California Cuisine and Just Food

2. Framing Alternative Food

2 Framing Alternative Food 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 puts California Cuisine and Just Food into the context of what is frequently called “the food literature.” That literature did not exist until the 1970s. Prior to that point, most of what we now think of as food and food systems was typically thought about and labeled as “agriculture.” Both mainstream and reform discussions of food were dominated by attention to production economics and agricultural technique. It was difficult to discuss food the way we do today for the simple reason that food was hard to envision very much beyond cookbooks .1 As the more complex idea of food systems became recognizable, discussions expanded to include a fuller picture of the activities involved in feeding a population: cultivation, harvest, processing, packaging, transport, marketing, sale, and consumption, plus disposal of food and food-related items, and, in addition, the labor, financing, and inputs needed and outputs generated in each of those processes. Until recently equity remained ancillary to the conversation, addressed episodically but only occasionally with sustained intensity. For most of the twentieth century, equity was discussed in the farm-centric context of agricultural labor.2 Topics now loosely addressed as food security, which turn on access for all to safe, nutritious food, were subsumed into analysis of the problems created by overproduction and agricultural surpluses. The international concept of food sovereignty, which includes an individual right to food and a community right to control its own food system, adds an element of self-determination to questions of food 14 Chapter 2 access; but it has only recently begun to shape the U.S. conversation about food. Perhaps because the early academic discussion of food was so narrowly focused, popular books, newspapers and magazines, and, more recently, blogs, videos gone viral, and feature films, have played an important role in leading the contemporary food conversation. Indeed, the line between academic and trade books has largely eroded in the food literature. Many trade books about food are analytically sophisticated and data rich, and several academics have written best-sellers. That is not unique, but neither is it common, and it may have contributed to the broad array of perspectives on food that is gaining traction as essential to the conversation about the future of the U.S. food system. Food Systems: An Intersection of Scholarly and Popular Debate Food systems were not discussed until recently because they were not generally visible. Allen (1993) points out that a focus on farm-related issues largely marginalized the analysis of the social impacts and dynamics of food production, distribution, and consumption. Even when social analysts were involved, a narrow cohort of politically powerful agricultural economists dominated, limiting the range of permissible topics.3 Academics learned “the dangers of challenging the hegemony of production agriculture and its intellectual articulators, the agricultural economists .”4 For a long time, it was difficult to put together a viable academic career outside a restricted range of technical and economic issues. It is not surprising, then, that several of the most influential early discussions about food and food systems started outside the academy. Many of the innovators discussed in part II mention two best-selling authors—Rachel Carson and Francis Moore Lappé—as critical to their own values. Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) compiled data regarding the environmental and health consequences of conventional agriculture’s growing reliance on pesticides. Many consider it to have been the opening salvo of the environmental movement. Although the initial response to her work focused on the impact of pesticides on wildlife and ecosystems, Carson’s analysis also exposed the disturbing public health consequences of intensifying agricultural production methods. Framing Alternative Food 15 Lappé’s Diet for a Small Planet (1971) appeared in the context of a deepening conversation about agricultural intensification, efficiency, and protein. First, the 1967 Report of the President’s Science Advisory Committee , The World Food Problem, reviewed global crop failures and concluded that “the scale, severity and duration of the world food problem are so great that a massive, long-range effort unprecedented in human history will be required to master it.”5 Promoting...