The influence of DIY punk in food
In the 1970s, the Do-It-Yourself movement was far more than just a practical way to fix things on your own or save money. It was an expression of an attitude that stood against consumer society, mass production, and standardized lifestyles. While punks in music pressed their own records and duplicated fanzines, a very similar current emerged in the realm of food — a subculture that no longer saw eating merely as consumption, but as cultural and political expression.
One can picture people sitting together in shared apartments, collecting recipes and typing or duplicating cookbooks by hand. Instead of accepting supermarket goods, many began growing their own vegetables, baking their own bread, and reviving preservation techniques such as canning or fermenting. Much of this was inspired by the counterculture movement, which opened natural food stores and popularized alternative diets — vegetarian, macrobiotic, or whole food.
Amid this DIY subculture, a new food ethic emerged: food should not be anonymous, but communal and conscious. People experimented with self-sufficiency, foraged for wild herbs, founded food collectives, and cooked together in squatted houses or at festivals. Every dish became a small political statement: against industrial food production, against excessive packaging, against the idea that food was merely a commodity.
This DIY understanding was more than mere practice — it was a draft for the future. The idea that by making your own food you could change not only your body but also society gave the movement an almost utopian energy. A subculture formed in which the cutting board became as much a tool of resistance as the guitar in punk. And so the song goes on…
The kitchen wasn’t just a place to cook. It was a lab for self-empowerment, a back-alley print shop in spirit, a stage for resistance. On the table, next to jars of pickles and fresh loaves, lay a handful of stapled zines — rough, jagged, hand-scrawled. Food zines. Recipes smashed together with cut-out headlines, drawings of carrots with clenched fists, notes on how to ferment cabbage or bake bread without a cent to spare.
“Bread rising in the dark / jars lined like soldiers / ink bleeding on the page / we feed ourselves, we feed the future.”
In the States, the Food Conspiracies had sprung up — radical buying clubs, kitchen collectives. They printed their own zines, spreading the gospel: how to cut out the middleman, where to score organic vegetables cheap, how to make soy milk in a battered pot. They weren’t cookbooks, they were manifestos. DIY ethics in every line: no gatekeepers, no glossy covers, no corporate stamp. Just knowledge passed hand to hand, free as breath.
“Do it yourself — do it loud, do it raw. / Recipes are riffs, soup pots are amplifiers. / We don’t swallow their system — we cook our own noise.”
Across the Atlantic, in German squats and communes, the same beat was playing. Mimeographed sheets titled Revolutionsküche floated around — collective kitchen blueprints scribbled in ink and sweat. Someone had scrawled Patti Smith lyrics in the margins of a lentil stew recipe, as if music and food were born from the same fire.
That was the pulse: Do It Yourself didn’t mean lonely hands, it meant collective hands. If something was needed, you made it. If a meal was cooked, it fed everyone. A loaf of bread was a strike against the system. A food zine was as sharp as a punk flyer.
