Black, White, and Green: Farmers Markets, Race, and the Green Economy

3. The Taste of Place

35 Chapter three The Taste of Place [The Berkeley Farmers Markets have] a great sixties community feel; after all, hippies started it all! —lujranne drager, Berkeley Farmers Market customer,   quoted on http://www.localharvest.org In the late 1960s [the Black Panthers] had this brilliant analysis around the intersection of poverty, malnutrition and institutional racism. They wanted to liberate Black communities, and they knew that providing food for young people was key. —bryant terry, West Oakland food justice activist, chef,   and author of Grub: Ideas from an Urban Organic Kitchen On April 13, 1969, a group of student and community activists met at a collective house half a block from Berkeley’s campus and proposed to create a “user developed community park” (Copeland 1969). Six days later, Stew Albert, who along with Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin had founded the Yippies (Youth International Party), put out a call in the local Berkeley Barb for “one and all to bring building materials to the lot so they could build a community park” (Brenneman 2004). The next morning, between one hundred and two hundred volunteers arrived and removed the asphalt (ibid). Over the next four weeks, thousands of volunteers spent their days planting trees, vegetables, and flowers, listening to music, sharing food, and talking politics (Wittmeyer 2004). They named it People’s Park in recognition of its populist roots. Noted food historian Warren Belasco (1993) describes People’s Park as an important site at which the activism and counterculture of the 1960s inspired new ways of thinking about the production and consumption of food, creating what he calls a countercuisine. The park’s creation is one of several moments in Bay Area countercultural history cited by Berkeley farmers market supporters such as Lujranne Drager, whose words introduce this chapter, as important predecessors of their activities. Other predecessors include the San Francisco 36 • chapter three Diggers, an anarchist, direct action street theater collective of the 1960s; the back-­ to-­ the-­ land movement of the 1970s; and Chez Panisse, founded in 1971. At the North Berkeley market, however, the populist roots of these events are tempered by the neighborhood’s upscale bohemian atmosphere, which is reflected by Chez Panisse’s development. The predominantly white counterculture was not the only group linking food and politics in the 1960s. In January of 1969, four months prior to the founding of People’s Park, eleven children received free breakfast at West Oakland’s St. Augustine’s Church. This simple act launched the Free Breakfast for School Children program of the Black Panther Party (bpp). Along with the bpp’s other survival programs, the breakfast program aimed to meet basic needs while illuminating the failures of the state to do so. It was among the bpp’s most popular initiatives. “We began with 11 youngsters the first day (a Monday) and by Friday we were serving 135 students,” recalled St. Augustine Pastor Earl Neil (n.d.). By the end of its first year, the bpp had created similar programs in black neighborhoods throughout the country, and its members and volunteers were regularly feeding more than 10,000 children (Black Panther Party, n.d.). According to Neil, “this was the first nationally organized breakfast program in the United States, either in the public or private sector” (Neil n.d.). Indeed, former bpp minister of education Ericka Huggins claims that “the government was so embarrassed by our Free Breakfast Program that it started the national free breakfast program” (quoted in B. Jones 2007). The counterculture that pervaded but was not exclusive to Berkeley in the 1960s gave rise to the desire for local and organic food so integral to farmers markets like North Berkeley (Belasco 1993). Similarly, we can see the roots of its West Oakland counterpart, and food justice activism more broadly, in the Free Breakfast for School Children program. Preventing child hunger may seem a far cry from the local organic produce that both farmers markets favor, but both link food provisioning to community empowerment and self-­ determination. The West Oakland Farmers Market also draws on the neighborhood’s earlier history in which a thriving African American arts district was decimated by urban renewal and divestment. Advocates of local cuisine, and of local economies more generally, often argue that their food and systems of exchange are shaped by the local biogeography and history of the places in which they exist. In short, they often argue that “place matters” (Kloppenburg, Hendrickson, and Stevenson 1996; Barlett 2005). Northern California’s...