</head>I learned to eat my vegetables on Grateful Dead tour in the late 1980s, when I was a high school dropout with boundless enthusiasm for hallucinogens and hitchhiking. This surely wasn’t the life my mother had wanted for me. Ma was a terrific and indefatigable cook who’d fed me well. My brother and I usually had hot breakfasts before school—soft scrambled eggs, crispy bacon, and lavishly buttered toast. Ma knew her way around a rib roast. She could braise a brisket to best any bubbe’s. Her fried chicken might’ve made you think she’d been raised in Kentucky, not Brooklyn. Maybe it wasn’t the healthiest food in the world, but it was real food, made from scratch, and made with love.

But when it came to vegetables, my mother was hopeless. She’d produce plastic pouches of creamed spinach from the freezer, or plonk a can of sugary baby peas in a pan. She thought salad was for losers—its consumption only intended for Californians who didn’t know any better, fad dieters, and vegetarian hippies.

And then her wayward daughter became one of those vegetarian hippie losers. Even, for a short spell, a Californian.

Back then, if you’d asked me why I’d stopped eating meat, I’m sure I would’ve said something about reading Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle at precisely the same time my family lived in Manhattan’s meatpacking district (before its insane gentrification, when meat was still packed there in great volume and I had to navigate an obstacle course of discarded cow carcasses on my way to the school bus many mornings). I would’ve said something about ethics and, by unsubtle implication, how mine were better than yours. No creature feels more superior than an adolescent asserting her emergent, self-righteous self.

I discovered how to make dal and poori from a cookbook a Krishna devotee gave me in Central Park’s Sheep Meadow—a favored gathering spot for young stoners and our burnt-out elders. I cooked up big pots of meatless chili and hauled them to the park to feed my unwashed comrades. And then I dropped out of high school and left home to become a full-time, on-tour Deadhead . In Ronald Reagan's 1980s America, I felt out of place, out of time. I'd been restless and unfocused in school, itching for adventure. I was drawn to the culture of the '60s, and the Grateful Dead tour was the closest I could come to experiencing that era, and tasting the freedom and fun and anti-consumerist ethos it represented to me and to other like-minded young people who chose to hit the road.

I couldn’t get over how wrong my mother had been about salads, how gorgeous and flavorful they could be.

We followed the band from city to city, and in arenas and stadiums across the country we danced and formed fast friendships. In the parking lots outside the venues, little hippie villages popped up for a night or two: I did Tarot readings and made jewelry to earn money; others had mobile kitchens in which they cooked up healthy, vegetarian favorites. There was always someone with room for one more in a beat-up VW microbus, always an extra concert ticket to be found. But I hadn't expected that the traveling culture of the tour would dramatically transform my eating habits.

I’d never had an avocado before turning up at a house party near the Santa Cruz boardwalk circa 1988, and was appalled that I’d so long been denied that creamy, green deliciousness. Cheap and abundant in California, avocados became a staple when I lived in an old cabin in the San Lorenzo Valley, and it was in that cabin’s kitchen that I made my first salads. I couldn’t get over how wrong my mother had been about them, how gorgeous and flavorful they could be. I’d never tasted cilantro before a friend ordered me a bowl of gazpacho for lunch at a vegetarian café in upstate New York; she warned me that it might taste soapy at first, but predicted I’d come to love it, and she was right. I developed an enduring affection for the small, local health food stores we sought out as we crisscrossed the country on its highways and back roads. Each soulful little shop was different from the next, and, comfortingly, each was the same, too, with wooden bins of nuts and brown rice and beans, homely devices that cranked out fresh peanut butter, bulletin boards pinned with news of local countercultural interest. Long before antiseptic whole-food megastores cannily cultivated the impression that buying their goods makes a virtue of consumerism, those little stores really did feel virtuous: they seemed to care about community as much as commerce. Whenever I'm in a small town, I still look for its independent health food store, and, invariably, when I inhale that earthy, vegetal smell they all share—an aroma of sprouts and grains accented by sandalwood incense and Dr. Bronner’s Peppermint Soap —I am transported to my arguably misspent but frequently joyful youth.

Rosie Schaap at age 17.

With the ingredients we found in those little stores, at farm stands, and, occasionally, late at night in the giant Safeways of mid-coast California (from whose bulk bins we liberally extracted “samples”), my traveling buddies and I cooked the culinary canon of tour life: stir-fries flecked with tofu chunks and splashed with Bragg Liquid Aminos ; so-called "rasta pasta" (a hippie spin on primavera, always using tricolor corkscrew noodles); pitas stuffed with hummus or falafel , pea and lentil soups with a few too many spices; satisfying and substantial veggie burgers.

Some friends tease me about all this. They regard my Grateful Dead years as a lapse in taste. I don't regret it: I became more open both to people and to produce. Sure, on the road we sometimes reverted to normal teen habits, and weren’t so sanctimonious as to forgo the occasional bag of Doritos. But I doubt I ever ate healthier than I did as a wandering hippie kid.

More than 25 years after I saw my first Dead show, I’m not a vegetarian anymore. That ended in college. I grew up to be the sort of person who belongs to a CSA and shops at farmers’ markets, and takes care to buy whatever meat I cook as conscientiously as I can. I splash out on decadent restaurant dinners once in a while, and when I crave a steak, I eat one (Ma would be pleased). I cook mostly in what might be self-flatteringly called the French farm-wife mode. And there’s still nothing I take more pleasure in preparing than a good salad : from an easy fistful of lightly dressed greens to a baroque, composed number.

When a nostalgic turn of mind overtakes me, I long to hit the road with a backpack, crash in a campground on a beach just south of San Francisco, earn my keep making jewelry and doing Tarot readings. More realistically, I still cook and eat the stuff that sustained me in the late '80s. And you’ll find a refillable bottle of Dr. Bronner’s Peppermint Soap right beside my kitchen sink.

Inspired by Rosie's Grateful Dead days, we developed this recipe for a veggie burger, all grown up . Check it out!