California Cuisine and Just Food (Food, Health, and the Environment)
Sally K. Fairfax, Louise Nelson Dyble
Language: English
Pages: 376
ISBN: 0262517868
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Can a celebrity chef find common ground with an urban community organizer? Can a maker of organic cheese and a farm worker share an agenda for improving America's food? In the San Francisco Bay area, unexpected alliances signal the widening concerns of diverse alternative food proponents. What began as niche preoccupations with parks, the environment, food aesthetics, and taste has become a broader and more integrated effort to achieve food democracy: agricultural sustainability, access for all to good food, fairness for workers and producers, and public health. This book maps that evolution in northern California. The authors show that progress toward food democracy in the Bay area has been significant: innovators have built on familiar yet quite radical understandings of regional cuisine to generate new, broadly shared expectations about food quality, and activists have targeted the problems that the conventional food system creates. But, they caution despite the Bay Area's favorable climate, progressive politics, and food culture many challenges remain.
that is impossible in a global system that erases the producer and often alters the product. In addition, local suggests that consumer dollars will remain in and support the local community. However, just how close to home local must be is a tricky question. For example, under what definition can coffee beans that are grown in Tanzania but roasted in the Bay Area be considered local to the Bay Area? Or under what conditions can milk produced in the Bay Area but packaged in bottles from Canada be
which requires Framing Alternative Food 25 importing many products.39 Conversely, diverse adaptations of terroir— roughly, controlled appellations such as Rocquefort, Champagne, and similar efforts to market regionally distinct products—require integrating industrial districts into global commerce. Indulgence and Innovation in an Alternative Food District Our book enters the conversation at this point. We start by admitting that it is more difficult than we anticipated to identify particular
in many circumstances, but the outcome is generally not for want of trying: enormous efforts to adapt the farmers’ market format to poor, particularly African American, communities, have produced limited success. These outcomes are clear signals of gaps in or threats to the common culture of the district. But they also reflect the enormity of the barriers to altering entrenched food system operations, as well as a host of class and race barriers. Modifying the Standard Format We have adapted
reality was quite grim. Owner-operator truckers took on enormous risk and committed themselves to pursuing unpredictable, low-wage work. The conditions were reinforced by an antiunion ethos embedded in growing consumer advocacy. Postwar Agricultural Intensification In the generally prosperous decades following World War II, consolidation, intensification, and integration of the food system proceeded as if on, and then actually on, steroids. Small farms continued to disappear as government
homesteaders A Civic Culture of Parks, Planning, and Land Protection 103 who typically focused on vegetables and fruit, perhaps a few pigs, pot, and chickens. The Stewarts became a mainstay in his education about the meat business, and, for a time the Nimans and Stewarts ran cattle together. Warren Weber had turned his back on all the opportunities afforded by a Berkeley Ph.D. in English and took up a youthful passion for farming. He began operations with five acres and a horse-drawn plow and