California Cuisine and Just Food
Publication Year: 2012
Published by: The MIT Press
Cover
Title Page, Copyright
Contents
Series Foreword
Download PDF (59.5 KB)
pp. ix-
I am pleased to present the ninth book in the Food, Health, and the Environment series. This series explores the global and local dimensions of food systems and examines issues of access, justice, and environmental and community well-being. It includes books that focus on the way food...
Foreword
Download PDF (91.9 KB)
pp. xi-xiv
California Cuisine and Just Food takes a deep and comprehensive look at past and new efforts to bring tastier, healthier, locally grown, and ethically produced food to San Francisco Bay Area eaters, poor and rich. The story is inspiring. The authors of this collectively written account...
Acknowledgments
Download PDF (88.7 KB)
pp. xv-xvii
Even six authors are apparently not enough — we have required a lot of help. In our more than ten years of working on this book, we have had time to impose on a lot of folks’ generosity. Hundreds of people have shared their experiences, insights, opinions, and perspectives in...
1. Celebrating a Community?
Download PDF (171.8 KB)
pp. 1-10
The sun shines through second-story windows at the Ferry Building, illuminating San Francisco’s historic transit hub, now transformed into the kind of foodie paradise many people associate with the San Francisco Bay Area (figure 1.1). It is October 2007, and a twenty-fifth anniversary...
Part I. Making A Place for Just Food
Our analysis of the possibilities for a just and sustainable food system focuses on the San Francisco Bay Area over a relatively long period of time. The Bay Area is geographically small, but it has an outsized reputation on issues of food. While it is frequently chided for its precious food obsessions, those preoccupations...
2. Framing Alternative Food
Download PDF (135.4 KB)
pp. 13-33
Both the evolution of the alternative food district and our analysis of it occur in close relationship to a broader discussion that has been taking place, more or less simultaneously, across the nation. Because both the exchange of ideas and the process of continuing dialogue are important to our district, this chapter...
3. California Agriculture and Conventional Food
Download PDF (699.2 KB)
pp. 35-67
Why alternative food? Alternative to what? This chapter describes the conventional side of the food system. The basic story is broadly familiar, and we do not reiterate the abundant literature. Instead we focus on background relevant to our arguments about alternative food. Because we define...
4. The Discontents
Download PDF (187.0 KB)
pp. 69-87
For more than half a century before what we describe as an alternative food district began to take shape, people were challenging — in very different ways and venues — the conventional food system as it emerged. Here we address four strands of criticism in roughly chronological order. The first was raised by...
Part II. Waves of Innovation in the Bay Area Alternative Food Community
If we are correct in asserting that an alternative food district is operating in the Bay Area, we should be able to locate activists, entrepreneurs, consumers, and producers who are developing new relationships, institutions, and innovations that have resulted in higher expectations for food quality. Part II explores...
5. A Civic Culture of Parks, Planning, and Land Protection
Download PDF (254.9 KB)
pp. 91-105
Although many innovative industrial regions do not require a land base, a food district probably does. The Bay Area’s experience in land protection, dating back more than a hundred years, anchors the district both symbolically and more concretely in possibilities for creative food production and processing....
6. Radical Regional Cuisine
Download PDF (321.0 KB)
pp. 107-133
Solving the distribution problems for fresh, local, sustainably grown produce created the face-to-face interactions that comprise the foundation of the Bay Area’s alternative food district. Innovations at the junction of two fairly distinct Bay Area food cultures gave the early district both momentum...
7. Maturing the District
Download PDF (275.0 KB)
pp. 135-174
In the Bay Area, the conversation about what it meant to produce and eat good food did not remain narrow for long. It rapidly became contentious and complex. New sectors — dairy and beef — joined the alternative enterprise, and new buyers, particularly schools and hospitals, emerged. As these businesses and...
8. Food Democracy and Innovation
Download PDF (297.8 KB)
pp. 175-222
Given the district’s history of radical food politics and food-based political organizing, justice issues were surprisingly unformed and inconsistently pursued during the 1990s. That began to change early in the new century. Expressed geographically, one could say that the center of district innovation has moved...
9. Conclusion: The District and the Future of Alternative Food
Download PDF (128.8 KB)
pp. 223-233
An alternative food district continues to evolve in the Bay Area — expanding, thickening, and incorporating new institutions and new understandings of food and food quality. Although it is anchored, both symbolically and concretely, in a regional base of protected land, the district is not just a particular geography...
Notes
Download PDF (215.3 KB)
pp. 235-280
Bibliography
Download PDF (324.3 KB)
pp. 281-338
Index
Download PDF (127.1 KB)
pp. 339-354
E-ISBN-13: 9780262305853
Print-ISBN-13: 9780262517867
Page Count: 376
Publication Year: 2012
Series Title: Food, Health, and the Environment
