Food

Three ingredients travel across the country

A container of pasta. A 10-pound tube of ground turkey. A can of tomato sauce. It was a Monday in November at a central kitchen in East Oakland and dozens of cardboard boxes were being unloaded, revealing the three main ingredients for a pasta and meat-sauce dish that would be served to elementary school kids in the Oakland Unified School District that Thursday. In a matter of hours, stainless steel racks filled with clumps of pasta, each in open-faced cardboard…

How three well-traveled ingredients end up as lunch in Oakland’s public school cafeterias

The lunchroom at Hoover Elementary School has a long metal counter built into the wall between the lunchroom and the kitchen. There’s an industrial-looking sliding metal door that can be opened for serving food directly from the kitchen, but this serving arrangement is no longer used. In terms of food preparation devices, the kitchen now boasts only a refrigerator and an “oven” that is not equipped to do anything old-fashioned, like bake; it only reheats trays of already-cooked meals. Despite the fact that there is no cooking at Hoover, there are still 325 mouths to feed at breakfast and lunch every day.

It’s on College Avenue, it’s delicious and cheese is its main ingredient

It rode on the back of a bike for a mile, it survived numerous left and right turns on the way to its final destination, and in the end this Zachary’s deep dish pizza loaded with spinach, mushrooms and cheese was well worth the wait. Though the staff at Zachary’s on Sunday night wouldn’t allow OaklandNorth to take pictures of their restaurant interior or their delicious pizzas as they slid out of ovens and into cardboard to-go boxes, raising the…

Oakland groups address sustainable agriculture

On Monday night people came out from around the East Bay to attend the Women’s Earth Alliance (WEA) event at the David Brower Center in Berkeley. The event showcased Oakland organizations like Planting Justice, Communitree, Art in Action, People’s Grocery, Something for your Soul catering service, Healthy Hoodz, and Ital Pinay Jewelry. Each addressed the importance of sustainable agriculture and featured the creative ways they are implementing it in their urban communities . “We’re trying to create health and wellness…