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, and evolving empires—to try to understand how food has changed over three centuries. Southern Californians produced a prolific quantity of fresh vegetables, fruits, nuts, meats, and dairy; in becoming a place of food-making, it also birthed opposing phenomena like mass food production and mass hunger, nationalist politics and fusion foods, and fast food and an organic movement. Southern California is complex, and I argue it is at the center of any attempt to make sense of our food systems today.