

Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh enjoying some health food, 1966



You’re more likely to associate vegetarian fare like falafel, hummus and ganja goo balls with the Grateful Dead and their parking-lot partisans than bloody steaks, and for good reason. The cookbook Cooking with the Dead collects “over 65 fabulous kynd [sic] and caring vegetarian recipes prepared with love” that Deadheads came up with to feed themselves and make money on the road. They took that “are you kind?” thing to heart.

But Owsley “Bear” Stanley, the Dead’s visionary soundman and the West Coast’s industrious LSD manufacturer, had some peculiar ideas about nutrition that might not have been welcome in the latter-day Deadheads’ tailgate scene. When the Dead moved down to Los Angeles for a few months in 1966, Owsley found a cheap house for rent in Watts—probably not a hard trick so soon after the riots—where the Dead and their retinue observed Owsley’s zero-carb, zero-fiber diet. From Rolling Stone:

In February 1966, Owsley and the Dead moved to Los Angeles for another series of Acid Tests. Owsley rented a pink stucco house in Watts, next door to a brothel, where they all lived together. For the Dead, the good news was that they now had nothing to do all day but jam. The bad news was that since Owsley was paying the rent, he expected them to adhere to his unconventional ideas and beliefs. He was convinced that human beings were natural carnivores, not meant to eat vegetables or fiber. “Roughage is the worst thing you can put through your body,” he says. “Letting vegetable matter go through a carnivorous intestine scratches it up and scars it and causes mucus that interferes with nutrition.” For the next six weeks, the Grateful Dead and their girlfriends ate meat and milk for breakfast, lunch and dinner. “I’ll never forget that when you’d open the refrigerator, there were big slabs of beef in there,” Rosie McGee, Phil Lesh’s girlfriend at the time, later told Garcia biographer Jackson. “The shelves weren’t even in there — just these big hunks of meat. So of course behind his back, people were sneaking candy bars in. There were no greens or anything — he called it ‘rabbit food.’”





Owsley Stanley and Jerry Garcia, 1969



“Who’d have guessed that health nut would kick early,” a friend’s father observed when Jerry went to meet his reward in ‘95. As a vegetarian, I’d love to be able to tell you that Owsley’s diet ruined his body, but it appears to have served him pretty well—although I tend to doubt his claim that meatatarianism helped him beat throat cancer, “starving the tumor of glucose.” In the end, it wasn’t the big C that got Owsley, but a car crash in Australia at the age of 76.

If you’re interested in this crackpot diet, the blog Zero Carb Zen reprints some of Owsley’s 2006 comments from a low-carb forum. I’ll stick with my bulk mung beans, thanks.

I have been eating the natural human dietary regime for over 47 years now. I do not eat anything whatsoever from vegetable sources. The only things veggie I use are spices. My diet is usually 60% fat and 40% protein by calories. I used to eat 80% fat and 20% protein when younger, and about twice as much quantity of meat also, but that seems too much energy at my age – which is 71 – even though I am very active. I think the body actually becomes more efficient with energy as you age, but I have no way of proving it true. Otherwise, my body today is very like it was at the age of 30. I figure most of what we call ‘aging’ is due to insulin damage to the collagen and other body structures. No carbs = no insulin. I don’t heal quite as fast when injured as I did as a youngster, however. But I have few wrinkles, and my skin is still strong and elastic.

Below, join Tom Davis and Jerry Garcia in the kitchen for “Cooking with Jerry,” from the Grateful Dead’s Ticket to New Year’s DVD. (Alas, Davis’ gag in which Jerry gazes longingly upon a plastic baggie filled with white powder has been edited out.)

