Almost Heaven, West Virginia: Food, Farming, and Utopian Dreams at New Vrindaban

In 1968, two years after A. C. Bhaktivedanta Prabhupada founded the Hare Krishna Movement, four of his followers set out for Moundsville, West Virginia, to establish New Vrindaban as an ideal, Vedic society organized around devotion to the Hindu deity Krishna. Bhaktivedanta and his devotees envisioned a self-sufficient agrarian society whose food and farming practices would be governed by devotional ritual practice. New Vrindaban was conceived as an experiment in creating a Vedic society in response to the perceived ills of the modern world. This experiment took place through a cultural critique instantiated by experimenting with alternate forms of social and material relations. Today New Vrindaban is a small but thriving community, and devotees still endeavor to achieve Bhaktivedanta’s idealized Vedic society through food and farming. This article explores the role of food and farming in the International Society of Krishna Consciousness’s Vedic utopia and the extent to which New Vrindaban has realized its utopian ideals.