California Cuisine and Just Food

by Sally K. Fairfax, Louise Nelson Dyble, Greig Tor Guthey

An account of the shift in focus to access and fairness among San Francisco Bay Area alternative food activists and advocates. Can a celebrity chef find common ground with an urban community organizer? Can a maker of organic cheese and a farm worker share an agenda for improving America's food? In the San Francisco Bay area, unexpected alliances signal the widening concerns of diverse alternative food proponents. What began as niche preoccupations with parks, the environment, food aesthetics, and taste has become a broader and more integrated effort to achieve food agricultural sustainability, access for all to good food, fairness for workers and producers, and public health. This book maps that evolution in northern California. The authors show that progress toward food democracy in the Bay area has been innovators have built on familiar yet quite radical understandings of regional cuisine to generate new, broadly shared expectations about food quality, and activists have targeted the problems that the conventional food system creates. But, they caution despite the Bay Area's favorable climate, progressive politics, and food culture many challenges remain.

Genres: Food

354 pages, Paperback

First published October 5, 2012

About the author

Sally K. Fairfax is Henry J. Vaux Distinguished Professor Emerita in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at the University of California, Berkeley.

Reviews

[Michelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book is useful for those looking to work for food justice. It provides histories for many organizations from the Bay Area in California centered on food justice issues. Looking into the histories of these organizations and programs could help others tackle these issues. It can be a bit dry sometimes (especially if you're not that interested in the topic), but it is very comprehensive. The tone is more or less unbiased (except for the call to action conclusion), as it simply details the progress of the food movement in California.

[Christy M · Rating 5 out of 5]

The MIT press always manages to crank out some quality works from insightful collaborators. This piece was no disappointment. Insights into the food revolutions as they boil up into contemporary society were well synthesized betwixt all aspects of the supply chain and social justice movements. I highly recommend this book to any environmentalist, activist, economist, or even farmer.