In 1967, The Berkeley Barb — perhaps the country’s most radical underground newspaper — published a peculiar recipe. “Freeze the peels,” it read, “break and reduce to a pulp in a blender, put in the oven (low heat, 200 degrees) until it’s dry enough to smoke.” Yes, The Barb was suggesting that people get high off of bananas. “Smoke-in was a success!” the newspaper declared. “Watch this space!” People were indeed watching. A doctor wrote in The New York Times that banana scrapings “provide — if anything — a mild psychedelic experience.” A recipe appeared in William Powell’s The Anarchist Cookbook, and before long, everyone was talking about “banadine,” a supposedly hallucinogenic chemical naturally occurring in bananas. A few weeks later, The New York Times reported that a federal investigation was underway.

But The Barb was full of it. It was a hoax played on the mainstream press and government authorities, who were clumsily watching the newspaper for insights into youth culture and activism. The Barb was the voice of the radical left, galvanizing a generation of activists through its coverage of the Vietnam War, civil rights, and police brutality. They had a different vision for the role of the journalist in turbulent times and saw themselves as “an unabashed alternative to the conformist mainstream press.” The founder and publisher, Max Scherr eschewed the model of journalist as objective vessel for facts. “Impartial journalism” was a shill for the status quo that kept America at war and minorities and the poor oppressed. The Barb staff were “active participants,” and the newspaper frequently issued calls to protest.

As Todd Gitlin wrote in The Sixties, during The Barb’s heyday, Berkeley was “a cafe cluttered college town … big enough for urban ailments, small enough to imagine transformed.” The city had long been home to anti-war demonstrations, civil rights sit-ins, radical radio stations, free clinics and schools, and collectives — “all the possible hybrids, to feed any utopian vision imaginable.”