I drank herbal tea and burned incense and wore love beads and actually said things like groovy, man and hep cat.

I baked my own bread (my parents saw this as incontrovertible proof of my granola-ness).

By 1978, I'd gone back to eating chicken, tossed the love beads, and traded my Earth Shoes for the Birkenstocks I wear every day (yes, I'm still a little bit crunchy-granola). I bought the newly-published Moosewood Cookbook, and Mollie Katzen's recipes sent me to the health food store once again, for exotic-in-the-1970s ingredients like wheat germ and miso paste and rolled oats.