Health

Small batch composters are digging deep to find big waste solutions

At Bishop O’Dowd High School in the Oakland hills, gardener Ned Lange is making small-batch vermicompost from the school’s food scraps. He takes scraps like leafy greens, peels, and stems that won’t make it into the cooked lunch, and blends them into a smoothie that he feeds into an 8-by-4-foot corrugated steel bin that is home to 100 pounds of worms. He lifts the roof off and carefully peels back pages of damp newspaper that are beginning to disintegrate. Underneath,…

Never mind Reefer Madness, seniors are the next big cannabis consumers

It’s a quiet Monday afternoon at Magnolia Oakland, a cannabis dispensary on the industrial end of Adeline Street. From the outside, the blocky, concrete building looks like the kind of place you might go to get a package shipped or a document notarized. Inside, as a guy working security chats with a front desk employee checking IDs, a skunky whiff of weed floats by, indicating that this is, in fact, a place to legally buy a bewildering number of cannabis…

West Oakland students prepare for chilly weather with coats from Operation Warm

On a suitably chilly and foggy Friday morning, streams of children entered the heated auditorium at Martin Luther King Elementary School on 10th Street in West Oakland and were received with an equally warm welcome by dozens of FedEx employees who were distributing winter coats. The volunteers, wearing purple Santa hats and t-shirts emblazoned with the words “FedEx Cares” guided the boisterous children to rows of tables stacked with fleece-lined and hooded coats in a dizzying array of colors in…