California Cuisine and Just Food

Can a celebrity chef find common ground with an urban community organizer? Can amaker of organic cheese and a farm worker share an agenda for improving America's food? In the SanFrancisco Bay area, unexpected alliances signal the widening concerns of diverse alternative foodproponents. What began as niche preoccupations with parks, the environment, food aesthetics, andtaste has become a broader and more integrated effort to achieve food democracy: agriculturalsustainability, 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 fooddemocracy in the Bay area has been significant: innovators have built on familiar yet quite radicalunderstandings 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, theycaution despite the Bay Area's favorable climate, progressive politics, and food culture manychallenges remain.

The hardcover edition does not include a dust jacket.