The dark ages

In a second-hand bookshop in Hay-on-Wye last month, on a damp day when time had stopped, I was rootling around the cooking and gardening sections, when a purple arty-farty cover on a slim book caught my eye: The Hippie Cookbook. That's worth £1.50, I thought, and soon I was home consulting the seminal work, published in 1970 by flower children, for flower children.

The Hippie Cookbook does not merely cover recipes, but the surrounding lifestyle, which 37 years on is coming back with a vengeance. All our organic, anti-giant foodcorp, anti-pesticide, anti-global warming ideas sit perfectly with the original Save the Earth ethos. The hippies' counterculture has become mainstream government-approved culture now. It's just that the dudes back then had much more fun.

"Any decent hippie knows that the establishment does weird things to their food, and since most grocers are over 30, the first step in good hippie cooking is to plant a vegetable garden? Plough your furrows unevenly, and use some imagination with weeds and free-form. This will confuse the golphers." I presume "golphers" are nibbling critters, but maybe they're hard-driving capitalists.

As a troubled allotmenteer, I like the hippies' relaxed attitude to weeds. Yet deeper in the volume there's an even better suggestion for flat-dwellers without gardens: truck farming. On the roof of your VW camper or truck flatbed, you build a large wooden box and fill it with "good black dirt and chicken coop scrapings" for fertiliser. You then have a portagarden. (Inspired, I shall be filling the Thule storage box on the roof of our people carrier with soil, and growing leeks at 70mph. Dig Mother Earth!)

"Select plants that have high wind resistance, like wheat," cautions the book, also suggesting that you park your truck whenever possible in the sun. If rain is not available, they suggest you go to the car wash for irrigation.

I know, it's thrilling, and we haven't even got to the cooking. Which is, of course, done naked whenever possible, even in winter. "Nude cooking is always quicker in cold weather," the hippies advise, while warning of the dangers of splashback from bacon and chips. While nude cooking maintains interest in the chef and is "good for your head", plastic is bad for your head and all Tupperware should be thrown away and replaced by secondhand china.

The ingredients, while tending to the vegetarian, are quite conventional, but the recipe techniques and titles are not: Piston Lickin' Chicken is cooked strapped in foil to your car engine as you take a road trip. Then there's Peace Symbol Pie, Seven Planet Salad, Moratorium March Muffins for demos, Good Karma Casserole and Psychedelic Hamburgers shaped like zodiac signs. The zodiac is of culinary significance. You should rinse brown rice twice normally, but three times if you are a Scorpio or Virgo.

I particularly liked a plan to create a jelly in jiggling psychedelic colours, and shine a flashing light through it as one listens to acid rock. Drugs are not discussed, for legal reasons, but they are the great unmentioned extra ingredient. Hence the recipes for dealing with "the munchies", including Munchie no 1 Electric Cider.

Alongside the silliness, the hippies' instincts are often right. On renewable fuels, for instance, they advise you to go to the dump and pick up an old wood-burning stove, since gas and electric cookers "inhibit growth of groovy vibrations in good healthy food. Also shop around for other groovy things like old mattresses (for the commune)."

Ah yes, communes. With smelly old used mattresses. Well, surely communal living is the next step for modern organic folk? The businesswoman who set up Britain's first organic pub, the Duke of Cambridge in London, was raised in a funky commune in the Midlands and took the communal grow-your-own ideas with her. All those green gurus, those Sloane Organics, Daylesford Organics and Sheherazade Goldsmith types need a Utopian community to get down and dirty in, for the present pious Earth People are missing the loony spiritual and sexual aspect that made it all more amusing.

Indeed, in our call for greens to become more groovesome, we should use the dinner table for consciousness-raising about subjects other than food. Brothers and sisters, what with house prices hitting the roof, property is a bad trip, and communal living is the way forward. We need to dump the materialist bag, the barbecues in suburbia bag, the 60-hour-week bag, the two-week holiday bag, and all move in together. Ooh, feel that Utopian urge. Tie-dye something. Get a toe ring. Crank up that bicycle-powered iPod. Cue the Age of Aquarius music. Are you on my astral plane yet?