Food and Wine In Utopia: Essay

Food and Wine in Utopia

 

How often do we think about Utopia? Has our society stepped closer to realizing our dreams or has it become an anodyne to its own problems? Perhaps food and wine are the last thing in anybody’s dreams or manifestos, but we can attempt to understand people’s dreams based on what they eat or what they want to eat.

 

Utopia is on the horizon. I go two steps, she moves two steps away. I walk ten steps, and the horizon runs ten steps ahead. No matter how much I walk, I’ll never reach her. What good is Utopia? That’s what: it’s good for walking

 – Eduardo Galeano

 

 

Santa Barbara Food History: Introduction            

The year is 1959 and a group of archeologists were working together to get their jeep out of the mud on Santa Rosa Island, just 26 miles off Santa Barbara. Perhaps due to exhaustion or looking upward for inspiration, they spotted what could be a bone protruding out on a cliff. That site, Arlington Springs, would be the discovery place of the oldest human remains in North America. The Channel Islands, which includes Santa Rosa Island, and the coasts of California were integral to the culture and livelihood of the Native Americans, the Chumash tribe who had lived in the region from 5000 B.C. As is expected from the course of history, colonization then altered the local biodiversity and population for years to come. The Spanish came to occupy Alta California in 1542[1]. When the environment changes, what sustains the native livelihoods will undergo drastic changes, which then paves way for new social mechanisms that upset the balance of exchanges, reciprocity, and exploitation.

It takes a village to raise a child. The communal effort to grow food and make them accessible to its inhabitants raises the very people that make up the village. In one of the earliest records about Santa Barbara’s food scene, we are transported back to the Presidio, established by the Spanish military in 1782. It served an important role in addition to its military obligations. Distributing food to its military personnel and the pueblo (town) that surrounded it, they developed their own agriculture system of growing vegetables and fruits. The village did still rely on shipment from the Spanish fleet such as food, spices, and alcohol[2]. The Mission, founded in 1786, was an important node for food delivery and by 1810, residents had already started a network of trade within Alta California.

                As we zip through a few decades, the food scene in Santa Barbara has grown. Hide and tallow were the main agricultural products in 1834, which were then sailed to New England. Other agricultural aspects were flourishing too, with grains (wheats and barley) being shipped to other ports of the world. Beans, orchards, vegetable fields, poultry, and dairy all set the stage for the for-profit culture of fruit growing in the 1880s[3].

Our history has called for significant architectural projects to serve as a location for worship and gathering. As for Santa Barbara’s history with food, a pavilion was dedicated to the agricultural technology. As years pass, like the burning of the pavilion in 1895, Santa Barbara has seen the rise and fall of the following industries: Dairy, Cattle, Walnut, Beet, and Broccoli. They all suffer the similar fate. Rising land prices, labor issues, diminishing returns due to higher cost of production, and the downfall of the boom. Cattle farmers used to be skeptical of turning their grazing land into the then highly valuable grape land. Their question was who’s going to drink all the wine?

 

Santa Barbara Food Scene: Current problems?

                Who indeed will drink all the wine? Despite the abundance of food and drink options in Santa Barbara, our consumer habits raise important questions about what we truly need here in our county, and in the world. As of today, Santa Barbara is home to more than 470 restaurants, and the county has over 250 wineries. While market analysts attempt to predict trends, our consumption must surely be driven by more than just economic forces. Let’s count the number of Starbucks we have in this town. The question of limits, often explored in dystopian films and literature, should make us question ourselves. What is the opposite of an upper limit to our food scene?

According to the report by five United Nations specialized agencies, there is adequate food to feed everyone in the world, yet access remains elusive. There were 733 million people who faced hunger in 2023, pushing back the year that the world was supposed to end hunger, which was 2030. For context, the population of Santa Barbara hovers about 85k-90k. An Argentine writer, Martin Caparros sought to seek the answer to why hunger exists. He travelled around the world and wrote about the problem of hunger. Ownership, distribution, price gouging, are all tied to the current state of network that each country is tied in this stage of our history. Neo-liberalism. Globalized economic systems benefit some but they have created problems that act as ghosts in our daily lives, haunting us. It is not the globalized portion of this that is the problem. The economic section is not the problem either but rather how the economic systems are set up and propped up by institutions across the world. Can we end hunger by eating our way through? Is there a teleological end to our food history?

To better understand how that affects the food and wine scene in Santa Barbara, a small section of the world, a series of interviews were conducted in 2024. These subjects include a chef at a pizza restaurant, a coffee roaster, the head of an agricultural real estate investment company, vineyard workers, and a winemaker. The topic: Utopia and its interaction with our food and wine scenes.

Pizza Chef: Fear

The social dynamics, the animosities, the resentments, the economics of the food scene are still the same today as they were in 1930s when George Orwell wrote a book called Down and Out in Paris and London. The chef believes that the restaurant scene is an aristocracy simulator, the more that the economy tanks, the cracks in the façade appear more evidently. And to replace this façade, there has to be restaurants that are harmonious with the environment, fair to their labor, nutritious, and non-wasteful. Though these aspirations are ideal, he warns against the danger of making a God out of anything, such as the vegan or heirloom movement. In the end, even in the utopian society, the chef wonders if the taskmaster will still be the same. This taskmaster, being money, which we all serve in the end. Unfortunately, the restaurant is not the one that can assign value to anything. And if restaurants are not dictated by money, then the demand still has to impact restaurants somehow. A good model, according to the chef, is a fund or endowment that supports the establishment of restaurants similar to the public arts in Colorado. Ultimately, the chef reckons that the current food scene is how people are mitigating their fears and loneliness, a failed form of therapy if you will. In our current world, in our current economic system, this fear is continuously grown, harvested, and fed to the people. The fear is a big obstacle for the society, with the chef stating that Utopia is already here waiting for us, but we have to choose it every day.

Coffee Roaster: Knowledge

The coffee roaster briefly recounted the history of the colonial and racist origins of coffee. He then pivoted, saying the biggest problem impacting the coffee industry today are the impacts of climate change and volatile supply-chains. In its origin, slaved labor coffee farming in Indonesia orchestrated by the Dutch prioritizing volume were common. The practice is still seen today throughout the Global South that grows arabica beans. Local populations including children do not have the opportunities to pursue better. The knowledge needed to operate the industry are shielded from the local population, allowing large corporations to retain profitability to their business by protecting the market share of their operations. Even though climate change is one big problem for the industry, it still sits in the myriad of problems that plague it. Attempting to solve them all at once is no easy task so the coffee roaster recommends solving them one by one. Even then, more problems will arise. Communication is a hypocrisy that exists in today’s world. With all these technologies that connect people, it is surprising that it is hard to educate people about what’s really plaguing us.

The coffee roaster agrees that coffee is a luxury item, and that in a utopian society people should have equal access to food first before focusing on the access to luxury items like wine and coffee. Individuals’ struggle for power is the biggest obstacle to utopia. When thinking about the obstacles to utopia, we tend to anthropomorphize them. It can be easy to place blame on a select few individuals of the world.

Can coffee ever step in and be an ally for utopia? How does a luxury item advocate for social and environmental justice when the world we live in still promotes the individual’s strive for power and wealth, without which they would perish. It is as if the world we live in promotes ideas that push us further away from utopia day by day. It is as if the world we live in promotes knowledge that pushes out essential utopian knowledge day by day.

 

Agricultural Real Estate Investor: The Invisible Hand

                 To understand the economics of food production in the region, an interview was conducted with a farmer who has become an agricultural real estate investor. With 45 years of food growing experience spanning from California to contract growing in China, the breadth of knowledge is no way sparse. The pursuit of the interviewee’s food production or land rental are dedicated to crops that have high margins such as grapes and berries instead of carrots or cabbages. It is also the higher-value crop growers that are able to afford the increasing cost that is attributed to labor and water shortages. The impact of shrinking marginal profits are evident in the relocation of flower farming from California to Oregon and Alfalfa from California to Columbia. Quoting Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand often, the interviewee reckons that business operation’s understanding of economics and business landscape will help the industry survive or flourish better than any government intervention. Also citing the inefficiency of governmental inefficiency, the interviewee gives solar and EV subsidies as examples of interventions that are not making the industry economical.

                With the loss of food production in areas such as San Joaquin Valley, the loss of businesses in the region are also impacted since there is loss of the resident labor population and the loss of food distribution to restaurants (who also lose business due to diminishing population). We are now currently in a period during this president’s administration where ICE agency is actively removing that very labor migrant population from the food and wine scene.

                When discussing small-scale farmers who occupy such a small portion of the food economy in general and the loyal customer base they have for a niche ideology, we discussed what ideology is. For the small-scale, organic farmers, their ideology of organic being better is up to the growers and consumers who want to pursue that goal, and the interviewee attributes that pursuit as a freedom of choice but also, the ability to afford it.

“I think the reality is we all want businesses to behave in a certain way. To create full employment. Yet we want to control them so that they make rational economic decisions, so we want to control what they pay their workers, the government interventions, the control of pesticides, laws and regulations. But you know, they’re regulating themselves out.

The electrical example is one. Now with AI, we have an increased need for electricity that we’ve completely idled. We’ve abandoned coal, oil, natural gas in favor of clean methods and now we have less electricity in the United States than most of our competitor countries because they have nuclear power[4].”

                In the end, the interviewee does not recognize the concept of utopia for our food scene. Ideologies competing with economic factors make it impossible for a consequence-less future.

Vineyard Laborers: Assigned value and pride

This series of interviews necessitates hearing from the laborers themselves. Interviewing two vineyard workers, the main theme for their decision to stay in the vineyard business for 10 years is because of the pride they have in their job and that they feel valued. They distance themselves from the majority of the vineyard laborers who are doing it for the money. The chase for a steady pay-check results in a high turnover rate in the crop industry, often moving between grapes, cannabis, strawberries, and other crops depending on the season.

The pride can harbor fear. Fear for the automation of vineyard work, fear for their job security. Not fighting against the automation process itself, they are advocating for more vineyards to be planted so that there are more needs for vineyard laborers while also accommodating the introduction of automation. They yearn for more demand for manual labor by calling for an increase in vineyards that grow higher quality grapes. Lower cash value grapes will often be first on the plate to be automated. However, lack of knowledge transfer or lack of communication has also shielded them from the trend of diminishing wine sales that are prompting vineyards across the world to be ripped out and fallowed.

                About affordability and wages in Utopia, these laborers wish rent to be free, food being more affordable, while wages sufficient enough to allow savings to purchase a home in the future. When talking about food being more affordable, they, talking as consumers also agreed that wine and beer should have their prices decreased in the future but when considering their position as laborers who depend on the margins of wine market doing well, they hope that wine prices increase. As for the working hours, they are content with a 40-hour week but also suggested that they would even be happy with a 50-hour working week (possibly because of the larger payout in that scenario). In terms of their work-life balance, they say that they are happy with the current situation raising families even though they often take side gigs on the weekends to earn more money. Regardless, they both agree that utopia is unattainable because of the lack of money that is accessible to the general public. The greed or the roncha[5] of the billionaires and millionaires suppresses the advancement of the programs that could benefit the general population.

Winemaker: the magician’s reveal

                The last interview was with one of the duo winemakers of Yata Eagle Wines, a small winery that is making Syrah with the profits going to the vulnerable community. Having stepped into the industry because of the passion for science and craft, the romantic illusions were pulled back as he got deeper in the winemaking scene. The inequalities of the industry being more apparent than ever, he adds that craftmanship and passion does not determine the success of the wine but rather what is invested into the brand’s superficiality and trends. In the end it is a cycle of the money where the winemaker summarizes as “money makes a full circle from the pockets of the rich, to the enjoyment of the rich, and returns to the rich.”

                About utopia and the topic of money, the winemaker submits that the money or currency problem would be hard to tackle but subsidies for the industry may help it be more competitive with the high-quality and affordable wines coming from Europe. And if that does not happen soon, the law of economics will eventually force small and high-quality producers in the US to fold and leave the large conglomerations in charge. Especially in the case of rising cost of living and goods in increasing profits for companies, the winemaker posits that the wealth has never been distributed equally but it should also not fall entirely on the responsibility of the consumer, or the producer, or the government by themselves to absorb these rising costs.

                Mentioning the likes of Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk, the winemaker states that there is a focus on individual success in today’s society that plagues our path towards a communal utopia. Equity and diversity is important in reaching this goal yet we continually not only repeat the same “mistakes” in our history, but we increase the consequences of our actions each time we go down this spiral.

Utopia: Where food and wine fits in

                The pursuit of utopia itself hinders our vision. It is our difference in the ideals and the absence of shared resources or collective capital that blurs our own goals. Yet, a politically enmeshed topic of food and wine can be a plate of catalyst for hope and progress. Look at the diversity of thought that exists out there on utopia, hopefully dwindling out the dystopian ideas. While inefficiency through democracy or intolerance through authoritarianism can be seen as deterrents for a better future, the interviews underscore that beyond the importance of embracing diverse viewpoints to expand the realm of possibility, the process of establishing a shared purpose or path is much more powerful when it results from mutual agreement rather than imposition. How do we work together, how do we put common goals together, how do we disagree, how do we debate? Over dinner, how do we become vessels of ideologies?

Utopia: Food and wine as politics

The need for ideologies reflects our society’s tendency towards religion. Looking for an ideology bigger than ourselves has given us purpose against the doom of the world. Religion, a historical ideology that persists today, has also fueled the path against it. Where do these people cling to? Organic food movement, Feminism, Environmentalism. Even politics.

Food and wine have always been political. Their place in future campaigns should be scrutinized. For example, former Vice President Kamala Harris introduced the Closing the Meal Gap Act in 2020 to reduce hunger in the United States, but the bill ultimately did not come to fruition and was not even voted on in the Senate. A similar destiny befell another bill with the same name that was introduced in 2023.

                If the inefficiency of the current governing body and administration is indeed an obstruction to common good, one is inclined to investigate the future of complete privatization. A relevant example is an island in Honduras called Próspera, a for-profit and private city that has attracted libertarian and anarcho-capitalistic minds. The founder was convinced that reformism would not work to fix a society, taking inspiration from Machiavelli’s writings such as The Prince. However, with the local administration gradually stripping privileges away from this city and barring banks and lenders from financing projects in the city, there is now a lawsuit filed by Próspera against Honduras. When free market takes precedent in a city like this, we are brought back to our interview with the food real estate investor. Can the free market’s dependent variables be reflective of the nutritional needs of the public while also minding the demand? Or should fast food chains still exist to calm the chaotic hunger that is embedded in all of us in today’s age[6]?

Non-reformist approaches are also embraced by certain fractions of the Left such as the anarchists and revolutionary Marxists. This reflects the dissatisfaction with the failures of our local and global systems. There are groups that focus on a hyper-local community to insulate themselves from the outside world while others try to do a coordinated movement in multiple regions, hoping to create a domino effect that brings about further change. Perhaps frustrated with the intervention of the government in agricultural law and distribution, we find ourselves staring at the plate that is supposed to be filling and nutritious, yet we only see the void of hope that is our system, our world. Even as we share a meal with a family, a loved one, friends, and strangers, the cherished tradition now has a food of thought: what are the food’s origins and where is it absent.

It is vital to continue our fight regardless of the path. We identify weaknesses in the current hegemonic structures, and we learn from one another. Optimism is an exercise that keeps us focused on the future, on our destiny. Much like any mind exercises or physical conditioning, dreaming and planning for utopia strengthens our call to it. Food and wine is interconnected with many aspects of our lives, our gardens, education, architecture, and art. Most importantly, they show you who you are, and our sense of purpose. You are what you eat.

                Utopia would still be needed. Later, too, these hopes would reignite countless times, before being smothered by the might of the enemy and then rekindled again. And the sphere of these hopes would grow larger than it had been in our time, extending across all the continents of the Earth.

– Peter Weiss, The Aesthetics of Resistance Vol. III

 

                Transcripts of the interviews are available on the blog sites of Yata Eagle Wines. Themes briefly mentioned and not included in this essay are food deserts, white privilege, addiction, consumers (not) wanting food education, migrant worker immigrations.