Food
The Oakland Food Policy Council is an organization dedicated to developing a local food system that can feed all citizens of the city in a healthy, sustainable way. The 21-seat council, which was established in 2005 with seed money from the city, meets monthly to work on initiatives that address some of Oakland’s most pressing food concerns, like poor nutrition, access to fresh produce and antiquated laws.
Rozlyn Steele offers a morsel of lemon chess pie to a customer at the Grand Lake farmer’s market in Oakland. She stands proudly behind a neatly checkered table displaying stacks of golden cookies, seasonal pies, and flaky biscuits from Little Ladybug Bakery. But before Steele started renting commercial kitchen space from a catering company, she was one of a number of renegade food entrepreneurs who sold baked goods “illegally” prepared at home.
Every weeknight, while the rest of the city sleeps, the kitchen crew at Delicious Nutritious bustles around an industrial-sized kitchen in West Oakland. They’re getting an early start on the day, cooking the nutrient-rich, low fat breakfasts and lunches that the company delivers to participating businesses around the East Bay and Oakland.
Across the country bugs are popping up on restaurant menus and on Internet cooking shows and blogs. They’re the focus of festivals and a main ingredient in a number of proposed future foods, like granola bars and seasonings. You can definitely find bugs on the menu here in the Bay Area. Fried wax moth larvae tacos are served at the Don Bugito food cart in San Francisco and chocolate-coated fried grasshoppers made a crunchy addition to Oakland’s homemade ice creams at Lush Gelato last summer. East Bay resident Scott Bower, founded a group for like-minded foodies—the Bay Area Bug Eating Society—back in 1999, and the poster-child of edible bug consumption, Daniella Martin, hails from the area as well.
Many of the 20,000 people from Ethiopia and Eritrea living in the Bay Area call Oakland home. Oakland North is taking a look at the culture and history of the Ethiopian or Eritrean community in Oakland with “East Africans in Oakland” a series of profiles on everyday people living in the city.
A group of Bay Area folks come together every year on March 14 to celebrate pi — the mathematical constant and the dessert. Laura Hautala spent a recent Saturday afternoon joining in on the peculiar celebration.
Discussions of food, community well being, and employment intersected in West Oakland on Wednesday at the city’s first “Ready, Set, Grow” event, a forum on jobs in sustainable food systems and health. Put on by the Alliance for Oakland’s Food Systems, which is headed up by People’s Grocery, the event brought together a who’s-who of Oakland’s non-profits that are hiring, and people looking for work to help them prepare for and find jobs.
Following a late night shootout at a taco truck earlier this month, food vendors are organizing to respond to a surge in violent robberies of their businesses.
With over 65 million Americans reported to have an arrest or conviction on their record, it seems nearly impossible for an employer to hire a person that does not have a criminal history. But Soul’s Restaurant in East Oakland has one goal: to provide jobs to those men and women struggling to transition back into non-institutionalized society.