Pam Peirce on 1970s collective
Long before she founded the San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners and wrote “Golden Gate Gardening,” Chronicle gardening columnist Pam Peirce was an active member of the People’s Food System, a Bay Area network of collectively run enterprises that flourished from 1973 to 1977. The network imploded in 1978 due to political discord and, somewhat improbably, a war between prison gang members employed at various enterprises. (Read more about the network in Shanta Nimbark Sacharoff ’s 2016 book, “Other Avenues Are Possible.”) I spoke with Peirce about those heady days. (Content edited for space and clarity.)
Q: How did you get involved with the People’s Food System? A:
I was a member of a food conspiracy called Ongoing Picnic. I knew there were some food stores and warehouses starting, and a member of the conspiracy who was studying graphic design had begun working on (the People’s Food System) newsletter. Someone had written a political history of sugar for it, and he said, “Maybe you would like to write a nutritional study of sugar?” I had just dropped out of graduate school in biology and botany at the University of Illinois. I wrote the article, and it was published as part of the newsletter’s sugar issue. Then I joined the newsletter collective. We changed the publication’s name from Storefront Extension to Turnover. And on we went.
Q: How did the People’s Food System emerge out of the food conspiracies? A:
We were buying food from various wholesale and retail sources, and some people decided they were to provide food for the conspiracies they could have a small business. Someone bought bulk dairy products, and they continued doing that in the food system as Merry Milk. Veritable Vegetable, Red Star Cheese and various suppliers formed once the stores opened. Other people began a wholesale warehouse for bulk goods.
Q: What was the newsletter collective doing? A:
We put out the newsletter. We didn’t get paid anything. All the businesses were independent, and we were scraping together the money to put out the next issue with the proceeds from the sale of the last issue, with no money budgeted for salary.
Q: So many of the collective food networks in other cities around the country were all-white. In my research, the People’s Food System came across as the most committed to economic and racial justice. A:
The Food System was very devoted to that idea. But it was a struggle, because we were dealing with so little income. A lot of the (food co-ops) were in neighborhoods with Spanish-speaking people. One of the first things Seeds of Life in the Mission did when looking for employees, for example, was to find recent immigrants who were Spanishspeaking or bilingual. My particular goal at the newsletter was to get information out to both Spanish and English speakers. We also had outreach to employ African Americans, and we had Food System-wide workshops on racism.
We wanted to reach out to as much of the population as we could in terms of getting them to buy good food. There was also a goal to radicalize communities through food.
Q: What do you think has been the lasting impact of the People’s Food System in the Bay Area? A:
People learned about the collective model of running a business, as well as food issues — economics, history, politics and nutrition — and became introduced to a lot of foods that they might not have otherwise experienced. I don’t know which came first, the drive to find these foods or the food itself. Changing food habits to the extent the system did, that’s very important.