Dead Cookbook Reveals Fans’ Food Cravings

The first Grateful Dead concert was 30 years ago, and within months the group’s fans were wearing buttons reading “Good Old Grateful Dead.”

Last week, guitarist Jerry Garcia’s death from a heart attack marked the end of an era for “Deadheads” across the country.

Someone outside the scene may find the Deadheads’ unlimited devotion hard to understand. It’s a way of life, they explain.

Of course, that means it’s also a way of eating, as shown by Ellen Zipern’s “Cooking With the Dead” (St. Martin’s).

The author, a Deadhead with a journalism degree, spent a year going to Dead concerts and getting to know the people who sell snacks of, by and for Deadheads in the concert parking lots. Every recipe comes with a profile of the food seller, so the book is a sociological document as well as a cookbook.

Cookbook may not be quite the word; since Deadheads gravitate to far-edge health-food theories, there’s a lot of “fireless cuisine” here, such as the “wheel-of-creation-spiral-vegan-organic-no-electricity” pizzas made from raw, sprouted wheat berries by someone known as Harvest Earth Heart.

The recipes - mostly funky vegetarian snacks, often with mystical or health claims - will appeal strongly to some people and utterly repel others.

If you’re looking this book over, bear in mind that Deadheads evidently use the word fat (or even fatty) as a term of approval, not of nutritional content.