California Cuisine and Just Food

By Sally K. Fairfax, Louise Dyble, Greig Tor Guthey Lauren Gwin, Monica Moore, and Jennifer Sokolove. MIT Press, 2012

For anyone turned queasy by our nation’s conventional food system and the billions of empty calories it pumps into our bodies daily, California Cuisine and Just Foodprovides a refreshing and long overdue tonic. Seamlessly drawing together the research of six scholars, the book examines the radical mix of pleasure and politics that has earned the San Francisco Bay Area its reputation as a gastronomic mecca passionately devoted to food justice.

The book explores the region’s alternative food networks, which have helped to bridge rural and urban communities by bringing farmers, consumers, and chefs together. The book provides a blueprint for anyone interested in cultivating “the extensive pleasures of eating,” a phrase coined by Wendell Berry in 1989 to describe a way of eating that entails “an accurate consciousness of the lives and the world from which food comes.”

As California Cuisine and Just Food shows, the San Francisco Bay Area has been actively cultivating just such “an accurate consciousness” since the 1960s, when a synergy of politics and gastronomy began to gather momentum, giving rise to such anti-establishment groups as the Diggers and the Black Panthers. While the Diggers handed out free food in Golden Gate Park, the Black Panthers started one of the nation’s first school breakfast programs, serving free meals to 10,000 children every day.

During the 1970s, food cooperatives and collectives began to proliferate, offering concerned consumers an alternative to the conventional grocery store. Chefs and farmers created distribution networks that enabled small farms to sell directly to restaurants. These networks expanded in 1977 when California passed legislation allowing farmers to sell directly to consumers, a shift that spurred the expansion of farmers markets into vibrant community spaces.

California Cuisine and Just Food not only provides an invaluable history of California agriculture and the roots of the Bay Area's food justice movement, but also introduces many of the visionary figures who created business models that prioritize sustainability and quality over profits. We meet the Straus family, who brought organic milk and dairy products to the region and, along the way, invented a machine that turns manure into electricity. We also meet the women behind Cowgirl Creamery, who took organic milk from Straus and fashioned it into a line of internationally renowned artisanal cheeses.

Although some Bay Area visionaries eventually succumbed to the profit-driven motives that define the commercial food industry, others have successfully resisted the dangers of unbridled growth. Their resistance draws on the Bay Area's radical roots in order to focus on "building a different kind of system—one in which healthy food is available to all, one that will protect the land and provide farmers and workers a decent living, and one that builds a community in which they themselves would live and want to remain” (30).

This distinctive vision has likewise nourished a new Bay Area generation passionately devoted to food justice. Oakland, in particular, has seen the growth of food initiatives focused on creating a sense of empowerment and self-determination within communities damaged by food apartheid. Since the murder of George Floyd, Oakland organizations such as the East Oakland Collective, Black Earth Farms, Raised Roots, and The People's Breakfast have included Black Lives Matter activists in their community outreach, providing meals to protestors and raising bail funds to aid those arrested.

In many ways, the fact that California has nurtured such political food movements makes logical sense, as it's where the conventional food system first started. Specialty crops, large landholdings, and exploited labor have been a defining part of the California landscape since as far back as the late 1700s when members of the Indigenous communities were first enslaved for use as field labor by Spanish missionaries. In 2020, the oppressive mix of COVID-19, police brutality, and wildfires that ravaged California brought centuries of injustice into stark relief, underscoring the dire need for a healthy, sustainable, and equitable food system—one in which BLM protesters and farm workers are treated and revered as national heroes whose valiant labor and personal sacrifices feed our future.

By teasing out the “connections between the evolving conventional food system and the struggle for civil and human rights in California and U.S. history,” California Cuisine and Just Food not only provides an invaluable history lesson, but also drives home the importance of eating with “an accurate consciousness of the lives and the world from which food comes.”

The review was originally published on Culinate.com and updated in 2020.