Andrew Barton remembers the cheddar bagel at Humble Bagel with unusual specificity. The now-defunct shop sat on the corner of the Sundance building on 24th and Hilyard, where Happy Cow is today. South Eugene High School students would slam the shop for an affordable after-school snack.
But it was that cheddar bagel — a yellowish-orange, possibly flavored with turmeric, studded with dried herbs — that stuck with him. Barton always ordered it with sundried tomato cream cheese.
“It felt very hippie food adjacent,” Barton says over the phone from Portland, where he lives now. The bagels had “this perfect dance of the boiled exterior texture with a blush of golden brown from the bake.” Humble Bagel closed in 2019 after 42 years. Other recognizable names to the Eugene food scene, like Keystone Café and Pizza Research Institute, have closed their doors, too.
For Barton, who grew up in Eugene and graduated from South Eugene in 2006, these places weren’t just restaurants — they were part of a larger food culture he couldn’t quite name. Not fusion, not rooted in centuries of tradition, but its own thing. Hearty vegetarian food with global influences, heavy on the nutritional yeast, unapologetically earnest.
He’s affectionately nicknamed it “hippie food,” and it’s the subject of his most recent book, Free Food, which came out in December 2024. With his third title, he’s mastered the art of the self-published author. Design, editing, printing and fulfillment are all done by Barton out of his small press company, Two Plum.
The self-publishing approach isn’t just logistics; it’s integral to the book’s ethos. “Carve your own path, create the beautiful world you want to live in,” Barton says. “That’s sort of the spirit of it.”
Free Food is part culinary memoir, part cookbook, organized around vegetables grouped by texture and cooking style rather than strict seasonality. There are short essays woven between recipes — contributions from Barton’s friends who grew up with the same Eugene cuisine — that recall specific memories of the food or add encouraging instructional notes.
The idea for a book dedicated to the “hippie food” movement that captured hearts and stomachs throughout Eugene came from releasing his first culinary book, The Long Loaf. The “bread book,” as Barton calls it, resonated with readers for its slim format and conversational tone.
“A lot of baking books are very didactic and exacting,” Barton says. “My goal was to be sort of free and loose.”
He’d read Jonathan Kauffman’s book, Hippie Food, which traces the culinary history of health food movements, macrobiotic diets and a brown rice obsession from the 1960s forward. (Kauffman wrote the introduction to Free Food.) While Kauffman’s book is history, Barton wanted to write something for today. He wanted “the book that’s actually for use, for making dinner on a weeknight.”
Barton also saw a gap in the market for contemporary vegetarian cookbooks. “We were at this moment, culinarily, where it was either maximalist, like bacon-wrapped burgers or eating air and plants,” he says. Nothing in between. Nothing like the substantial and nourishing food he grew up eating in Eugene.
Nicole Lavelle, who contributed an essay to Free Food, encountered the Eugene food culture for the first time when she moved to Eugene in the early 2000s. She’d never thought about organic food before. But what struck her about Eugene wasn’t just that the food was organic or vegetarian — it was the specific character.
“The dumpstered loaf of bread, the gleaned street apple… and the expensive cheese from Sundance,” Lavelle says over the phone from her home in Northern California. “It’s a mix that includes a sort of unpretentiousness.” She describes it as having a “funky edge” with accessibility baked into the approach. “Food Not Bombs energy,” she calls it, comparing it to the Bay Area now, where a comparable sandwich might cost $22.
For Barton, the recipe from Free Food that best encapsulates the approachable nutrition at the core of the cuisine is the savory vegetable pie. Not quite a quiche, it’s held together by onions, sour cream and nutritional yeast. His mom started making them when he became a vegetarian as a teenager. “That was like a huge step forward in me being delighted by the possibilities of quality vegetarian food,” he says.
He admits that it’s “super uncool food,” knowing that some might be skeptics of the vegetable pie, “but I think it slaps.”
That was the revelation. Jacked-up vegetables, improvised grain bowls — those wholesome foods were actually great. And there was no contemporary book that captured it. Barton wanted to make something for the average home chef that wouldn’t require an $80 shopping trip to Whole Foods and a subscription to a recipe app in order to feel really good about the food one eats.
What he wanted to offer was different: “Boiling, roasting, occasionally pan frying a vegetable, cooking a grain, whisking up a sauce… that could be the best weeknight dinner.” Not definitive instructions, but “a gift of freedom,” he says.
Free Food also chronicles Eugene’s transformation. The city has become “more Portlandified,” as Lavelle puts it — chain restaurants moving in, infamous places closing. But Sundance remains. When Lavelle visited recently, she says she was “almost crying at Sundance… thank god it’s still here.”
Barton feels the same pull back. “It still really feels like home,” he says. Most of his childhood friends have moved back to Eugene, and he visits regularly.
Tsunami Books hosts a release party for Free Food Saturday, Oct 18, and guests are invited to bring potluck dishes and, fittingly, there will be free food to sample. Free Food is available at Sundance, The Kiva, J. Michaels, Tsunami Books or online at TwoPlumPress.com.