College students enjoy homemade food and create community. Photo: Courtesy CoFED

Taking matters beyond burritos, pizza, and beer, a boot camp for college food activists from across the country kicks off today at Berkeley Student Cooperative‘s Cloyne Court Hotel. The intensive, three-day retreat is designed to help train students who want to run campus co-op food cafés and stores stocked with wholesome foods for college kids seeking something other than a steady diet of fast food.

The event, dubbed “Occupy Your Plate,” is sponsored by the year-old Cooperative Food Empowerment Directive (CoFED), a Berkeley-based program that was inspired by the launch of the Berkeley Student Food Collective (BSFC), across the street from campus on Bancroft Way. Speakers at the training include People’s Grocery executive director Nikki Henderson and cookbook author Mollie Katzen.  CoFED supporters include Cal professor and author Michael Pollan.

We spoke with CoFed co-founder and UC Berkeley graduate Yoni Landau — who was instrumental in getting the BSFC up and running and, in 2009, lead a protest to keep the Chinese fast-food chain Panda Express off campus – about what’s cooking with the CoFED crew this weekend and in 2012, which has been dubbed the International Year of Cooperatives by the United Nations.

What were some highlights from CoFED’s first year?

At the University of Seattle students secured a rent-free café space for a co-op cafe in their nutrition sciences department. At UC Santa Barbara, students received funds for a mobile-powered solar food cart. And at George Washington University in DC, CoFED training attendees won the top student enterprise grant on campus. These things happened within six months of these students being inspired to start a food co-op at a CoFED training.

Raising our first 200k, having Forbes.com list us as one of the top five ideas in food and sustainability, a Huffington Post nod, and electing the dream team board of directors was also pretty great.

Probably the most lasting highlight: when we had a one word, “how do you feel” check-out at the end of our very first workshop and the quiet kid said, “inspiregized.”

CoFED co-founder Yoni Landau. Photo: courtesy CoFED

Who is coming to the training this weekend?

College students from all over the U.S. and Canada who want to learn how to create cooperative, sustainable food enterprises will attend. They are grad students and freshmen, economics majors, geography majors, sustainable agriculture majors and nutrition sciences majors.

For the most part, they are ambitious, idealistic and won’t take no for an answer. They want to help the world around them get to a great big “yes.”

Why hold the training here in Berkeley?

If you want to learn how to play jazz, you go to New York — it’s not like that’s the only place that jazz is played. Berkeley is an incubator for the food movement.

Can you give us an update on the Berkeley Student Food Collective?

Sales have steadily grown at the new storefront towards break-even, leadership has turned over, the education and event planning is thriving.  Maybe most surprising: several fridges broke in the first month the store was open. At its November fundraising gala (and one-year anniversary for the store) over 100 people dropped 50 bucks a head to watch students sing the food co-op fundraising song (mainly a capella). They rule.

Are there other successful food co-ops on campuses around the country?

There are over two dozen examples on campuses in the US and Canada. Maryland’s Food Collective is one of our favorites. It’s been running since the ’70s, does over $700,000 in sales annually, and is a thriving part of the campus “scene.” Students can volunteer for an hour to get a local, organic lunch — it’s a low barrier of entry into the community.

How is CoFED funded?

Last year we got 115 people to commit to giving 10 or more dollars a month and it was a large part of our funding.  This year we’re going to triple that with 212 new monthly donors.

Much of the non-profit industrial complex will come down with crony capitalism. If we’re looking to create a new world, we have to build it on foundations that are aligned with our ends. Too many non-profits are stuck in foundation worship mode — it’s a death stroke if you ask me. Not that I’m not grateful, and I love spending time with these people, they’re usually pretty wonderful.

But in five years, we plan to be primarily funded by monthly supporters and the ownership shares paid by our members.

Berkeley's student co-op is across the street from campus on Bancroft Way. Photo: courtesy BSFC

What is going to happen over the weekend and what do you hope to achieve?

The magic that happens at these things is hard to pin down — young people leave changed. Part of that is the weird eye contact exercise and part of it is finally finding that community of real peers that they may never have had before. Part of it is definitely learning basic accounting and business planning. Our goal is to help students leave with the inspiration and tools to create the change they want to see on their campus in the form of a cooperative, sustainable food enterprise.

What does “Occupy Your Plate” mean to you?

By occupy, we mean to remove what we don’t like and create what we do like. Western, secular culture is the first human culture to lose its dinner-table rituals. Thousands of years of cementing cultural norms over food are basically gone with us. Bringing back gratitude, honesty and empathy to our most basic social function — eating with loved ones — is the most important thing we can do to shift our culture in a holistic way.

The occupy movement has reinspired us, or me at least. It hasn’t always been easy to make every decision based on my highest values; you want to take short cuts. My friends sleeping in the cold are reminders that you can’t take shortcuts to create a more democratic, just and sustainable world. You just have to do it.

There’ll be more on CoFED’s occupy stuff coming soon — here’s a hint though, we’re being outdone by Istanbul.

In this video Landau discusses CoFED’s mission on college campuses across the country.

This post originally appeared on Berkeleyside.

You might also like:

Berkeley Student Food Collective: Education & Eating
Nikki Henderson: On the Front Lines of Edible Education
Mollie Katzen: Get Cooking Author Dishes

I’ve been so busy compiling “top food stories of 2011″ lists for KQED’s Bay Area Bites and Berkeleyside, I almost forgot to compile a similar list here. So, as 2011 comes to an end let’s take a trip through the Lettuce Eat Kale archives at, arguably, the year’s best blog posts (horn toot alert).

It’s been a different kind of year here at LEK, as regular readers may have noticed. I’ve had an abundance of paid freelance work (no complaints) and thus much less time to write original pieces for my own site. So, you’ll see some crossover on my end-of-year lists this year, as most of my working days have been devoted to turning stories for other outlets, which I reprint on LEK.

I do miss penning personal posts here, and I’d like to make it a goal for 2012 to try to do more such pieces, but given my lousy track record (see exhibit A) with New Year’s resolutions, consider it an intention rather than a guarantee, okay?

Some of this year’s LEK posts spurred lots of comments, others pointed to national trends or local enterprises, some profiled well-known people and their culinary pursuits, still others focused on little-known folks who worked without fanfare on worthy food causes. Some I picked for this list simply because something about the subject or person particularly resonated with me, and I hope it does with you too.

Feel free to check out a post you may have missed, chime in on your favorite piece, or comment on those featured in this list.

And don’t be shy about letting me know what you’d like to see more (or less) of on this site in the year ahead.

I am grateful to Berkeleyside, Civil Eats, and Bay Area Bites, for sharing my stories with a wider audience on a regular basis. Thanks, as well, to other outlets who have published my work this year, including AFAR, Bay Citizen, Eating Well, Edible East Bay, California, Diablo, Great Schools, Grist, San Francisco, and Shareable.

Here’s wishing you, my loyal readers, a healthy, well-read and well-fed 2012.

Top Ten LEK Highlights of 2011 (in no particular order)

1. Covering the business of food blogging: Two posts I wrote for Bay Area Bites struck a nerve with readers — or at least other food writers. Will Write for Food, Payment Preferable generated so much attention I was worried I’d win the underpaid, underappreciated food writer of the year honor (which, seriously, would be okay if there was a big check attached.) A post later in the year, So You Want to be a Successful Food Blogger? Here’s How., annoyed some male bloggers, spoke to others, and appeared in BAB’s top 5 viewed food posts of the year. Oh, and the irony of The Huffington Post (see Will Write for Food) choosing my seafood story as its first BAB feature was not lost on me.

Artisan preserver June Taylor. Photo: Sarah Henry

2. Interviewing dozens of food folks for Berkeleyside’s Friday food column: I’ve been so fortunate to have the chance to chat with some of the most enterprising people in my hometown who work in the food and farming world, as part of my weekly food series for Berkeleyside. Highlights this year (a baker’s dozen) include Q&As with gleaner Natasha Boissier, urban farmer Kim Allen, artisan preserver June Taylor, community activist Joy Moore, culinary couple Wendy Brucker and Roscoe Skipper, jam maker Dafna Kory, cooking instructor MikeC, pasta maker Eric Sartenaer, baker Eduardo Morell, cheese purveyor Cathy Goldsmith, ghee artisan Matteo Girard Maxon, and pop-up restauranteur Nigel Jones.

3. Having a whole lot of fun with Whole Foods Parking Lot: What can I say? Sometimes a story comes your way that is just a blast to write. That’s exactly what it was like with the viral hit Whole Foods Parking Lot in two stories also for Bay Area Bites, the first of which appeared in that site’s top 5 viewed food posts of the year as well. Bonus: The fact that Dave Wittman was a super sweet interview and the story earned me cool cred with my son and his friends.

These guys had fun at a vegan speed dating event. Photo: Karine Brighten

4. Going undercover to document the perils of speed dating with a food focus: Just as well I was on assignment for Berkeleyside for this one, because social anxiety might have prevented me from attending a speed dating event for vegans and vegetarians, if it wasn’t the subject of my food column for the very next day. As you’ll see, this night was not for the faint of heart — or the hungry.

Nikki Henderson of People's Grocery. Photo: Rick Gilbert

5. Continuing coverage of the food insecure: My social justice reporting roots had me ferreting out stories about people working to get affordable, healthy food to the hungry in our communities. I penned pieces on James Berk of Mandela Marketplace in Oakland who brings produce to his people, chef Andre Green, who feeds the homeless in Berkeley, and People’s Grocery executive director Nikki Henderson, who educates people in her community and beyond about food security matters. I also stayed on the school food beat and covered the opening of the first faith-based urban farm in my area, Urban Adamah, and reminded readers on Thanksgiving to give thanks for farmworkers, the people who pick our food, often under difficult and dangerous conditions.

6. Ongoing reporting of promising food phenomenons: This year saw the launch of several food swaps, crop swaps,  food book clubs, an heirloom produce resource sharing project, and community supported aquaculture, all of which were covered here.

Talking Head David Byrne and a waiter wearing one of his designs. Photo: Christina Diaz

7. Chronicling the adventures of Alice: It was all about Alice in August. Alice Waters that is, the local food icon whose landmark restaurant Chez Panisse celebrated its 40th anniversary this year with a series of fundraisers for her edible education programs. Personal paparazzi moment: Greeting rocker David Byrne and immediately introducing him to a surprised waiter wearing a T-shirt he designed to support the Edible Schoolyard, all for a photo opportunity. Phew! (Those pics were taken by Christina Diaz, the wonderful photog I collaborated with on several occasions this year. Working with such a talented photographer was a highlight in itself.)

Scenes from the film Toast, released this year in the U.S.

8. Reviewing food films and books: There was less time for these posts this year than in 2010, but I still managed to sneak in a story about Serve Yourself author Joe Yonan and his solo suppers. I also covered an intriguing conversation between Gabrielle Hamilton, who penned the popular Blood, Bones, and Butter, and New York Times writer Kim Severson (so much left unsaid). And I had a chat with Food Rules author Michael Pollan. On the film front, I reported on screenings of the documentary Corner Store, the pilot episode of the TV series Food Forward, the couple behind The Perennial Plate online video series, and Toast, the theatrical release of British author Nigel Slater’s memoir of the same name.

Snapshots from a Wild Onion farm dinner. Photos: Heidi Gross Sandvoll

9. Turning the infrequent original post here: On rare occasion I wrote a post that just appeared here — whether it was an homage to the humble potato, a report on a visit from Michelle Obama or the U.S. Surgeon General, a reflection on the simple pleasures of a country dinner, or a reprint of a previous post (this time with awesome images of my grandmother attached) on the joys of listening and leftovers.

10. Winning an award: I was delighted, surprised, and honored to receive this year’s Karola Saekel Craib Excellence in Food Journalism award in recognition of my food writing on LEK and elsewhere. The San Francisco chapter of Les Dames d’Escoffier, an international philanthropic society of female leaders in the culinary world, established the fellowship in honor of Karola Saekel Craib, the San Francisco Chronicle reporter whose writing helped to define food journalism as we know it. Saekel Craib died earlier this year.

The $2,000 award was presented by Saekel Craib’s daughter, Anne Craib, whom I connected with over excess backyard citrus and local gleaning efforts designed to share that surplus with those in need. The award check, which came with no strings attached, was immediately put to good use: I updated my website and bought my growing teen a bigger bed. Speaking of beds, compiling this list makes me feel tired. Time to take a nap.

And that, dear readers, was the year in food over here at Lettuce Eat Kale. Let me know below if you have a favorite LEK story from 2011.

Author Michael Pollan. Photo: Fran Collin

Sometimes a spoonful of sugar does, indeed, make the medicine go down. Though you won’t find that catchphrase in the just-released hardcover edition of Food Rules, Michael Pollan‘s best-selling little eater’s manual.

Food Rules does sport the sweetly whimsical and witty illustrations of well-known artist Maira Kalman, however. And the new book also boasts 19 new rules — many gleaned from eaters around the country that Pollan wished he had thought of and included the first time around.

Take two is again full of commonsense kitchen wisdom such as If you’re not hungry enough to eat an apple, you’re probably not hungry; No labels on the table; and When you eat real food, you don’t need rules.

The takeaway message: food need not be complicated, and the act of eating is as much about pleasure and communion as it is about nutrition and health. In other words: lighten up a little and enjoy your food.

In case you’ve been living under a compost pile, Pollan is a champion of small-scale, sustainable farming, humanely-raised livestock, and access to real food for all. A foe of what he calls highly-processed, edible food-like substances, Pollan’s food philosophy is famously simple: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

He is the author of five previous books including the popular In Defense of Food, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and Botany of Desire, and he writes regularly about food matters for The New York Times. Pollan is also the Knight Professor of Journalism at UC Berkeley and co-instructor of the Chez Panisse Foundation funded Edible Education 101 at Cal this fall.

Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world last year and everyone from students and grandmas to Oprah and the Obamas listen up when the mild-mannered man speaks out about corporate food, Big Ag, school food, factory farming, eating culture, and food safety.

We talked, briefly, following an Edible Education lecture given by former Berkeley School Lunch Lady Ann Cooper, whom Pollan introduced before taking her to dinner at — where else? — Chez Panisse. And we spoke again a few days later, at length, via phone.

Pollan, 56, dedicates his latest work to his mother, former New York Magazine style columnist Corky Pollan, “who always knew butter is better for you than margarine.” He lives in North Berkeley with his wife, the artist Judith Belzer. His formerly picky eater son, Isaac, recently dispatched to Wesleyan, misses family meals.

Why Food Rules Two?

I wanted to work on a more visual version of Food Rules to reach more people and continue the conversation that the first edition started. My wife and I saw an exhibit of Maira Kalman’s work at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco and Judith suggested we collaborate.

When you look at Maira’s work — like a painting of a Snickers bar on a pink ground or a framed collection of onion rings — it often manages to be poignant, funny, and sad, all at the same time.

Eating is important to her but she doesn’t take food too seriously and is not politically correct about it in the least. We’re already neurotic enough about our eating; I wanted this book to be fun while it covered some serious ground.

Can you give us some insider insights into Edible Education 101?

It’s been an interesting experience for me personally because I’ve not taught undergraduates before, though I should note my co-instructor Nikki Henderson is carrying most of the load as I’m technically on leave. I’ve found the students terrific; they ask questions that are sharp but well phrased and polite. In a community meeting with corporate food people you might expect to hear the Berkeley hiss, but there’s been none of that. They’re an engaged and impressive group.

We’ve learned things too. We might have had a more effective dialogue in the case of the corporate food lecture, which included Wal-Mart, if it hadn’t been webcast. That had an inhibiting effect on the conversation. I’m also used to three-hour classes; these 90-minute ones go by really fast. I think they work best when we have just one guest so we can really drill down and expound on the issues. At this stage of the semester I wouldn’t be sorry if one of our guests had to cancel just so we had some time for reviewing and contextualizing the material with the students.

And, it has to be said, what a gift this is from the Chez Panisse Foundation to the community as well as the students. The list of speakers and the subjects covered is impressive.

Has interest in the food movement peaked in the popular culture?

It’s hard to know where we are right now but I don’t think so. I remember when I was trying to finish The Omnivore’s Dilemma, published in 2006, I thought I was coming to the subject a little late. It took me forever to finish that book. I do feel a sense of urgency to keep writing about food. We’re just beginning to see the impact of our food choices on health care and insurance costs — obesity, diabetes, and heart disease are soaring — and we need to keep the pressure on the government and corporations for change. If anything, I only see the conversation deepening, and that’s especially encouraging given the economic situation since 2008.

Do you ever want to write about something other than food?

I haven’t always written about food but I find it’s a good place to talk about other things like the environment, the economy, health, culture, and politics. Food is a very big tent as subjects go. That’s why it’s held my interest.

How — and what — do you cook?

I make simple food. I grill more nights than I don’t and my wife and I typically cook together. We work well in the kitchen together. One of us makes the main and the other the sides. We’re fortunate to work from home so we’re able to make dishes that require slow cooking like braises and soups.

Some of our readers view you as an elitist foodie and roll their eyes at such stories as your New York Times Magazine piece, The 36-Hour Dinner Party. Is that unfair?

I reject that characterization while I’m sensitive to the fact that not everybody has access to good food. I appreciate that food and class are intimately tied: that story is set in Napa, which implies a lot of leisure in certain circles. But I don’t think Americans should be afraid of aestheticism; as a culture some times we can have an aversion to pleasure.

To eat healthily in this country — by which I mean consuming food that contributes both to the eater’s health as well as to the health of the environment — costs more than it does to eat poorly. That situation is a public policy problem. We need farm policies that will correct this imbalance, so that healthy calories can compete with unhealthy ones.

There is no question that there is an elite strand within the food movement, but a lot of social change movements in this country — I’m thinking of abolitionists, women’s suffrage, and civil rights as examples — have been started by the affluent because they have the leisure and resources to do so.

#76: Place a Bouquet of Flowers on the Table and Everything Will Taste Twice as Good. Illustration: Copyright (c) Maira Kalman 2011. Reprinted with permission from The Penguin Press from FOOD RULES by Michael Pollan.

As a recognized leader in the food movement how do you handle the rock-star status?

A sense of humor helps, so does remembering that this type of attention is fleeting. And regardless of what people say about my books, the next morning I still have to get up and face the page and come up with sentences I like. All that other stuff, doesn’t help with writing, which can be incredibly hard.

What’s the subject of your next book?

It’s about the transformation of food through cooking methods such as baking, fermentation, and cooking with liquids or heat. So it focuses on the science of cooking, the classical elements; I’ve been doing research about fire, for instance. It should be out in early 2013.

What gives you hope on the food front?

I see movement happening all around the country, like grass-fed beef in supermarkets and young people taking up farming. I’m asked to speak in places like Troy, New York, Cleveland, and Lubbock, Texas, that’s new. They aren’t your typical food towns. People in their 20s are as engaged with this issue as their parents, whether it’s for their health, the environment, or both. I have a lot of faith that as consumers we can change things by voting with our forks.

This post originally appeared on Berkeleyside and was republished on Civil Eats.

You might also like:

Michael Pollan Talks Food Rules at the Ferry Building
Nikki Henderson: On the Frontlines of Edible Education
Reassurance for Parents of Picky Eaters

Food Day, October 24th, highlights the good, bad, and ugly of the way we consume food in this country.

Can Food Day, on October 24th, do for the growing food movement what Earth Day did for the nascent environmental movement back in 1970?

The organizers, the Center for Science in the Public Interest in D.C., certainly hope so. A national, grassroots campaign, Food Day is designed to celebrate what we eat while drawing attention to the need to overhaul this country’s food system from farm to fork. In this way it is similar to Earth Day which sparked widespread interest in the fragile nature of our planet.

Events planned for Monday, including in Berkeley and around the Bay Area, will highlight the good, bad, and ugly of the way we consume food in this country.

Simply put, how we grow, transport, process, market, and eat is not sustainable for the environment or our health, said Michael F. Jacobson, executive director of CSPI and the creator of Food Day in a recent piece for The Atlantic. Dietary diseases such as obesity, diabetes, and heart attacks are rising at alarming rates. Industrially raised meat sucks up energy, pollutes the land and water, and is cruel to beast and worker alike.

Even in places like Berkeley where local, seasonal, organic, sustainable, and fresh food is available in abundance, too many people lack access to good grub and/or go hungry or malnourished.We are a nation, to quote UC Berkeley visiting scholar Raj Patel, of the “stuffed and starved.”

Food Day, whose advisory board includes Michael Pollan and Alice Waters, local heavy hitters on the edible revolution front, seeks to mobilize citizens to step up efforts to reform what’s wrong with our food system (hello Farm Bill). The campaign has six admirable goals:

1. Reduce diet-related disease by promoting healthy food.

2. Support sustainable farms and cut subsidies to agribusiness.

3. Expand access to food and end hunger.

4. Protect the environment and animals by reforming factory farms.

5. Promote health by curbing junk-food marketing to kids.

6. Obtain fair pay and safe conditions for food and farm workers.

The Berkeley City Council voted to proclaim October 24th Food Day, and to adopt the Seattle Farm Bill Principles. This is a set of six guiding principles that could serve as a framework for policy discussions around the renewal in 2012 of the federal Farm Bill, the primary piece of legislation that determines the nation’s food and agriculture policy.

“Sometimes it takes action at the local level to help to create change at the federal level,” said Ecology Center Executive Director Martin Bourque. “This may be a case — as with the Kyoto Protocol and climate change — where cities lead the way with innovative government strategies. We need a Food Bill not a Farm Bill.”

On Monday, the Ecology Center will mark Food Day with a tour of local women-owned farms for its members, as part of a series of activities in honor of what many hope will become an annual event.

Food Day activities will get major play in and around the UC Berkeley campus on Monday, said Kristen Rasmussen, a workplace wellness dietician for faculty and staff at Cal who serves as the university’s Food Day coordinator. Highlights include a BYO Lunch Picnic. (Read the full list of events.)

Speakers include Food Day co-organizer and UC alum Lilia Smelkova and Appetite for Profit author Michele Simon. “This is an excellent opportunity to talk about what’s wrong with our broken food system,” said Simon. “But we don’t want to do a lot of complaining. We also want to talk about solutions and what individuals can do to improve food for themselves and their communities, both locally and nationally. The time is ripe to organize around this issue.”

The Berkeley Student Food Collective plans on hosting a sandwich-making event during the day (11 am-4 pm) at its storefront at 2440 Bancroft across from campus, and in the evening will co-host Edible Occupation 101: Careers in Sustainable Food and Agriculture, a panel discussion featuring Sprouts Cooking Club founder Karen Rogers, local farmer Esperanza Pallana, and urban agriculture planner Nathan McClintock.

Every Monday the student stand The Local sells fresh organic produce on campus. Photo: Courtesy The Local

The Local, the student-run organic produce stand that is on campus every Monday (Upper Sproul Plaza, 10 am-2 pm) will be open for business as usual and will also distribute free samples of Cheese Board wholegrain bread.

“Though the food movement is growing, many still see it as exclusive,” said The Local’s Mickey Davis, a 21-year-old senior in the Nutrition Sciences Department. ”Not everyone is aware of the peril our food system is in, and a dangerous number of people do not understand the severity of the situation we are in health-wise, environmentally, or economically, and how the food system is closely related to that. It is important to invest time, celebration, and awareness to these issues on Food Day, to help spread the word to others who may otherwise not know.”

While Berkeley has much to celebrate on Food Day, there’s still plenty of work ahead on the food front, even in this food-focused and food-forward town.

“We can take pride in being early adopters as far as farmers’ markets and CSAs, and for being leaders on school food reform, and on the forefront of community gardens and urban agriculture,” said Bourque at the Ecology Center. “But even in Berkeley, with its very advanced alternative food system, we have large numbers of people dealing with diet-related illnesses and huge disparities still when it comes to access and affordability. We need to keep fighting to make good food available to every person in our community.”

This post originally appeared on Berkeleyside. You might also like:

Berkeley Student Food Collective: Education Through Eating
Sprouts Cooking Club: Growing the Next Generation of Chefs
Author Raj Patel’s Food Revolution: From Crisps to Salad
Alice Waters’ 40 Year Campaign for Good Food
Michael Pollan Talks Food Rules at Ferry Building
Berkeley Farmers’ Market Man, Ben Feldman
Cheese Board Collective: 40 Years in the Gourmet Ghetto

Nikki Henderson strives to keep it real in a new course at UC Berkeley this fall called Edible Education 101. Photo: Rick Gilbert

People seem to have an insatiable appetite for food matters right now. Case in point: the public tickets for Edible Education 101 at UC Berkeley were snapped up in 12 minutes on Monday, according to a tweet from Alice Waters, who played a key role in bringing the curriculum to the university.

The 13-week course, co-taught by J-school professor and The Omnivore’s Dilemma author Michael Pollan and Nikki Henderson, the executive director of People’s Grocery, a food justice organization in West Oakland, will examine the rise and future of the food movement. Student enrollment for the one-semester course also filled within minutes after it was listed online, as Berkeleyside reported earlier this month.

Why such interest? The class offers undergrads, grad students, and regular folk a chance to critique current food systems and dissect food politics with Pollan, Henderson, and Waters, as well as a slew of other big names in the food movement, including Marion Nestle and Eric Schlosser. The course kicks off with a lecture by Slow Food founder Carlo Petrini on August 30. The class also coincides with the 40th anniversary celebration of Chez Panisse restaurant.

“UC Berkeley is my alma mater so I feel a real connection to the institution,” Waters explained to Berkeleyside earlier this week. “The opportunity arose to develop this course and we pulled this program together quickly. We also wanted to show our support for the university and public education.” Waters’ Chez Panisse Foundation (soon to be renamed The Edible Schoolyard Project) is footing the bill for the fall semester course to the tune of $30,000.

“I hope that students will have a stronger grasp of the concept that what we eat has consequences for our health, culture and the environment,” Waters said, adding that she hopes that the course will continue beyond the fall.

If Waters is the iconic idealist and Pollan the affable academic, Henderson is the unapologetic activist. She’s also young (26), African-American, and spends her work days at a nonprofit devoted to dealing with food security issues for low-income people of color.

Prior to coming to People’s Grocery 18 months ago, she worked for Slow Food USA and Green for All, the environmental organization co-founded by Van Jones. Not surprisingly, Henderson, who grew up with seven older foster brothers and two blood brothers in L.A., brings a different perspective and sensibility to the Berkeley bourgeois food scene.

Berkeleyside recently met Henderson for lunch — in Oakland — to learn more about why she decided to come to the table with Waters and Pollan.

Members of the People's Grocery team meet with Coalition of Immokalee Workers.

How did your involvement with this course come about?

Well, the Chez Panisse Foundation came to me and asked me if I’d be interested in doing it. This class was important to me because it’s an opportunity to have a real exploration of the issues of race, power, class and privilege in relation to food, which is something we do every day at People’s Grocery. When Chez Panisse approached me I told them I was only interested in teaching the course if we hit those bases and a good third of the curriculum does that.

It was also important for me that people speak for themselves. The whole class could have been taught by people who have written books about other people’s experiences. But we’ll have practitioners like the Coalition of Immokalee Workers [immigrant farm workers who have brought about historic changes for tomato farmers in Florida], for instance, who will come and tell their stories themselves. It’s important for the students to experience that, because one of the dynamics of not having privilege is that you don’t get to tell your own story. Those with means and access get to spend their time telling your story.

I wanted to ground the syllabus in the struggle for food justice and food security. There wouldn’t need to be a movement if there weren’t deep injustices happening and divisions within the movement. This college course explores the complexity of these issues within the context of the food movement.

How involved have Waters and Pollan been in shaping the curriculum?

Alice Waters really laid the groundwork for this to happen and her message is so consistent that you know what she’s going to say, so she just sort of gave me her marching orders and made a lot of suggestions, but then she just leaves it in your hands.

Michael wanted to make sure that the course was academically rigorous and that it involved deep, critical thought. He wanted the mix of practitioners and academics. He didn’t want it to be just a good conversation about the food movement but that there was a component that explored the complex question: what is there to do now?

They both made it clear since the beginning that they wanted me to feel it was very much my course too. And they’ve been generous with their time and expertise. Michael’s been coaching me through putting the lecture series together. One piece of advice he gave me: don’t have the same format every week or people will fall asleep.

Can you tell us a little about your personal connection to food?

We grew up eating very healthy food. We ate home-cooked meals that consistently included a grain, a protein, and a vegetable, usually something like brown rice, baked chicken, and steamed broccoli. My mom was a kind of ’70s hippie, though I don’t think she’d classify herself as such, she is vegetarian and has a deep interest in health and nutrition, and she passed on those good habits to her children.

My great aunt and uncle were diabetic amputees. My aunt has the disease and my grandfather, who is no longer alive, almost lost his feet to the condition. With this exposure to diet-related diseases it hit me early on: what you eat is not something to play with.

What can young people interested in the food movement learn from those who have worked on this cause for decades?

There’s a lot of context that younger people need, of what’s actually happened so far in the food movement, like the current middle-class mainstream food movement is very much centered in an older struggle for food security and it’s important to have that context. You need to be grounded in the history. I’ve only been in the food movement the past three or four years and I’m well aware of how much there is to learn about what’s happened historically, so we in this younger generation can be truly effective in bringing about change. I want to soak up every bit of that in this course.

Is this the right time for this class?

It should have happened two years ago because the window of opportunity is closing. The mass media switches from one thing to the next pretty quickly and food has been hot for the last two years and it’s probably only going to be hot for another year or two and then it’s going to fade into the background. I’m going to do everything I can to move some things along while I can.

This post originally appeared on Berkeleyside and was republished on Civil Eats and The Bay Citizen.

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The People’s Grocery Staff. Photo: Asual Aswad

A full-service grocery store may finally come to the people of West Oakland. It looks like the People’s Community Market, a long-anticipated mid-size retailer in West Oakland, may be a step closer to raising the capital it needs to break ground with the announcement today by First Lady Michelle Obama about a new food financing initiative designed to increase access to healthy, affordable food in underserved communities in this state.

That’s the local take away from a White House press conference Wednesday, where FLOTUS announced that The California FreshWorks Fund, a $200 million public-private partnership loan fund and a project of The California Endowment, will help bring healthy grocers to food deserts or areas that lack a grocery store. The endowment, a private statewide health foundation established to expand access to affordable, quality health care for communities in need, has been joined by prominent investors on the project, including NCB FSB, Kaiser Permanente, and JP Morgan Chase.

The goal of the fund is to provide loans at or below market rates to encourage new stores in Californian food deserts and it is expected to create or retain some 6000 jobs in the state. The First Lady also announced commitments from large chain retailers, including Walgreens and Walmart, to open or expand 1,500 stores in food deserts around the country. According to U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates, 23.5 million Americans– including 6.5 million children–live in low-income neigborhoods that lack stores likely to sell affordable and nutritious foods.

“The FreshWorks funding is so applicable to what we do and it’s a real acknowledgement of the work we’ve done for nine years in the community to be invited to this event,” said People’s Grocery executive director Nikki Henderson, who was summoned to the White House for the announcement. Since 2002, People’s Grocery has provided food education, training, and access to residents of West Oakland, including cooking classes, nutrition programs, urban agriculture instruction, a mobile grocery truck and a CSA delivery dubbed the “Grub Box.”

The loans will be available to food retailers of all sizes and types. That includes independent stores such as People’s Community Market, which is in talks with investors to raise $3 million, said Brahm Ahmadi, People’s Grocery founder and the CEO of the People’s Community Market, which was spun off from the group’s educational arm last year.

Current plans call for a 12,000-square-foot full-service, environmentally-friendly retail space serving low-income residents in an abandoned 1950s-era shopping center at the corner of West Grand and Market Street. West Oakland, which has some 30,000 residents has no full-service grocery. By comparison, the affluent Oakland enclave of Rockridge has one such store for every 4,333 people.

Henderson and Ahmadi are confident of securing significant assistance from the new initiative. “FreshWorks is a good fit for our nonprofit, community-based model,” added Henderson. “It’s not enough to just locate a grocery store in an under-served community — you have to engage people in a deep way about how to have a healthy community and that’s what we do. This kind of funding can go a long way to solving both food access and food insecurity issues, which are not the same thing.”

The organizations are well known to The California Endowment. “We’re very familiar with their operations and programs and the great work they do in their community,” said Tina Castro, director of mission related investment for the endowment. “While they still need to go through the application process like everyone else this is just the kind of creative, innovative business approach we want to support.” Castro added that the Bay Area is a hot bed of ideas and activities to address food access issues and that other local organizations are also applying to FreshWorks.

Eliminating food deserts from the U.S. landscape in seven years is a major goal of the First Lady’s Let’s Move! campaign, which began after the White House Task Force on Childhood Obesity identified improving access to healthy, affordable foods as one of the keys to ending childhood obesity within a generation.

Mrs. Obama’s announcement closely follows widespread coverage of a large study on food deserts and food access published last week in the Archives of Internal Medicine. In the study of three cities, including Oakland, researchers collected data on the grocery shopping habits of more than 5,000 people for 15 years and concluded that greater supermarket availability wasn’t generally related to the quality of dietary intake or the consumption of fruits and vegetables.

But as Henderson, food access and food security advocates, and even the senior author of the study have explained, plopping a supermarket or two in a neighborhood that has long gone without isn’t going to change residents’ eating habits overnight. Education, encouragement, outreach, and training are all vital to help people raised on a fast food or junk food diet make the switch to more healthful eating, she said.

Of course, it’s tough to compete with fast-food joints, corner stores, and gas stations that peddle cheap fried food, sodas, and highly-processed sweets and snacks. But Ahmadi points out there’s a misperception around demand for healthy food in historically overlooked urban areas. “People who aren’t familiar with West Oakland or its residents assume that people here aren’t interested in eating good quality food,” he said. “They think these residents just want to eat junk. But what we see and hear is that people do want healthy, affordable food choices like people have in middle-class or suburban communities. Just because there’s a lack of fresh food doesn’t mean there isn’t demand.”

While small, health-oriented stores are beginning to find homes in West Oakland, including Mandela Foods Cooperative, an owner-worker grocery, and the recently opened Produce Pro, there remains a thirst for more than one mid-size retailer to set up shop in the area before it can shake off its food desert designation.

Today’s announcement may mean that West Oakland will feel less parched in the future.

This post originally appeared on KQED’s Bay Area Bites and excerpted on Civil Eats.

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Michelle Obama and Alice Waters: Let’s Do Breakfast

FLOTUS, also known as First Lady Michelle Obama, is scheduled to have breakfast at a political fundraiser tomorrow in Berkeley, where slow food legend Alice Waters and friends will whip up something seasonal, sustainable, local, organic, and, let’s hope, delicious — since supporters are forking out $1,000-$25,000 a piece to break bread (an Acme garlic loaf, the first from the Edible Schoolyard no less) with the Commander-in-Chief’s wife.

Waters is a fan of Obama’s efforts to get folks to eat well and move more. “Her dedication to children’s healthy eating has been an inspiration to all of us here at Chez Panisse,” said an email from Alice herself. “The menu will be a celebration of these ideals, featuring organic ingredients from local farmers and purveyors around the Bay Area.” Obama, of course, values Waters’ impressive work to improve school lunch around the country and champion school cooking and gardening programs through her Chez Panisse Foundation.

The woman who recently unveiled the fed’s new food icon My Plate and strives to combat childhood obesity through her Let’s Move campaign is in the Bay Area to raise money for hubbie’s 2012 re-election campaign and the Democratic National Committee. The event will be held at the toney Claremont Hotel, Club, and Spa on the Berkeley-Oakland border, a local landmark, known for its regal white facade, killer views, and expensive club membership.

The hotel has been spiffing itself up in anticipation of Obama’s visit, wrote Berkeleyside, which noted the recent appearance of two raised planting beds near one Claremont entrance. The post prompted one resident to write: “Will the Claremont also be hiring cute, chubby children to conspicuously exercise in areas Michelle Obama might pass through?”

The Claremont Hotel's modest attempt at growing greens./Photo: Sarah Henry

Lettuce Eat Kale swung by the hotel yesterday and can report that one bed boasts new tomato plants, another starters, including radish, carrot, and parsley. But who among us hasn’t tidied up a bit before important guests come over? And when I interviewed executive chef Josh Thomsen a few months ago he mentioned plans for a veggie patch in close proximity to the hotel’s fine-dining Meritage restaurant. Fair enough.

No doubt the hotel is a flurry of activity today, as an army of folks clean and polish in anticipation of the event. There’s something else they might want to pay attention to. The wording on the sign outside the hotel, which doesn’t, ah, seem in keeping with the First Lady’s or Water’s message of (mostly) eating home-cooked meals made from scratch:

And, while we’re on the subject of staying on message: What happened to plans for another fundraising breakfast event the same morning at the Golden State Warriors’ practice center in downtown Oakland? Both breakfast events, keep in mind, are being hosted by Oakland politicians Congresswoman Barbara Lee and Mayor Jean Quan.

The basketball facility is in the heart of a city where food deserts and hunger are a significant problem, and children struggle with alarming rates of early-onset diabetes and other dietary health problems. And Oakland doesn’t have an Alice Waters in the schools or Berkeley’s enviable cooking and garden program. School food advocates there face an uphill battle to bring quality fresh food to children.

Maybe the event got cancelled due to logistical or security reasons. Regardless, local residents, like James Berk, the young owner-member of the Mandela Foods Cooperative, might have welcomed knowing that Michelle was in town, fighting the good food fight on their behalf, let alone being offered a place at the table.

Over in Berkeley most folks will likely grumble about traffic delays due to her security detail. And club members at the Claremont? They’ll probably just want to make sure they get their early morning swim, tennis game, or gym workout in before the First Lady swoops in for, perhaps, free-range eggs with artisan goat cheese and freshly foraged greens.

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Raj Patel (left) is fêted by Bill Schechner at the recent Berkeley Public Library Foundation's Annual Authors Dinner. Photo: Richard Friedman.

Raj Patel is a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley’s Center for African Studies, an honorary research fellow at the School of Development Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa, and a fellow at The Institute for Food and Development Policy, also known as Food First, in Oakland.

Such affiliations allow the academic activist to hang out with his brethren in both camps. At the same time it affords the Oxford, Cornell, and London School of Economics educated writer the time and freedom to turn out newspaper think pieces and serious tomes on weighty topics served with a healthy dollop of his trademark wit. (Perhaps a legacy of his British upbringing, Patel has a fondness for Monty Python).

His first book, the well-received Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System, documents the toll on human health of industrial agriculture’s global food production.

His second, The New York Times bestseller, The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy, chronicles the failures of the free-market economy, the hidden costs of consumption (see him discuss $200 hamburgers on the Colbert Report) and the social movements seeking to fix the system around the world.

Bizarrely, while plugging his second book, Patel, 38, developed a cult following of fans who claimed he was, um, The Messiah. This title came courtesy of an obscure religious group that refers to God by the name Maitreya. Devotees flocked to Patel’s readings and flooded his email. He debunked his exalted status in the press, joked about it on his blog (Monty Python fans can guess how), and now prefers not to comment on the strange matter.

A recent U.S. citizen, he was honored — with a slew of other authors — at the Berkeley Public Library Foundation’s Annual Authors Dinner in February. We met in San Francisco where Patel lives with his wife and young son.

What was you relationship to food like growing up?

My parents — my mother was born in Kenya, my father in Fiji — ran a corner shop in London, so I grew up on a diet of salty and sweet crap. I was literally the kid in the candy store. Britain’s contribution to cuisine then seemed to solely be its incredible selection of crisps [aka, chips]. I was fond of cheese and onion crisps. There were even hedgehog-flavored crisps. I was a fussy eater; I’d only eat roti smothered in ketchup.

When did that start to change?

When I was working on Stuffed and Starved. Prior to that I seemed to survive by chugging Red Bull. I met people in Brazil, India, Italy, Senegal and elsewhere for whom food wasn’t just about survival; they took eating seriously. It was about growing, sharing, and cooking together. That blew me away, it was like I was eating for the first time.

Sooner or later everything seems to come back to food with you. True?

Yes, because food ties everything together that we should care about and that is currently in crisis  — the environment, climate, wages, labor, poverty, health and so on. It’s about what we need to survive on this planet, the way we interact with the earth, and the way we replenish or don’t replenish the earth. It’s something primal that unites us all.

Raj Patel explains food sovereignty on Cooking Up a Story.

Your books detail a lot of wrongs around the world. But you also see reasons to be hopeful, particularly in the food arena. Why?

The food movement is one of the most vibrant areas of social change in the U.S. and elsewhere around the world right now. The concept of food sovereignty is a democratic way to seriously address some of the big issues of the day. The farmers and landless people known as La Via Campesina, are an inspiring global example. Close to home, the Oakland Food Policy Council — local doesn’t have to mean parochial — are doing good work. It’s an exciting time to be organizing around food.

Are there academics at UC Berkeley you admire?

Many. The professor of soil science, Ignacio Chapela, because he flagged the extent to which the university was willing to sell off some academic freedoms in exchange for a large donation by the corporation Novartis.

In the Department of Geography people like Gillian Hart, for her work on South Africa.

Michael Pollan in the journalism faculty because his food writing largely paved the way for people like myself. I’m grateful for his work.

What’s next?

I’m researching a project about the future. It’s early days yet. Food will probably be in there somewhere.

What do you like to cook?

I make a mean salad.

This post originally appeared on Berkeleyside.

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Yesterday on Bay Area Bites we highlighted the year’s food news in food safety, D.I.Y. food, food politics, school food, and street food.

The top ten for 2010 continues:

The crew from Phat Beets Produce, a food justice collective in Oakland. Photo: Zachary Matthews

6. Food Security

Late in the year in a cover story on class Newsweek explored the growing gap between the haves and have nots on the food front. “The Dinner Divide” noted that we are a nation where Gourmet Ghettos and food deserts co-exist, often in close proximity in places like the Bay Area. The sad truth is that while many of us indulge our “passion” for local, organic chow, an increasingly larger group of Americans simply don’t have access to enough healthy food to eat. Meanwhile, another European is attempting to help Americans in need feed themselves, namely Spanish native and James Beard Award-winning chef Jose Andres, who heads up the nonprofit DC Central Kitchen, which offers professional culinary training for formerly homeless, addicted, or imprisoned adults.

Local angle: Actor Dan Hoyle skewered, among other things, hipster San Franciscans obsession with pristine produce with a politically-correct pedigree in his solo show at The Marsh The Real Americans. Meanwhile, Phat Beets Produce, a volunteer-run collective, launched a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) box, nicknamed the “Beet Box,” in Oakland, to help under-supported small farmers and get produce to people who don’t live near a farmers’ market.

Eataly in NYC. Photo: Megan Gordon

7. New York Food

Lest this list be accused of being too parochial, let’s turn our attention to food news out of New York City this year. There was lots, much of it of a legislative nature. Depending on your perspective, Mayor Michael Bloomberg is either a crusader for the people’s health or a publicly-funded no-fun-nik: The city took a stand on sodium, introduced letter grades to evaluate restaurant cleanliness, tried to prevent food stamps recipients from using benefits to sip soda, (a controversial move even among anti-hunger and public health advocates) and outlawed alcoholic energy drink Four Loko. Furthermore, a calorie count initiative in restaurants begun in the Big Apple went national on menus across the country this year.

There was fun stuff too: Hello Eataly, a high-end food emporium boasting all things Italian, launched late summer by the city’s reigning food Mafia, covered in a photographic homage recently on Bay Area Bites by Megan Gordon.

Local angle: San Franciscans welcomed Manhattan transplant Anthony Mangieri and his much-lauded Una Pizza Napolatana to town.

Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Eating Animals. Photo: Wendy Goodfriend

8. Animal Food

Meat mattered this year. The culinary conversation among carnivores, omnivores, vegetarians, and vegans continued as people pondered whether they could morally eat sustainably, humanely-raised animals and wrestled with conflicted or confused feelings about carnal consumption. Now more than ever how much and what kind of meat we eat reflects our ethics, environmental values, economic status, as well as class, culture, and convenience.

That said, butchers made a comeback, hosting cleaving parties from coast to coast. Meanwhile,the Meatless Monday campaign, which asks folks to forgo meat once a week for health and the environment, garnered the endorsement of celebrity chef Mario Batali, long-known for serving plates brimming with animal protein.

And in books and online vegetarian gals chronicled their carnal adventures as they discovered the joys of the flesh.

Then, just as the year drew to a close, New York Magazine announced that vegetables are the new meat, despite significant evidence to the contrary. Make of that what you will.

Local angle: A queen of vegetarian cuisine, East Bay resident Mollie Katzen, came out with a cookbook that included meat dishes, a decision she found herself explaining in every interview about Get Cooking.

While across the bridge the butcher’s shop in Bernal Heights Avedano’s Holly Park Market, run by self-taught female butchers, typifies the new-style yet old-fashioned meat market, offering cleaving classes using traditional tools and selling only local, sustainable meats. And the Oakland Unified School District hopped on the Meatless Monday bandwagon.

Photo: Stephanie Stiavetti

9. Sweet Food

Now to dessert (with all due respect to the First Lady): Move over cupcakes macarons are the new trend treat.

The Wall Street Journal reported on French fretting that these formerly high-end confections (not to be confused with chewy coconut sweets with a similar spelling known as macaroons) are finding their way onto shelves at such mainstream American stores as Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s. The soft, sandwich-like cookie, which resembles a pastel-hued minature hamburger, has also been popping up in patisseries and restaurant menus around the country. Natch, the blogosphere weighed in, with negative reviews for the meringue-style pastries on offer at Starbucks, and an amusing update that cupcakes are the new macarons in Paris. Go figure. For you D.I.Y.ers: Pastry chef Hisako Ogita’s I Love Macarons details how to make these crunchy and chewy morsels at home.

Local angle: These dainty nibbles can be found in Bay Area bakeries including Miette in the Ferry Building, Paulette in Hayes Valley, Pamplemousse in Redwood City, and Bouchon Bakery in Yountville.

Bay Area Bites blogger Stephanie Stiavetti sung the praises of these egg white, ground almonds, and sugar concoctions in a week’s worth of recipe posts on her own blog.

10. Virtual Food

Social media and cyberspace continued to impact food consumption. As noted previously (see item #5 in Part One), Twitter + new wave food trucks = content consumers and cooks. Everyone seemed very app-y happy, with Mark Bittman, the Food Network, and even Gourmet (R.I.P.) embracing the new technology. Not all old-school media, though, marveled at the development. (Ruth Reichl, writing on Twitter, ironically, called the move a “pity.”) Regardless, cooking, eating, and drinking apps found fans: There are apps for wine enthusiasts, environmentally-friendly eaters, and ethnic edible adventurers, among other food-focused iFinds. And, although some people doubted it would come to pass, cookbooks made the leap to ecookbooks in a big way in 2010.

Local angle: Budding Bay Area food businesses turned to social media to cash up their new edible enterprises. Examples include Awaken Cafe in Oakland, and an olive oil press and cheese-making venture that utilized Kickstarter to, well, kick start their companies in Berkeley. Early ecookbook adapters include Marin-based chef Eric Gower.

And over at 7×7 food editor Sara Deseran wondered out loud what a lot of local food writers have been thinking: With the explosion in new media — think Yelpers, bloggers, and Tweeters — is San Francisco suffering from a gluttony of information on all things edible?

What say you readers: Are there too many citizen scribes (not to mention a healthy helping of professional writers) weighing in on the minutia of every meal made in this city? Or does this town have an endless appetite for food news?

And that, folks, was the year in food.

This post originally appeared on KQED’s Bay Are Bites.

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Food, glorious, food. It’s that time of year people: Bay Area Bites brings you the best in food news for 2010.

In this two-part package, we look at the national trends and topics that sizzled over the past 12 months and serve up some local flavor on the side.

Feel free to weigh in with your own edible highlights from the year that was.

In no particular order:

1. Food Safety

From previous years we’ve learned that what we eat can make us sick (tainted peanut butter, beef gone bad, and salmonella-laced spinach ring any bells?).

This year’s food alerts: A massive egg recall and lingering questions about health risks associated with Gulf seafood.

Thankfully, late in the year Congress passed the Food Safety Modernization Act to protect consumers from food products hiding harmful poisons or pathogens like E. coli and salmonella, a food policy coup that greatly strengthens the Food and Drug Administration’s ability to keep unsafe food off supermarket shelves and restaurant plates by expanding the agency’s recall abilities and access to records.

Local angle: Bay Area-based media consultant Naomi Starkman kept the spotlight on potentially dangerous foods for sale in reports on Civil Eats and Huffington Post, including a story about a Consumers’ Report study that found packaged salad laden with fecal bacteria.

2. D.I.Y. Food

Age-old practices such as canning, jamming, foraging, fermenting, growing and gleaning are suddenly new (and cool) again. Chickens are the au courant backyard animal of choice. And classes in the Domestic Arts all the rage.

The New York Times Magazine traveled west to take pretty pictures of urban homesteaders from the Bay Area, The Washington Post chronicled the canning trend long strong here, and Vogue got down and dirty with city farmer Novella Carpenter, who donned a pink cardigan in a concession to fashion for a photo shoot with the stylish mag’s scribe Hamish Bowles. (Carpenter seemed to pop up everywhere last year, including on KQED.)

Local angle: In addition to Novella Carpenter’s Ghost Town Farm in Oakland, the Bay Area D.I.Y. brigade created a kind of cottage industry, hawking their homemade wares at venues like SF Underground Market and East Bay Underground Market, as well as the Pop-Up General Store.

And they wrote about it too; notable D.I.Y. books this year included Rachel Saunders’ tome The Blue Chair Jam Cookbook, Napa forager Connie Green‘s The Wild Table (featured on The California Report), and D.I.Y. Delicious by Vanessa Barrington. Online, San Francisco’s Sean Timberlake launched Punk Domestics, a curated space for D.I.Y.-driven cyber self-publishers.

Classes in baking, brewing, beekeeping, bottling, animal husbandry and more were in high demand at venues like 18 Reasons, Urban Kitchen SF, the Institute of Urban Homesteading, and BioFuel Oasis, a worker-owned cooperative begun by Carpenter and friends.

3. Food Politics

Obama Farmers: Photo collage by Roger Doiron at Eat the View

In an era of identity politics and culture wars, food fights join the fray. What you eat (and what you choose not to consume) speaks volumes about your political persuasions. First Lady Michelle Obama, dubbed America’s foodie-in-chief by The Atlantic, talked about ending obesity and increasing activity with her Let’s Move initiative. She also championed growing food and farmers’ markets — and brought to her kitchen top chefs like Sam Kass. On the other hand, Rush Limbaugh mounted a modern-day Twinkie defense (this time citing the fact that a man lost weight on a diet consisting mostly of the infamous junk food as evidence that all nutrition science is bogus). Sarah Palin showed up at a Pennsylvania school bearing cookies and dished up s’mores at a diner in a calculated countermove to a Michelle Obama dessert comment. Professional rager Glenn Beck even weighed in. Sigh…

The task of putting the food wars in context fell to ex-Washington Post writer Jane Black, who has moved to Huntington, West Virginia with new husband editor Brent Cunningham to see what happens to the community’s eating habits now that celebrity chef Jamie Oliver has skipped town.

Local angle: Taking the happy out of Happy Meals: Outgoing SF Mayor Gavin Newsom vetoed a Board of Supervisors ban on plastic toys in fast-food meals. But the supes struck back, ensuring that no child in the city will be tempted to eat junk food simply to get their hands on a cheap trinket that will likely break before you can say Big Mac.

4. School Food

Jamie Oliver Photo: Colleen Laffey for Food Revolution

For the majority of schoolchildren around the country school lunch sucks. Big time.

But change is coming. This year, Jamie Oliver brought his Food Revolution to the States, an anonymous teacher chronicled what she ate every day in her school cafeteria in her blog Fed Up With Lunch, and President Obama signed into law the much-anticipated Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010. The legislation bans some junk food, and gives a small, though historically significant, six-cent increase per child per lunch (the first such boost in the reimbursement rate in 30 years), and there may be more lunch money tucked inside the bill to boot.

Local angle: Veteran school food reformer Alice Waters claimed victory for her Edible Schoolyard model following the results of a study on Berkeley’s School Lunch Initiative from University of California at Berkeley researchers.

5. Street Food

Chairman Bao street food truck in San Francisco

Fueled by Twitter feeds, gourmet grub on the go continued to attract a growing following around the country as food trucks hit the streets in increasingly more legitimate ways, boasting inspired names and bright colors, to wit The Best Wurst in Austin, Big Gay Ice Cream Truck in New York City, and Chairman Bao in San Francisco.

Food trucks went a step further in size, too, with the introduction of bustaurants, stripped former public transit buses reconfigured as a mobile kitchen, and, in some cases, even offering eat-in seating.  In L.A. the double decker Worldfare dished up ethnic eats, while closer to home Le Truc in San Francisco served up gastro-pub fare, and Diamond Lil debuted to a small crowd and a camera crew.

Los Angeles officials announced it may regulate mobile carts, a move that could see other cities follow suit.

Local angle: With mild-mannered accountant Matt Cohen at the helm, the mobile food fest Off-the-Grid launched in Fort Mason and sprouted several neighborhood locations, including Golden Gate Park, McCoppin Hub, Civic Center, and UN Plaza. Officials in San Francisco passed reforms making it easier and cheaper for mobile vendors to serve street eats, while in the East Bay the city of Emeryville saw pushback from local brick-and-mortar businesses and Berkeley residents bemoaned missing out on most of the mobile food fun (for now).

Check back tomorrow for the rest of the best of 2010 food news.

This post originally appeared on KQED’s Bay Area Bites.

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