Food

For years, the Kwik Way drive-thru on Lake Park Avenue has been in limbo, as businesses come and go. Now, it will turned into affordable housing.

For organizers of the Eastlake district’s Night Market and Moon Festival, the event was a way to invest in community and local business.

Every September, the Alameda County Community Food Bank joins a network of 200 food banks nationwide for Hunger Action Month to promote volunteering, social media activity and advocacy to raise awareness about food insecurity, a term food bank staffers, activists and the government organizations use to mean that people lack access to enough safe, nutritious food to be healthy.

The presence of culture and community was radiant this weekend in Oakland during the 6th Annual Black-Eyed Pea Festival.

After the Oakland Unified Schools District (OUSD) eliminated the district’s free supper program in 2018, student organizers from Oakland Kids First, a city organization that supports youth organizing and campaign work, and the OUSD Superintendent’s Office teamed up to recover and revamp the program.

Jospefina Gonçalves, 75, knows how to cook—and she does it well. On a Sunday afternoon at her daughter’s home in North Oakland, she was leading a cooking workshop on how to prepare a Cape Verdean delicacy called pastel, an empanada-like pastry with a mix of African and Portuguese flavors. “Everything Cape Verdean, I cook,” Gonçalves said confidently. “I don’t cook nothing that’s not Cape Verdean.” Six women, including Gonçalves and her daughter Nella, are all Cape Verdean Americans—Cape Verde is…

Beny Ashburn and Teo Hunter, a dynamic duo who are hoping to diversify the craft beer industry, stopped by Temescal Brewery in Oakland as part of a crowdfunding crawl to launch their new beer called Hella Halftones. Ashburn and Hunter founded Crowns & Hops, one of the few black-owned craft beer companies in the nation. Listen to the audio piece below to learn more about efforts to diversify the world of craft beer.

Based out of Counter Culture Labs, a community-owned lab in Oakland, Real Vegan Cheese is working on making a cheese that would have less of an environmental effect than making traditional cheese, which requires collecting milk from cows. They are using yeast and E. Coli to create the cheese proteins. In this video, scientists at UC Berkeley discuss whether or not the lab-grown cheese will be sustainable and if people will want to eat it.