Abstract
Can a regional food system exist that delivers public health, ecological integrity, prosperity, and justice for low-income consumers and food system workers? Through the story of one region, California Cuisine and Just Food answers in the affirmative. Along the way, and befitting its title, it takes a healthy jab at derisions familiar to those of us working in grittier parts of the country, such as Detroit, about drawing a connection, say, between artisanal cheese and upscale eateries, organic production, and a preoccupation with taste on the one hand, and a concern with justice issues, such as access to healthy food for underserved populations and higher wages and better working conditions for food workers, on the other.
The book documents a nine-county food “district” comprising the Bay Area’s prime agricultural lands as well as its urban core containing neighborhoods isolated by race and poverty. Tracing the influence of scale, proximity, and district practices on the production of new knowledge central to the development of an alternative food system, it credits the region’s unique mix of climate and geography, immigrant skills, cuisines, rootstocks, university support, and entrepreneurial energy.
The district began when a new generation of growers adapted sustainable methods of production and made connections to area chefs and restaurateurs who shared their values and a commitment to quality and taste. Through expansions to schools, hospitals, farmers markets, and other venues, these connections cultivated constituencies across the urban and rural divide, such as urban consumers who supported the protection of working landscapes, and rural producers endorsed higher wages for farm and food workers.
The book also opens a fascinating window into the lives, practices, and commitments of a group of key players in the district called “mavens.” Mavens include names now familiar in national food circles, such as Bill Niman, Alice Waters, Sibella Kraus, Dana Harvey, Brahm Ahmedi, Nikki Henderson, and others, as well as less familiar ones, such as Warren Weber, Albert Straus, Boyd Stewart, Laura Chenel, David Roach, Shakirah Simley, and Anya Fernald. All too often, such stories are given to us by popular media or as case studies of individuals or organizations, isolated from the broader context they helped create collaboratively. These stories are a delightful aspect of the book.
Taking advantage of both a need to make food better as well as the region’s environmentally aware marketplace, mavens created new models of food production, distribution, and consumption. Thus, they exemplify a key theme of the book, namely, that “everybody does better when everybody does better” (26). Mavens clearly put community before (but not to the exclusion of) profit, and demonstrated a willingness to start small, and plough back revenues to build a sustainable regional community rather than private empires.
The book’s content is organized in nine chapters. Following a brief introduction, the second chapter traces the contributions of influential thinkers, such as Rachel Carson, Frances Moore Lappé, Jim Hightower, and Amartya Sen. Here, the book’s conceptual framework—Alfred Marshall’s industrial district—is adapted to explain how relationships between and among actors in a common enterprise lead over time to learning and innovation.
Chapters 3 and 4 trace the growth of the now-global, conventional food system in California and survey early critiques and alternatives. The first account moves from large agribusiness farms—factories in the field serviced by massive amounts of cheap labor and enabled by new technologies and policies—to changing consumer expectations, and the growth of suburban, big-box supermarkets. Criticizing this system for the unhealthy, unjust, and unsustainable food it produces, chapter 4 documents the rise of alternatives. It traces the organic movement galvanized by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, a growing consumer movement, early cooperatives and farmers markets supplied by back-to-the-landers, and farm worker organizing around pesticides and other concerns. This review is bracing for both the resilience of the conventional food system it illustrates but also inspiring for creativity and perseverance of alternatives.
Chapter 5 starts the story of the district with land use planning. A century of civic engagement by Marin County elites in land protection laid the ground for a new coalition of anti-highway and growth control activists, planners, outdoor recreationists, and ranchers who moved from protecting open space to protecting working landscapes. Requiring farms to be seen as resources, these shifts also created new expectations and new institutions. To meet these expectations, farmers searched for new ways to produce food and to connect with urban entrepreneurs and consumers.
Chapters 6 and 7 describe the growth, evolution, and growing pains experienced by the district. Chapter 6 offers a definition of radical regional cuisine to describe a mix of politics and food esthetics emerging in the district. Counterculturalists, radical groups such as the Black Panthers, food cooperatives, and alternative bakeries combining political messaging with environmental sustainability and health education, and chefs were important players. Their politics, along with a growing interest in French and European food, helped create the Gourmet Ghetto in Berkeley. The following chapter discusses the district’s maturing, with the thickening of institutions and the creation of new agendas. Maturation enabled more small operators to take advantage of the new infrastructure and greater public acceptance of environmentally responsible alternatives. Public health concerns also introduced institutional buyers such as schools and hospitals to the system, and surfaced concerns about access for low-income populations to quality food.
Early attempts to scale up alternative food to increase access, however, were not without controversy. For example, Niman Ranch’s efforts to increase the supply of meat produced without antibiotics or synthetic hormones meant linking to feedlot finishing and more distant slaughter facilities. These decisions put Niman at odds with district values that prioritized small-scale, artisanal, and local. Increasing availability and thereby access versus securing price premiums by limiting supply was a key dilemma. Scaling up, however, is essential to fairness for workers, the authors argue.
Chapter 8 zooms in on Oakland to bring justice issues for urban neighborhoods front and center. Issues of access to healthy food for communities of color, their political and economic empowerment, and re-skilling around food and nutrition increasingly challenge the district’s understanding of the qualities of good food. The chapter traces Oakland’s history and its influence on food-related activism—especially the environmental justice movement—which draws attention to racial factors and reasserts the importance of affordability and community development. Urban agriculture and alternative retail activities initially, and food microenterprises and business collaborations and new approaches to labor issues later on, offer concrete approaches to achieving food justice goals. The chapter highlights such institutions as Mandela Farmers Market, City Slicker Farms, People’s Grocery, and the Oakland Food Policy Council, and their travails.
A concluding chapter summarizes the district’s accomplishments and challenges, and outlines priorities for the future. Eschewing the common distinction between market-oriented and political strategies, the authors argue that consumption can influence the food system and be a precursor for policy change as well. They also call for the inclusion of justice criteria—fair wages, career opportunities, community development, nutrition education, and sustainable production and processing practices—in initiatives and urge a greater recognition of the special skills food workers bring to their jobs.
Urban and regional planning appears as a source of solutions in preserving working landscapes in rural areas and in legitimizing and supporting urban agriculture. However, highway and port planning also exacerbated the isolation of Oakland neighborhoods. Mavens also experienced challenges in setting up a food processing and retail infrastructure in close proximity to the locations of production.
One is hard put to find another region that can match the many factors in the creation and evolution of this district. To be sure, other places are taking advantage of their own mix of history and resources to forge exciting alternatives to the conventional food system. However, food justice efforts continue to struggle for resources and policy attention compared to those aimed at relocalizing the food economy or seeking to increase healthy food access by attracting chain supermarkets to inner-city neighborhoods. This is the case in the Bay Area as well, and the authors are clear-eyed about the challenges posed by food justice goals.
Nevertheless, Oakland’s food justice efforts—which are creating their own, separate, place-based linkages in production, processing, and distribution—raise questions about whether or not it is a “district” in its own right and what the theoretical import is of its linkages with the larger, surrounding district. In fact, it is in the attempt to bring Oakland’s efforts within the broader district’s conceptual embrace that the book’s key theme—the possibility of a locally based, just food system—starts to crack. The limitations of the district concept for the book’s goals, and particularly of place in obtaining justice, could have been discussed in greater depth than is the case.
The book’s strength is the case it makes that place-based efforts are important to resolving many of the conventional food system’s problems. Small business, local governments, and civil society all have important roles to create a viable alternative to the conventional system. However, place is insufficient, especially for achieving the many varieties of food justice demanded by affected populations. The willingness of some consumers to pay higher prices and of some producers to commit a greater share of profits to benefit the environment and workers is laudable, but even in the wealthy Bay Area, these commitments only go so far. Broader shifts in the political economy and culture are needed for the system to create political and social empowerment.
In sum, though, the book should be valuable to planners working in communities and regions, and to those concerned with developing locally based, more just alternatives to the industrial food system.