California Cuisine and Just Food

Sally Fairfax, Henry J. Vaux Distinguished Professor Emerita, College of Natural Resources, UC Berkeley; Co-author, California Cuisine and Just Food
Sue Conley, Co-founder, Cowgirl Creamery
Nikki Henderson, Executive Director, People's Grocery
Maisie Greenawalt, Vice President of Strategy, Bon Appétit Management Company
Caleb Zigas, Executive Director, La Cocina

This event is sold out.

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 the nation'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 democracy": agricultural sustainability, access for all to good food, fairness for workers and producers, and public health. Our speakers will explain that progress toward food democracy in the Bay Area has been significant: 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 that despite the Bay Area's favorable climate, progressive politics, and food culture, many challenges remain.

Join us for a wine and cheese reception before the program. Cheese courtesy of Cowgirl Creamery.

MLF: Bay Gourmet
Location: SF Club Office
Time: 7:15 p.m. wine and cheese reception, 7:45 p.m. program, 8:45 p.m. book signing
Cost: $20 standard, $8 members, $7 students (with valid ID)
Program Organizer: Cathy Curtis