Making Slow Food Fast in California Cuisine by Victor W. Geraci (review)

Jeffrey Charles

The Public Historian, Volume 40, Number 1, February 2018, pp. 157-159 (Review)

Published by University of California Press

For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/737495

[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ] must have approved of the statue, since the National Association of Colored Women participated in the unveiling ceremony. Though members supported the statue, their appearance should not signify that they thought the sculpture fully represented the movement. At least in part, the association attended to win respect from women’s organizations that had rarely recognized them in the past. Indeed, in Weber’s suffrage narrative, the pro-suffrage National Association of Colored Women only shows up when she is justifying the three white women on the monument. Rather than offering a critical analysis of the ways the sculpture defines the public memory of the women’s rights movement, Weber defends Johnson’s choice to portray the trio by arguing that these privileged white women ‘‘symbolized all women of the movement’’ (189). The heavily illustrated book makes it appealing for the classroom and a general audience. Weber provides a brief overview of the suffrage movement, making it useful for readers unfamiliar with key moments. US Capitol tour guides certainly should add this blow-by-blow history of the statue to their list as well. A public history class would have a vibrant discussion of the Portrait Monument’s story and the ways the statue continues to shape the public memory of the movement. Allison Lange, Wentworth Institute of Technology

Making Slow Food Fast in California Cuisine by Victor W. Geraci. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. vii þ 225 pp.; notes, bibliography, index; clothbound, $99.99; eBook, $79.99.

In 2014 Michelle Moon and Cathy Stanton published an article in The Public Historian calling on public historians to use museum exhibits, oral history collec- tions, and historic sites to contribute to the ‘‘food movement’’ and its crusade for a healthy and environmentally sustainable food supply. They argued that public historians were in a unique position to ‘‘link food and farming interpretation to real world interests and problems.’’1 Making Slow Food Fast in California Cuisine is one public historian’s scholarly attempt to do just that. Victor Geraci unites the extensive historical literature on the growth of California’s preeminent agribusi- ness sector with the many popular accounts documenting the rise of a commu- nity-based and environmentally concerned ‘‘counter cuisine’’ emerging primarily from the San Francisco Bay Area, while also drawing extensively on interviews gathered under the auspices of the University of California, Berkeley’s Oral History Center. The result is a brisk overview of California’s contribution to the nation’s diet that concludes with a call for compromise between industrial agricul- ture’s mass production and efficiency and food activists’ concern for sustainability,

1 Michelle Moon and Cathy Staunton, ‘‘The First Course: A Case for Locating Public History within the Food Movement,’’ The Public Historian 36, no. 3 (August 2014): 109–29.

Book Reviews 157 health, taste, local sourcing, and communal eating—what Geraci characterizes as ‘‘making slow food fast.’’ Although the basic story this book tells is fairly familiar to any food or agricul- tural historian, Geraci does admirable work in putting both the rise of California agribusiness and the emergence of a Bay Area counter cuisine in a broad historical context. Throughout the book, he notes the continuation of slow food traditions, even as industrial agriculture came to dominate California and processed food emerged as the primary way of eating. Therefore Geraci is not guilty of the ahis- toricism of some popular accounts that see the reaction to industrial food emerging de novo out of the efforts of a few culinary geniuses like Alice Waters. In fact, one of the virtues of this book is the way Geraci uses oral histories to expand the cast of characters involved in the Bay Area’s development of an alternative California cuisine—discussing the role and responses of relatively neglected restaurateurs like Cecilia Chang and Narsai David, along with culinary instructor Mary Risley, cook- book author Marion Cunningham, and food journalist Doris Muscatine. Geraci personally conducted many of the oral histories he cites. After twenty years teaching middle school history, he returned to university work at the Uni- versity of California, Santa Barbara, where he wrote his doctoral thesis on the Santa Barbara wine industry while working for the Gainey Vineyard, and then, as his second career unfolded, directed oral history projects in Connecticut, and finally worked as a research specialist for the University of California, Berkeley’s Food and Wine Project, from which the book’s oral histories are exclusively drawn. While the book is therefore extremely useful in showcasing UC Berkeley’s Food and Wine Project, that is also somewhat a limitation. Geraci’s citation of the secondary literature is wide ranging and comprehensive, but the individuals he highlights in his discussion are almost exclusively those whose oral histories were collected at Berkeley. Because the Food and Wine Project collection features mostly restaurateurs and food writers, Geraci does not mention by name the local farmers and purveyors—people such as Warren Weber, pioneering Bay Area organic farmer; Dale Coke, ‘‘inventor’’ of the spring salad mix; and Laura Chenel, goat cheese maker—who were essential to Waters’s restaurant Chez Panisse’s success and central to the Bay Area culinary revolution. Also, while no one would gainsay the importance of the Bay Area in the emergence of a food counter culture, Southern California also made a major contribution to the California cuisine that emerged in the seventies and eighties. The Asian and Latino immigrant communities and the chefs who drew on their foodways in Los Angeles—not to mention the Southern California small farmers who supplied them—certainly deserve more credit than Geraci gives them for the ethnic fusion cuisine that, along with local sourcing, became representative of California as its new food style spread across the nation. More controversial than the scope of his oral history sources, however, will be Geraci’s prescriptive conclusion that with appropriate government regulation and continued consumer vigilance, California can mass produce food in a way that is environmentally sustainable and preservative of the virtues of slow flood. As he

158 The Public Historian / Vol. 40 / February 2018 / No. 1 acknowledges, many food activists see the current technology-based and corporate-dominated agriculture as anathema and have no faith that government will do anything but support the current system. For these reformers, the call to ‘‘make slow food fast’’ will seem naı¨ve, at best, or show a disregard for the lessons of the food movement, at worst. Nevertheless, regardless of how his proposed solution is considered, Making Slow Food Fast fulfills the call for public historians to engage with the issue of food and farming in ways that are both informed by scholarship and enlivened by recalled experiences. Jeffrey Charles, California State University, San Marcos

California Mission Landscapes: Race, Memory, and the Politics of Heritage by Elizabeth Kryder-Reid. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. ix þ 355 pp.; illustrations, appendix, notes, bibliography, index; clothbound, $122.50; paperbound, $35.00.

California Mission Landscapes: Race, Memory, and the Politics of Heritage is a pro- found contribution to mission studies and public history in its demonstration of how different types of historic documentation can be used to understand cultural heritage sites, landscapes, and public perceptions of cultural places. The book is a joyous and thought-provoking journey through the history and reconstruction of the Alta California mission gardens. It will appeal to a wide range of students and scholars whose focus is on public history, ethnicity, race, cultural landscapes, mission studies, historic preservation, museum studies, cultural anthropology, and heritage tourism. For those interested in these subjects this book will be difficult to put down. It is also essential reading for cultural resource managers, tour guides, museum exhibit designers, and federal land managers working at mission sites. The book’s power is in the revelation that who we think we are and how we understand our relationship to places and to others is constructed and molded by historical factors, race, ethnicity, and class. The analytical methods utilized and discussed provide examples of how to study the many layers of meaning at heritage sites, and specifically colonial sites. Using the Spanish Colonial missions of Cali- fornia, Kryder-Reid shows that the meaning and importance of heritage resources is often created from an imagined past, replete with implicit ideological biases related to ethnicity, gender, race, religion, and economic status. The author de- monstrates that at many of the missions these biases are reflected in the restoration and reconstruction of the mission landscapes and specifically mission gardens, beginning in the 1870s. The focus is on understanding the ‘‘history of representa- tion’’ through a study of the ‘‘accessible, familiar and seemingly natural setting’’ of the missions (xi). Towards this end, the author is explicit in stating that Spanish mission- or church-controlled records were not the primary type of historic record used in her analysis. Instead, the focus is on the analysis of representations in art,

Book Reviews 159