California Cuisine and Just Food

1. Celebrating a Community?

1 Celebrating a Community? 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).1 It is October 2007, and a twenty-fifth anniversary celebration for the nonprofit Pesticide Action Network (PAN), the North American branch of a global federation of sustainable agriculture advocates , is about to begin. Cowgirl Creamery, purveyors of extraordinarily fine cheese, and the Center for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture , the nonprofit manager of the sumptuous Ferry Plaza Farmers Market, held here several times a week, have cosponsored the party. The upper floor of the Ferry Building is frequently leased for weddings and corporate functions; the PAN anniversary gathered an unusual crowd for the site. The first guests to arrive were farmworkers Lidia Sanchez and Victor and Gloria Contreras, who came from the Midwest to join the celebration welcoming PAN’s new executive director, Kathryn Gilje.2 They were soon munching organic appetizers with Karen Heisler, cofounder of San Francisco’s community and sustainability-oriented Mission Pie, and colleagues from the Environmental Protection Agency, where Heisler worked for many years before changing gears. Across the room, Marian Moses, once the personal physician to Cesar Chavez and Dorothy Day, and Consumers Union scientist Michael Hansen join a large contingent of community leaders and high school students from the San Joaquin Valley. The young people are on hand to make a presentation about their work with PAN’s Drift Catcher, a tool they use to collect data on pesticides in the air in their community, the epicenter of California’s conventional agriculture.4 Diverse nonprofit and government partners, colleagues from sustainable business enterprises, 2 Chapter 1 Figure 1.1 Main Hall of the Ferry Building. Originally opened in 1898, the transportation hub was central for more than thirty years during which the only way to enter San Francisco, from the north, west, or east, was by boat. The building is still a ferry hub, but it now has a market on the first floor, offices on the second, and a farmers’ market several days a week in the surrounding plaza (photograph by Elizabeth Fenwick Photography). Celebrating a Community? 3 academics, friends, donors, and family members complete the assemblage . When all are fed, Cowgirl founder and owner Peg Smith raises her glass to toast the diverse company as a group that those in the room have dreamed and worked to build.“You are our community,” the celebrity chef-turned-cheesemaker exalts, “and we are proud to be here.” Smith’s toast frames the central question of this book: Can such a diverse group create a common understanding of alternative food and pursue it as a community? Such an understanding would combine ideas about sustainability and justice with the production of healthy food. Such food would be healthy for the planet and for the people who cultivate, process, and sell it, and it would be accessible to all.5 But does a maker of expensive, artisanal cheese really share priorities with an impoverished migrant farmworker from the Central Valley? What do they have in common? How do the entrepreneurs who create and sell products available in places like the Ferry Plaza envision and build community with food system workers who want safe and dignified working conditions and fair wages? How do global pesticide campaigners work with urban community organizers who regard food as a focus for self-determination and youth empowerment? It is not easy to establish a small, ethical business that must compete with global firms that prioritize profit, or to maintain a nonprofit that challenges the power of conventional agriculture ; nor is it easy to stay centered on a regulatory mission in government agencies that are understaffed, underfunded, and misdirected by politicians in the thrall of agricultural corporations. Mere survival in such difficult environments can be considered a major accomplishment. How could there be energy left over to build connections across diverse missions , resources, and personal priorities? Our analysis of those and related questions proceeds in nine chapters. The first four form an unusually long introduction. Chapter 2 positions this book in the growing popular and academic conversation about food. Readers who can happily get through the day without ever thinking about economic geographer Michael Storper or social theorist Melanie DuPuis might be tempted to skip what scholars...