Histories of Food, Ecology, and Culture in Southern California

Nancy Kwak
History
UC San Diego

I am writing a history of food in Southern California from the late 1700s to the present. My manuscript looks at the interwoven histories of growing, preparing, and eating food in the region. I deploy various analytical lenses—race, gender, labor, the relationship between urban and rural, history of science, and anthropology—to try to understand how food has changed over nearly three centuries. Throughout this time, Southern California produced a prolific quantity of fresh vegetables, fruits, nuts, meats, and dairy; in becoming such a critical source of food, it has also birthed and fed opposing movements like mass food production and mass hunger, fast food, and an anti-pesticide movement, nationalist politics, and fusion foods. Food has also at times been deeply contentious, with fierce struggles over who and what should be eaten. Rather than trying to tell a comprehensive story, I am interested in pivotal moments when Southern Californians grappled with these contradictions and made big decisions that would alter the course of food making and eating for future generations. Along the way, I point to the ways specific decisions led to a dependence on unsustainable food, and I observe the roads not taken.

Image Credit: Orange County Archives