California Cuisine and Just Food

6. Radical Regional Cuisine

6 Radical Regional Cuisine 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 and a recognizable name: California cuisine. Preoccupation with food defines the first critical culture, and it began in the ethnic diversity of the Gold Rush. No matter how enamored they have become of Big Macs and soda, Americans have never totally ignored the tastes and pleasures of food, and particularly its importance in families and communities. Those factors never seriously eroded in San Francisco. Reasserting them as an appropriate focus of conversation and national social, economic, and political concern may be the district’s singular contribution.1 The second element, now less familiar, is the residue of Bay Area food politics of the 1960s and 1970s. A network of frequently quite radical food processors and distributors—worker-owned co-ops, particularly bakeries, collectives, and buying clubs (occasionally known as food conspiracies)—provided the first distribution networks for alternative growers, and the survivors remain important.2 Those food and political cultures intersected in high-end restaurants and at farmers’ markets and led to a distinctive, politically engaged, regional cuisine. Briefly, as Reagan -era prosperity and then the dot.com boom unfolded, preoccupation with taste threatened to overwhelm progressive politics. Nonetheless, alternative producers’ interactions with discerning chefs and environmentally oriented consumers redirected expectations from food aesthetics to environmental sustainability. 108 Chapter 6 Both radical politics and food quality preoccupations are closely identified with Berkeley, California. Two downtown blocks, more or less, of Berkeley’s Shattuck Avenue are frequently described as the Gourmet Ghetto. It has been frequently parodied as precious and overpriced , and with some justification. It is not accurate, however, to describe its priorities as simply displays of either wealth or connoisseurship . Regional cuisine in the district developed as simultaneously radical and haute and became, we argue, a critical proving ground for developing alternatives to the increasingly toxic conventional system. What we characterize as radical regional cuisine became imaginable as the alternative producers described in chapter 5 sought markets for their new products. We have been repeatedly told that it is hard to grow good food. Driving it around, explaining it, marketing it, and managing wholesale accounts are also difficult and require a particular skill set, or several of them. As in the coastal pastures, then, something more permanent was required. The solutions began to emerge in two settings that continue to be important in the district: quality-defined restaurants and farmers’ markets. The Political Roots of Radical Regional Cuisine Baby Boomers in the 1960s and 1970s The left politics of the Depression cooled during the McCarthy excesses of the Eisenhower years, but the baby boomers who reached college age in the 1960s pursued diverse social reform agendas.Their efforts included elements of the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the environmental movement, the antiwar movement, and farm workers’ unionizing efforts. Period discussions of a generation gap reflected younger Americans’—particularly the privileged ones—discomfort with the prevailing culture and their experiments with communal and cooperative living, drugs, free love, and peace. In the district, that played out in a context shaped by the hippies, the free speech movement (FSM),3 the Diggers, and the Black Panthers. The reformers ranged from well-intended and sweetly naive to seriously revolutionary and occasionally intended to be or were accidentally violent. The Bay Area was less convulsed by the race riots that gripped other major urban areas in the 1960s, and the turmoil in our district is Radical Regional Cuisine 109 still typically glossed by reference to Bezerkeley, the free speech movement ,4 and the Summer of Love (1967–1968), a global phenomenon that drew thousands of young adults to the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco. Food values and institutions were surprisingly important in the antiestablishment chorus of the decade. The San Francisco Diggers and the Black Panthers The Diggers and the Black Panthers defined what was then seen as an extreme end of the food-relevant spectrum. Patterned on a seventeenthcentury Protestant agrarian community led by British radical Gerrard Winstanley, the Diggers pursued a radical agenda with street theater, art “happenings,” and occasional direct action. Digger challenges to capitalism included the Free Store (Trip Without a Ticket) where everything...