I confess that my instinctive reaction to Ashley’s story had to do with the Betty Crocker cake mix. Like many others who write about the history of home cooking, I want the food industry to have a much smaller footprint in the American kitchen. What could be easier than mixing butter and sugar, adding eggs and flour, and putting a pan in the oven? As far as I’m concerned, cake mixes should be treated like controlled substances and made available only by prescription. But the image of this determined mother pulling out a plastic ice-cream tub to use as a mixing bowl will be emblazoned in my memory for all time. I’m still at war with the food industry, but I think Ashley deserves a medal.

We’re now 50 years or so into an unprecedented run of culinary activism known as “the food revolution”—a loose term, but in general think farmers’ markets, school-lunch reforms, chefs rampant on TV, and middle-class kitchens stocked with olive oil and preserved lemons. That revolution is driving the politics of food, too: Federal policies targeting agriculture, hunger, nutrition, and food safety have jumped to the headlines and spurred a tremendous amount of local and national organizing. And, of course, we have celebrities—including chefs, nutritionists, movie stars, and Michelle Obama—telling us how to eat for optimal health and reminding us of the sacred importance of family dinner.

Basic

As you’ve noticed—especially if you’re one of the countless home cooks who won’t be serving wild-caught king salmon at $30 a pound tonight, despite its impressive omega-3 status—the ideals of the food revolution may be everywhere, but the reality hasn’t reached everyone and isn’t likely to. The revolution’s evil twin, by contrast, has been stunningly efficient in its spread. As Bee Wilson points out in The Way We Eat Now: How the Food Revolution Has Transformed Our Lives, Our Bodies, and Our World, junk food has overwhelmed traditional diets pretty much everywhere in the world, and at an astonishing speed. This revolution is making massive numbers of people fat and sick.

Both revolutions sprang from the 1960s, and both were aimed at bringing about a radical transformation of our relationship with food—emphasis on radical, which may account for the wildly divergent outcomes. During that decade, the counterculture was putting a political and environmental spin on the whole question of food. People who had been raised on Wonder Bread sandwiches and frozen blocks of vegetables had started growing their own bean sprouts, kneading their own whole-wheat dough, making their own yogurt, even trying their damnedest to master organic farming.

It was this sensibility, combined with cheap and head-spinning travel to Europe, that inspired young gastronomes such as Alice Waters to make “fresh and local” the basis for an entire culinary philosophy. Although she soon became famous as a restaurateur, Waters’s writing and politicking have always focused on rethinking home cooking. As she once wrote, “My favorite recipe is: ‘Go cut some mint from the garden, boil water, and pour it over the mint. Wait. And then drink.’ ” She opened Chez Panisse in 1971, and the good-food revolution was on its way.