Canned Sunshine

From the Albany Bulb, we ask visitors on our tour to look southeast toward the Pixar campus in Emeryville. It has a hidden food history, one we’ll get to presently.

Looking back toward the shore from the Bulb, you can see landscapes that used to produce huge amounts of food. Ohlone people gathered mollusks, fish and game and harvested acorns here. Later, settlers from Europe and Asia raised beef cattle, dairy cows, vegetables and fruit along the shores of San Francisco Bay.

And in the twentieth century, Oakland, San Francisco, and San Jose processed and packaged food that was sent around the world. In this Monument to Extraction tour, we are exploring the extraction of minerals from the earth. Modern food production can also be seen as an extractive industry.

California producers popularized canned food, though they did not invent it.  In eighteenth-century France, jars kept soldiers fed in far-flung places.  Cans did the same for American soldiers in World War II. Tinned meats filled the bellies of impoverished Americans with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal relief programs.  For many families in the U.S., jarring perishable food kept pantries full through the winter.

Preserving food in jars, and later tin cans, is one of humanity’s great achievements. By the turn of the twentieth century it was also a major marketing opportunity.  California is at the center of that story. It starts in Oakland, where the Fruitvale district used to be famous for fruit trees.

In the late nineteenth century, the California fruit industry was blooming—especially orchard fruit, centered in what is now Silicon Valley, as well as the Central Valley.  At first, California’s new food manufacturers served the demands of the local population. But industrial canning allowed California growers to ship their product to the Eastern United States and even Europe. The industry grew in step with the railroad networks spreading across the country.

Back East, consumers eagerly bought the Golden State’s exports: bright, sumptuous treats like peaches and apricots were suddenly available in the dead of winter. Some Americans were tasting new fruits for the very first time.

Producers printed “California grown” on their tins, marking the desirability of their products. At this time, the industry was composed of many large and small canning businesses. In 1899, 18 canneries merged into the California Fruit Canners Association, an early step in the consolidation of power in the American food system.

Bay Area members included the F. P. Cutting Company in Oakland, San Jose Fruit Packing Company, the King-Morse Canning Company in San Francisco and San Leandro, the Oakland Preserving Company, and M. J. Fontana and Company in San Francisco, 

Their aim was to market their products more effectively together, as but they continued to operate fairly autonomously and didn’t see much success until they began using the name “Del Monte,” thanks to Frederick Tillman, Jr.

Tillman had launched the Oakland Preserving Company in 1891. But the name “Del Monte” actually came from the Hotel Del Monte, which was a massive seaside resort in Monterey. (Today it houses the Naval Postgraduate School.) Tillman created a blend of coffee in 1886 for the hotel, and applied the name to the company.

In doing so, he built a brand that effectively communicated “superior value” to customers; high-quality California produce, available any time of year, in any part of the country, at an affordable price. The CFCA introduced the Del Monte shield logo on their non-coffee wares in 1909, along with the tagline “Not a label–but a guarantee.”

The CFCA became a pioneer of the marketing of abstract concepts rather than fresh food, their product literally hidden in a can, the logo the only visible entity the consumer could judge the value of the product by. Eventually, the company name became Del Monte and its wares traveled the world in shipping containers–which were also pioneered in Oakland.

You can see the Del Monte Cannery No. 1 building preserved at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco even today. But the vast Del Monte Cannery No. 35 in Emeryville was torn down in 1992 and has been replaced by the headquarters of the Pixar film company. It exports a different kind of California product.

Today, San Francisco Bay is known as a center of food culture and activism centered on locally-grown, seasonal produce and food justice. Alice Waters’ iconic Chez Panisse restaurant and her Edible Schoolyard at the Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School are tucked into the landscapes you can see from the Bulb. But the Bay Area has also had a big role in the extractive, industrial-scale food industry that dominates American diets. Next time you’re in the canned food aisle, think of the Bay Area roots of those canned peaches.

For further reading

Carlsson, Chris. Del Monte Foods, in FoundSF. https://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=Del_Monte_Foods

California Fruit Canners Association.

http://vasonabranch.com/packing_houses/index.php?title=California_Fruit_Canners_Association#:~:text=California%20Fruit%20Canners%20Association%20was,that%20would%20rival%20the%20cooperatives.

Del Monte Foods, Inc. https://www.delmontefoods.com/our-story/our-rich-heritage

Doyle, Jim. “Hotel Del Monte was a mystical forest hideaway.” SF Gate. 2/11/2012.

https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Hotel-Del-Monte-was-a-mystical-forest-hideaway-3283833.php

Hotel Del Monte where the coffee was originated and where the name comes from.

Encyclopedia.com. “Del Monte Foods Company.” 2/9/21.

https://www.encyclopedia.com/books/politics-and-business-magazines/del-monte-foods-company

Geoghegan, Tom. “The story of how the tin can nearly wasn’t.” BBC News Magazine. 4/17/2013. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21689069#:~:text=The%20importance%20of%20canned%20food,much%20of%20it%20canned%20beef.

Hausler, Donald. “The History of Park Avenue.” 1996. https://emeryvillehistorical.org/incorporation-infrastructure/park-avenue-district/the-history-of-park-avenue/

 

---

We made a planter out of bricks found at the Bulb and planted a peach tree. It’s intended as a monument to canning and cannery workers.

Under the peach tree, there is a mosaic of a peach tree branch by Lynn Jones. When you are at the Bulb, if you scan the mosaic with the Artivive app on your phone, a short video will play. 

You can see video here by clicking the image of the mosaic.