In contrast to its wildness on matters of sexuality and the ingestion of exotic chemicals, the Counterculture also had a certain element of repressed, hair shirt-wearing asceticism about it.

Just as business success was often seen as mere crass commercialism (often accompanied by heedless despoilation of the environment), a wide variety of consumer indulgences tended to be viewed as nothing more than tacky, vulgar excess.

Food was very much part of this equation.  And the more colorful and/or convenient a food product was, the more likely it was to be seen as somehow debased and debauched;   while the more difficult it was to obtain or prepare, or the more drab and dull it was in appearance or taste, the more likely it was to be considered virtuous.

Such perceptions were heavily intertwined with the emerging organic and health foods movements.  Some of the results could be strange.

For example, a foodstuff called carob began to be recommended  as a replacement for chocolate.  Carob looks kind of like chocolate, except duller and grayer;   and it has a taste kind of like chocolate, if you were to mix chocolate with, say, moldy cardboard.  Today, carob is known to have just as much fat as chocolate, and therefore to be every bit as bad for you.  All it ever really had going for it was its greater “virtuous drabness.”  But that didn’t stop it from being widely touted by adherents of The Movement.

Chocolate was by no means the only foodstuff to come under such attack.  As Counterculture-based nutritionism came to be more and more overdone, some Americans began to feel they were being told everything was bad for them.

The situation became especially odd regarding the purported evils of dietary salt.  No less an authority than the Journal of the American Medical Association reported itself unable to find reasonable evidence that reducing salt intake would benefit most people.   And the founder of the American Society of Hypertension had this to say:

Is there any proven reason for us to grossly modify our salt intake or systematically avoid table salt? Generally speaking the answer is either a resounding no, or at that, at best, there is not any positive direct evidence to support such recommendations.

Neverthless, the general media continued to go on and on about the need to lower dietary sodium—and an entire U.S. government agency was established to exhort people to consume less of it.