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People's Grocery frees up food to move--locally
For many years I lived in the East Bay (of the San Francisco Bay Area), both a hotbed of local food pride and a stronghold of striking inequality and food insecurity. Mere miles from Alice Water's famous stands--Chez Panisse and the Edible Schoolhouse--I worked at a number of soup kitchens serving the homeless, hungry, and generally food insecure people of Berkeley and Oakland. The store with the best produce section on the west coast is just a few more miles from genuine food deserts. I think this contrast helped motivate so many interesting projects to improve community food security in that region.
People's Grocery in West Oakland is a great example. They have more projects than I'll describe here, but they hit several crucial strategies I think are awesome:
- They produce food locally AND aggregate food from the wh*** region to bring into the community
- They take food on the move, driving a truck around a set route to make fresh food super accessible (as well as the more traditional food box delivery)
- They actively engage a broad spectrum of community members, especially youth, in making it all happen
1. Local plus regional production.
People's Grocery sprang in part from a community garden, and produce grown in gardens in the neighborhood is still a staple of the group's distribution. But they also draw in more regional resources, foods processed in the larger region of Northern California, and those that don't fit so neatly into the blocks of West Oakland. Now, the SF Bay Area has a fantastically productive climate for small-scale agriculture year-round. And besides, if Growing Power in Milwaukee has taught us anything, it's that very small urban spaces can in fact achieve productivity rivaling the economies of scale of industrial agriculture. But however bountiful and sustainable local production is, building relationships on a regional level--uniting disparate microclimates, political persuasions and food specializations--is ultimately a more robust and resilient practice. If the neighborhood's production is (god forbid) hit by some calamity, there are recourses and relationships to make those recourses work.
2. Food on the move.
Farmer's markets. Food Co-ops. Community supported agriculture food boxes, delivered to homes and community centers. These are some of the direct-to-consumer (usually from the farmer or processor) innovations of the past decades. But People's Grocery managed to fit a wh*** greengrocer into the back of a small truck. That truck drives a convoluted route around the wh*** neighborhood, filling orders and entertaining spontaneous shoppers. This unsticks food from brick and mortar, even from the asphalt of the parking lots permitted to host farmers' markets. It's not a luxury like food deliveries are often framed. This is important: people's mobility, especially hauling around food, should not be taken for granted.
3. Engaging community and youth.
This is where we must remember again that food security isn't just about acquiring food to eat. It's about sustaining adequate food in the long term, and cultivating a culture that values this and is legitimately not afraid of lacking food. Involving, educating, employing, engaging young people is a key part of broader cultural shifts like this: children who understand and appreciate food create a more food secure culture as they grow up and teach their own children and neighbors. I had the good fortune to work with Collective Roots in East Palo Alto, who integrate food-system change with garden-based learning, and their work in local charter schools and the community at large really embodies and illustrates this principle.
From the unfortunate roots of food insecurity and inequality, we can question our assumptions, build more resilient food systems, and change our culture.
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Tags: agriculture, food, food system change, resilience
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Comment by Mita Williams on March 13, 2010 at 2:16am -
Thanks so much for sharing the work of the People's Grocery (I so love that name) with the Evoke network. Not only did you provided a wonderful introduction, you did a great job explaining that food security is much more than a distribution metric.
+50 for Local Insight! Welcome to the network, Grace!
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Comment by Felix Albus on March 24, 2010 at 1:52am -
This is some great work you put together here. Very inspiring. This is how it's got to be done. As I stated, Happiness is only true when Shared :)
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Comment by Hayden Darrell Linder on March 26, 2010 at 9:21pm -
Wonderful post.
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Comment by Patricio Buenrostro-Gilhuys on April 14, 2010 at 3:49pm -
This project is absolutely amazing!!! Cool!!!
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