California Cuisine and Just Food

7. Maturing the District

7 Maturing the District 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 related institutions thickened the district, others expanded and began operating in multiple locations. Through this process, many of the distinctions between urban and rural values and priorities eroded. Alternative processors—artisanal cheesemakers and cheesemongers among them—worked specifically to build and knit together the district. Producers increasingly started identifying themselves collectively and in association with a particular geography in the style of a European appellation. The district itself became more recognizable to news media, consumers, and government officials. Protecting farmers on the land remained a priority for the new generation of alternative food advocates, but their efforts were shaped less by early environmentalism than by intensifying health concerns. As the conventional dairy industry deployed the engineered hormone rBGH to increase milk yields, Straus Dairy went in a different direction, gaining organic certification and opening an organic creamery.1 Nearby, several generations of alternative beef producers struggled to get their synthetic hormone, antibiotic-free, and, later, grassfed product to market. These new products made healthier, sustainably raised milk and beef available to growing numbers of prosperous consumers. We tell that story in the first part of this chapter. Our narrative is less serene than its pastoral setting might imply. For example, a growing oyster sector subject to stringent state health regulation repeatedly challenged dairymen on water quality issues. More broadly, scaling up 136 Chapter 7 became highly controversial across the alternative sector. As businesses grew, their connections to land, markets, and district norms changed. Some businesses grew by partnering with neighbors, creating space for smaller operators to start without having to do everything simultaneously . Some evidence suggests that the scaling-up process improved opportunities for workers, but alternative food was not definitively on the side of equity and justice. Renewed controversy about the shorthandled hoe—and some organic growers’ defense of it—suggested the opposite: that organic producers were not so different from their conventional counterparts. Scaling up exposed and complicated the question of the relationship between alternative food and justice, and debates over how much growth, and what kind of growth, were consistent with alternative norms and values became common. One perspective considered even small expansion as a fall from grace and branded scaled-up enterprises “industrial organic.”2 Fundamental issues about the meaning of alternative food swirled in charges and countercharges large and small. Within the district , Bill Niman’s Niman Ranch, once a celebrated local alternative beef producer, ran into push-back. As Niman became involved in a national market, he ran afoul of district values prioritizing small-scale, artisanal, and local in preference to expanding operations in order to increase access to meat raised without antibiotics or synthetic hormones. Straus encountered controversy over amended organic pasture rules that were intended to curtail the industrial producers but seemed to ignore climatic differences and prioritize happy cows over increasing the availability of organic milk. Our second topic takes place somewhat removed from both public view and many of the personal relationships formed in the early days of the district. Institutional buyers—hospitals and schools particularly— became leaders in nutrition, food, and health education. Kaiser Oakland and Chez Panisse addressed issues of scale from two very different perspectives . Kaiser Oakland and Healthcare Without Harm, two institutions not generally associated with alternative food activism, together promoted connections between institutional food buyers and alternative producers. Just as restaurants had in earlier days, large buyers needed guidance to connect with alternative producers. Programs linking the two addressed the distribution mismatches and introduced a new array of Maturing the District 137 possibilities for small-scale producers to participate in new and largerscale markets. Farm-to-school programs for linking those sellers to schools were first piloted in in the late 1990s and have become important throughout the nation. The school lunch took on a particularly high profile in the district in 1994 when Alice Waters began to connect her interests in cooking, sharing, and education to growing concern with health at the Edible School Yard kitchen and gardening project at a Berkeley middle school. Finally, we turn to three programs that express some of the ambiguities about justice goals...