Revisit the Garlic Revolution, April 10 in Berkeley
L. John Harris as Mr. Garlic.
If you’ve never met Mr. Garlic in person, you’ll have the pleasure at this evening of good fun, good food, and a lot of garlic, aka the spice of life. In 1975, when Berkeley journalist and artist L. John Harris published The Book of Garlic (Holt, Rinehart, Winston), a revolution in taste was launched, and through collaboration with Chez Panisse, the Gilroy Garlic Festival, filmmaker Les Blank’s “Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers,” and Lovers of the Stinking Rose—Harris’s garlic fan club—America was introduced to the flavor, fun, and health benefits of fresh garlic. Replacing the convenience of highly processed garlic powder and garlic salt, the full range of garlic’s flavor profile emerged—from sharp and pungent to sweet and nutty—a revelation to American cooks and eaters.
Spearheaded by Harris’s antics as Mr. Garlic, Head Garlic Head of Lovers of the Stinking Rose, and publisher of the Garlic Times newsletter, garlic festivals sprang up all across the USA. Translated into French, Spanish, German, and Japanese, The Book of Garlic became the bible of a new gastronomic religion of flavor, fun, and health. It’s the funniest food in the world’s culinary cornucopia, and adding garlic to our bland American diet enriched and enlivened the American food revolution, launched in California in the early 1970s, proving Brillat-Savarin’s immortal wisdom—”We are what we eat.”
Garlic Revolution
Thursday, April 10, 6pm
Berkeley City Club
2315 Durant Ave, Berkeley
$29 (includes garlicky meal from Julia’s restaurant at BCC)
To reserve seats, contact Kristina Seher at kseher.tpa@gmail.com.
L. John Harris, born in Los Angeles, studied art and literature at UC Berkeley in the 1960s. Seduced by Berkeley’s food revolution in the 1970s, Harris worked at several iconic shops and restaurants and wrote The Book of Garlic (1974). He launched his cookbook company, Aris Books, in 1980 and his “Foodoodles” cartoon byline in Bay Area magazines led to a series of illustrated memoirs: Foodoodles (2010), Café French (2019) and My Little Plague Journal (2022). Harris’s latest book is Portrait in Red: A Paris Obsession (Heyday Books, 2024) and his next book will be a history of Berkeley’s “gourmet ghetto,” to be published by Heyday Books.
Images courtesy of L. John Harris
