By any measure, American are packing on the pounds at an unprecedented rate. Photos: Courtesy HBO

HBO has a history of tackling serious American health-care crises. In recent years, the cable network has taken on addiction and Alzheimer’s to much critical acclaim. And now the network has turned its attention to another huge health problem: obesity and its enormous economic, emotional, social, and health cost on individuals, families, communities, and the country at large.

As Americans have gained weight in recent years, rates of diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and other obesity-related health problems have also skyrocketed. Rates of Type 2 diabetes (once known as “adult-onset diabetes”) are soaring among kids. And this is a generation of people that may well die at a younger age than their parents, largely because of medical concerns associated with excess weight.

These facts have become commonplace to those of us who have been paying attention. Still, The Weight of the Nation: Confronting America’s Obesity Epidemic serves as a clarion call to the country to take action — and fast — to combat this pernicious, complex problem that has myriad root causes.

Despite the familiar territory, this viewer gives the filmmakers points for framing the issue in a fresh, visually compelling way through astute story selection. The first episode recounts The Bogalusa Heart Study in Louisiana — a landmark investigation which found that cardiovascular disease can begin in childhood. And in the final installment we meet a Nashville mayor trying to help his city get healthy and a Latino community in Santa Ana, Calif., whose members spend years advocating for a play space for their children.

Bigger than individuals

Some critics (including those who have yet to watch the series) worry that The Weight of the Nation only fans fear, stereotypes fat folk, and doesn’t go after the real villain in the war against weight: the food and beverage industry. But from this critic’s perspective, the program doesn’t lay shame and blame at the feet of the overweight and obese people it features. On the contrary, it presents their struggles in a sympathetic and non-judgmental light, revealing how hard the body fights weight loss despite good intentions, and how current social, economic, and government systems sabotage Americans’ attempts to stay healthy.

A shopkeeper tells of parents bringing children in for highly-processed packaged snacks for breakfast.

Yes, there is the question of personal responsibility, and the films address physical inactivity and poor diet as key contributors to this problem. But there’s also healthy discussion of factors outside an individual’s control — including genetic makeup and evolutionary biology (we’re programmed for scarcity in a time of abundance), workplace changes, fast food marketing strategies, federal farm subsidies, changes in American food culture, and the ready availability of low-cost, high-calorie food.

The series also points a finger at the global corporations that are responsible for peddling the unhealthy, highly processed foods at the crux of the problem. It’s hard to imagine commercial television, hugely dependent on advertising by the makers of such food, taking on this topic in the first place.

To produce The Weight of the Nation, HBO teamed up with some major government agencies battling this spreading epidemic — the Institute of Medicine, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Institutes of Health — as well as the child-focused philanthropy Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, and health-care giant Kaiser Permanente.

The series doesn’t sugarcoat matters, but makes it clear that obesity-related health problems will become an unprecedented crisis with dire consequences if left unchecked. They’re also incredibly expensive: At the current rate of increase, obesity-related health-care costs are projected to exceed $300 billion by 2018.

In conjunction with the series, HBO also launched a massive social media campaign to spread the word about what can be done about these health problems, and reached out to more than 40,000 community-based organizations across the country.

Take that, obesity epidemic. And yet, as John Hoffman, executive producer of the series, noted in a discussion after a recent screening in Oakland: One of the first steps that might put a serious dent in this problem would be addressing government subsidies for commodity crops, which have made ingredients like high-fructose corn syrup cheap, accessible, and ubiquitous. He suggested changing the date of the Iowa caucus — a step that would give this farm state considerably less political power. (Such creative thinking didn’t make it into the series. But it’s food for thought — as is the hormonal defect hypothesis, detailed in a Newsweek story last week, which argues that refined sugars and grains are the major players in a problem that no amount of dieting and exercise could correct.)

Students at a school in New Orleans admire their new salad bar.

For kids’ sake

People can argue whether the root problem is corporations and their lobbyists, unfair government subsidies that benefit Big Ag, or cultural forces that keep many of us eating low-nutrient, high-calorie food. But most folks can agree on this much: It’s time to help kids get healthier.

One whole hour of the four-part series is focused on children. School lunch takes a hit, as does a food and beverage industry that preys on America’s most vulnerable population. As Kelly Brownell of the Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity notes in one episode, food marketing to children is “powerful, it’s pernicious, and it’s predatory.”

A highlight in the HBO effort is a half-hour film titled The Great Cafeteria Takeover, which runs on Wednesday. It chronicles the actions of a group of preteen reformers in New Orleans, known as the Rethinkers, who set about to improve lunch at their schools. Two other half-hour programs in the children’s series will debut in the fall.

Given the severity of obesity-related health problems and their rapid rise among kids, it looks like HBO won’t be the only broadcaster taking on a topic that has caught the attention of everyone from Michelle Obama to Ellen DeGeneres. The Hollywood Reporter recently announced that Laurie David, author of The Family Dinner and the producer behind An Inconvenient Truth, has teamed up with Katie Couric for a feature-length film about childhood obesity titled The Big Picture, which also promises to examine the impact of the food industry and government subsidies on children’s health. Stay tuned.

View the entire series online for free at the weighofthenation.hbo.com.

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

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Occupy the Farm advocates clear Gill Tract in Albany. Photo: Subconscious Collective

Stranger things have happened: Maybe six months down the track a crop of winter greens will occupy a stretch of land on San Pablo Avenue along the Berkeley-Albany border known as Gill Tract, site of a nearly two week standoff between the University of California, Berkeley and Occupy the Farm.

And everyone in this growing controversy might be happy. The saga over an often overlooked but special patch of earth began, aptly, on Earth Day. Now, both sides in this brouhaha in the normally quiet enclave of Albany appear to be making noises about having “meaningful dialogue” to facilitate a resolution that could include “shared custody” — though the situation resembles more of a spurned suitor (urban ag activists argue the university has repeatedly ignored requests to use this land for farming) than a marriage gone bad.

At stake: UC-owned land on the last parcel of Class 1 soil (considered the best for growing food) left in the East Bay that, except for a few months every summer when it’s used for corn research, lies largely vacant — aside from a proliferation of wild mustard, wind-carried trash, (often fast food wrappers), and, reportedly, the odd hypodermic needle.

Indeed, a private meeting between Cal representatives, Occupy the Farm advocates, and attorneys for both sides was slated for last Thursday night at an undisclosed location to dig into their differences and come to a compromise over the 15-acre plot, the remaining remnant of a 104-acre area that UC Berkeley bought for $400,000 in 1928. It is named for the family that once owned he land.(No settlement was reached, UC spokesman Dan Mogulof said at 9:20 am last Friday.)

Last week, Berkeleyside talked with representatives from Occupy the Farm, UC, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, about the contested property. All seemed to see the merit in using some of this land for urban farming purposes — including teaching students about soil and plant crops and feeding hungry residents in nearby Richmond or South and West Berkeley.

So far so good. How to get there, however, seems up for debate. Yesterday, as reported here, the Dean of UC Berkeley’s College of Natural Resources, J. Keith Gilless, who in principle is willing to engage with the Occupy the Farm folk who took over the lot April 22, stated that such a constructive dialogue could only happen if Occupy the Farm inhabitants peacefully departed their recently planted plots.

“I firmly believe that biology research and a well-organized metropolitan agriculture program could ultimately not just co-exist on the site, but benefit from interaction…” noted Gilles in a message to faculty. “It’s possible for us to achieve something wonderful together at the Gill Tract. The politics of confrontation also make it possible for us to fail completely.”

Agroecologist Miguel Altieri

Both parties accused the other side of slinging mud. Occupy the Farm organizers aren’t just a bunch of hippie agitators, argued Miguel Altieri, a professor in the college’s Department of Environmental Science, Policy & Management. Many in the movement are former students from UC with an abiding interest in food security, social justice, and sustainable agriculture.

For more than 30 years, Altieri, an internationally-recognized expert in the science of agro-ecology, has conducted research on this land as part of his field work growing crops without external inputs. Working next to him for roughly the same period of time: Sarah Hake, an adjunct professor at UC’s College of Natural Resources and a U.S. Department of Agriculture employee, who studies basic plant biology by growing corn, which is grown on the site during the summer.

Hake noted that all her work is financed through federal grants — not multinational Big Ag companies — and none of her research involves working with genetically modified corn. Both accusations have been levied her way during this showdown over soil, she said. Despite their long history on the same land and their collegial affiliations, the two agricultural researchers keep to themselves.

Hake, who lives on an organic, family farm in West Marin known as Gospel Flat Farm, said she is empathetic to the Occupy the Farm movement’s agenda to feed more needy people. At the same time she’s concerned her research — and the work of her graduate students — won’t get started on time this summer due to their actions.

Corn researcher Sarah Hake

“In the short term these people have made their point,” said Hake, who noted that her dealings with Occupy the Farm representatives have been civil and polite. “But illegally staying on this land is the wrong tactic as a long-term measure and could very well jeopardize the kinds of programs they’d like to see implemented,” said Hake, a member of the National Academy of Sciences who maintains a small edible garden in front of her USDA office.

Meanwhile, Altieri maintained that the university has had no real interest up until the occupation of exploring using this “idle and abandoned” land for urban agricultural purposes. In an op-ed piece for the Daily Cal campus paper, Altieri and his colleague Claudia Carr argued that as a land-grant university, UC has a mandate to educate students, undertake research, and share that research with the public. An urban farm that taught undergraduate classes, conducted graduate level research, and produced food for the greater good would fulfill all of those functions.

The takeover of the tract is a wake up call, in the East Bay and beyond, of growing support for urban farming and local agriculture to feed people close to home, explained Altieri. The university administration has expressed alarm at Occupy the Farm’s tactics — ignoring property rights and illegal encampment for starters — and countered that the young farmers are trying to bulldoze their demands through without consideration for other community interests (Little League, student housing, and retail space, the three most commonly voiced alternative users for the space to date).

Gopal Dayaneni, a spokesperson for Occupy the Farm, pointed out widespread support for their cause from food justice advocates such as Raj Patel, author of Stuffed & Starved, Yoni Landeau, a leader in the campus cooperative movement, and the Ecology Center.  For the record, Dayaneni noted that while some occupiers remain on site overnight to keep the land in their control, this is not a tent-city situation akin to the recent Occupy camps that sprung up in Berkeley, Oakland, and San Francisco.

“This land is supposed to be used for agricultural purposes and we’re just trying to ensure that that remains the case,” said Dayaneni, an Oakland resident whose wife teaches in the Berkeley public schools and whose children attend Berkeley schools. He described the protest as simply a measure to protect a precious resource.

The group has planted herbs, tomatoes, beans, leafy greens, and even corn. UC responded by cutting off the water. The nascent farmers have been keeping their veggies alive with water donations from supportive local residents. Proving, perhaps, that it’s possible to sow seeds (or at least starters) of change, one plant at a time.

This post originally appeared on Berkeleyside.

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Photo of Tracie McMillan by Bart Nagle

Tracie McMillan, who went undercover and worked with low-paid food and farm workers to pen The American Way of Eating, has had perhaps the wildest of rollercoaster rides since her book came out a few short weeks ago.

First came a less-than favorable review in the San Francisco Chronicle, which didn’t do much to calm those new author jitters. Then, mercifully, a glowing critique of the book, which documents her days embedded in a Detroit Walmart stocking produce, a New York Applebee’s restaurant prepping food, and California farms picking grapes, sorting peaches, and cutting garlic. Think hard, poorly-paid work and–ironically–no access to good food.

In the New York Times Dwight Garner called her “a voice the food world needs.” Other critics complimented her prose. “The best thing about this engagingly written tract is its excellent and sometimes moving first-person narrative of the author’s experiences sharing, albeit briefly and under false colors, the daily grind of workers at the bottom of the Great American Food Chain,” wrote Aram Bakshian Jr. in the Wall Street Journal. Not too shabby.

But there was no time to sit back and watch her book, which makes the case that everyone should have access to affordable, healthy grub, climb up the bestseller list. Because Rush Limbaugh decided to have a go at McMillan, who comes from a blue-collar background in Michael Moore territory near Flint, Michigan. The attack came hot on the heels of Limbaugh’s slagging off Georgetown University law student Sandra Fluke as a slut because of her testimony, intended for Congress, about the cost of birth control.

The controversial, conservative radio host with a huge following ranted that McMillan, who grew up eating unfancy food like Tuna Helper, was an overeducated authorette — young, white, and single too, as if these were shortcomings on the part of this gutsy reporter, simply because she asks in her book, which focuses on food and class: What would it take for everyone in America to eat well?

“It would never have occurred to me that Rush Limbaugh would go after me,” said McMillan, following a panel appearance at the recent Edible Institute in Santa Barbara. “Nobody would have paid any attention if he’d only talked about the book, but he just couldn’t help himself from saying something else really offensive and dismissive about women.”

Along with Nikki Henderson of People’s Grocery, McMillan was invited to discuss food justice concerns at the conference, a meeting of the publishers of the Edible Communities magazines which celebrate regional eats (locally these quarterly magazines include Edible San Francisco, Edible East Bay, and Edible Marin & Wine Country).

“Walmart controls 25% of the nation’s food supply,” McMillan told the conference. “In some parts it’s 50% or more,” she added, and explained that stocking food is a loss-leader for the corporation, but also a way to get folks into their stores. “I think it’s dangerous to trust something that’s as vital as our food supply to one massive institution. And particularly, to a private corporation whose only accountability is to its shareholders.”

Throughout it all, the 35-year-old investigative journalist with a penchant for covering poor people, has stayed on message, as she did in a rebuttal to Rush Limbaugh on The Rachel Maddow Show and in a first-person piece for The Atlantic, where she attempted to make sense of it all. “As a reporter, I take it as a point of pride that Limbaugh apparently found little he could challenge in my reporting; he does nothing to discredit the facts I found in my work,” she wrote. “And that likely explains why Limbaugh turned his critique away from my book, and aimed fire instead at me.”

As McMillan explained it, Limbaugh seemed to take umbrage at the central political point of her polemic: That both private enterprise and government have failed Americans when it comes to providing all of us with good, healthy food. “Food is not like the other things we buy. It’s not like sneakers,” she said. Everyone needs to eat, but as McMillan makes clear, many of the people who are feeding us can’t afford to.

An award-winning poverty and welfare reporter, McMillan is a current darling of the progressive food press. In the past couple of weeks she’s been featured on Civil Eats, Grist, and Salon, and her book has also caught the eye of online food sites such as Bon Appetit. (Find excerpts over at Slate, Gilt Taste, and Edible San Francisco.)

The Brooklyn-based McMillan, whom a conference colleague dubbed “scary smart,” is scheduled to speak in San Francisco this week at 18 Reasons, Omnivore Books, and CUESA.

It’s also clear she’s committed to covering a subject area on the edible beat that frequently gets overlooked: The plight of the people who grow, sell, and serve our food.
“We need to make it easier for people who want to get good food, who don’t identify with the food movement, to have that option,” said McMillan. “It’s hard to eat well when you’re earning less than minimum wage and your life is stressful.”

And she takes issue with the common assumption that people of little means are content to eat crap in this fast-food nation.

McMillan, who lived on food stamps while writing the book, which took three years from woe to go, knows firsthand just how exhausting — and demoralizing — low-paid food work can be. She wanted to nap, she said, after a long shift, not go home and tend a pot of beans on the stove. Work in the fields was back-breaking stuff, her Walmart gig included handling fruits and vegetables of questionable quality, and at Applebee’s little real cooking takes place in the kitchen. It’s enough, she implies, to make anyone lose their appetite for a nourishing meal. And it’s that hopelessness that McMillan believes needs attention. Lectures from the food elite to the food insecure to “eat more greens” just aren’t going to make a difference.

But McMillan doesn’t just lay out the problems, she also offers a framework for how our food system challenges might be solved. Enforce labor laws to protect workers, and pay them minimum wage, for starters. Address the lack of public infrastructure for food distribution. Offer adults and children access to cooking training; since kitchen literacy is a basic life skill in McMillan’s mind. “We need to think of learning to cook as a form of self-sufficiency,” she said. It’s as important as making sure people have access to affordable, healthy food.”

Such massive social change, of course, won’t happen overnight. And much of what McMillan exposes in her book is far from cheery. But like Barbara Ehrenreich (Nickel and Dimed) and Jessica Mitford (The American Way of Death, whose title McMillan’s book pays homage to) someone has to tell it like it is. Fortunately we have McMillan reporting back from the frontlines on the dark side of of the American way of eating.

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

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Merrilee Olson, right, kitchen supervisor Mayte Lopez on her left, in the FoodWorks kitchen. Photo: Duncan Garrett

It’s no secret that Marin County farms produce an abundance of local, seasonal, and organic produce enjoyed by residents around the Bay Area.

But finding homes for all that fresh food, whether lemons, tomatoes, or apples, can be a challenge for farmers during harvest time — and what to do to generate income during the months when specialty crops are out of season?

Enter canning queen Merrilee Olson to the rescue. Olson heads up the new food manufacturing company Community Action Marin’s (CAM) FoodWorks, a small-batch, co-packing company that helps Marin farmers turn their excess fruits and vegetables into jams and jellies, conserves and chutneys, and salsas and sauces, giving them a shelf life beyond the growing season, adding another source of revenue to farmers, and providing an artisan product to consumers.

And — the CAM community hopes down the track — turning a profit that would supplement this San Rafael-based, non-profit, county organization, which funds, among other services, food programs for local residents in need.

From Olson’s perspective, it’s a win-win all round. “We’re trying to create a model here that’s replicable and plays a role in creating a resilient, thriving, and healthy community,” she says. “Though my new motto is: We’re sailing the ship while we’re building it. Since we’re creating something that hasn’t been done it’s both exciting and challenging,” she adds. “We’re a local food company for the people and we want to make stars out of our local farmers and their produce through these value-added products.”

Launched last June as a project with long-term fundraising objectives for Community Action Marin, a social services agency that provides child care, energy assistance, emergency family needs, mental health care, employment training, and senior programs for the county’s low-income residents, FoodWorks began producing jars of jams back in August from the agency’s central kitchen and production has been steadily building ever since.

The CAM kitchen — used to feed more than 600 children in the county’s Head Start program every day — used to shut down at 2 p.m. CAM staffers realized that the state-of-the-art space was an underutilized resource that could be put to good use and hired canning guru and recipe tester Olson, the founder of PRESERVESonoma, a nonprofit canning organization previously profiled on BAB, to come on board as FoodWorks’ director.

Given her canning and culinary background, Olson was able to attract many big name small producers to her nascent project, including McEvoy Ranch in northern Marin, as well as Middleton Farms, Preston Vineyard, and Medlock Ames Winery, all in Healdsburg.

A trio of value-added products produced by FoodWorks. Photo: Shae Irving

Others who have sought out FoodWorks include small local food entrepreneurs, who want to sell their own BBQ sauce, and restaurant clients who want to produce their own line of condiments. Kenny Rochford of School Garden called on Olson’s service for an apple chutney product using gleaned produce from an unused farm in Healdsburg as part of a fund-raising effort for a local school garden. “As charitable endeavors go, I’d rather write a check for apple chutney than gift wrap,” jokes Rochford. The project has proven popular; up next: Meyer lemon marmalade. “Gleaned fruit is tricky, there are variations in color, flavor, and texture,” notes Rochford. “Olson is good at tweaking recipes to accommodate that.”

FoodWorks recently landed a commitment from Bi-Rite Market to make tomato sauce using produce from the independent retailer’s farm, and FoodWorks’ biggest client, whose product will hit a major grocery store chain at a $5.99 price point, will be announced shortly. Both are big gets for the budding business.

While Olson, a former culinary director for Bon Appetit Management Corporation, enjoys coming up with unique specialty products for farmers, she’s especially glad to be crafting quality artisan products out of pristine produce that was otherwise destined for the compost pile. (Speaking of compost: Olson sends all of hers to Tara Firma Farms in Petaluma, where it’s enjoyed by the resident pigs.)

Persimmon pickles with ginger and chile ready for canning. Photo: Shae Irving

Olson, who supervises a kitchen crew of three, works with clients on product concept, recipe development, production, and packaging and labeling, often with farmers own private label attached for instant branding purposes. Higher-value, less-perishable products can also help subsidize small farmers whose profit margins are slim in the sustainable, organic produce world.

CAM FoodWorks plays an invaluable role as an incubator for small food businesses, says Sarah Darcey-Martin, outreach director for Agricultural Institute of Marin, which operates eight Bay Area farmers’ markets. And the group can assume many of the costs of regulation and certification, a commercial kitchen space, and labor that could prove prohibitive for small farmers, adds Ellen Roggeman, the specialty food developer and an assistant gardener at McEvoy Ranch, who works with Olson on recipes for the ranch’s line of products, including apple and lavender jelly.

Each jar that comes out of the FoodWorks kitchen costs between $2 and $3.50 to produce, with a minimum order of 25 cases (by comparison, the industry average is around 500). Farmers pass on this cost to consumers, with products retailing around $8-$12 for the gourmet goodies, typically sold on site, at farmers’ markets around the Bay Area, or in small specialty stores. (Though the notion of landing bigger takers like Whole Foods remains a goal, as is farmers pooling produce to come up with a product — say, five-farm soup — for the wholesale or retail market.)

The range of products produced by FoodWorks for Medlock Ames Winery. Photo: Shae Irving

“Foodworks is one of the few kitchen partners able to work with boutique volumes and Merrilee Olson has the skill and zeal to help us craft delicious products, says Dawn Pacheco of Medlock Ames Winery, for whom FoodWorks has produced strawberry jam, quince apple butter, apple pear butter, mandarin marmalade, and rustic marinara sauce. “The scale, flexibility and passion of Foodworks is perfect for us.”

Olson, a Good Foods Award winner for her raspberry preserves using Middleton Farm fruit, would also like to see the kitchen made available for community canning projects, such as jarring excess tomatoes, for instance, that can be used as sauce in school lunch programs.

Olson gears up to make tomato sauce. Photo: Duncan Garrett

Olson also hopes to see other small-scale food processing places popping up emulating FoodWorks efforts. And she’s already talking about expansion plans for her own nascent enterprise.
“We need other local food-processing facilities to get where we need to go in terms of advancing a local, sustainable food system,” she says. “We need to build momentum here — for us that means a bigger facility and more investment. We’ve already demonstrated the business is there.”

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The farm Urban Adamah through the eyes of artist Alan Leon in Edible East Bay.

In journalism, like many professions, we have expressions that have been around for years to describe what we do. For instance, a story has a lede, nut graph, and walk off — a beginning, summary paragraph early on, and an end.

And sometimes a story has legs, a phrase used by American reporters to mean a story that sticks around.

As a freelance writer, it’s good to stumble upon a story with legs, the kind of tale that editors and readers want to hear more about. Last year, articles about food swaps, cookbook clubs, and an edible education, all had legs.

As does the story of an urban farm with a religious twist that I first learned about when it moved in within walking distance of my house.

Urban Adamah's Adam Berman. Photo: Christina Diaz

As a frequent chronicler of urban farms, I covered the opening of Urban Adamah for Berkeleyside last summer.

The farm’s presence is a welcome addition to a flatland community that, while gentrifying, still has a gritty side.

In the past month alone, for example, there have been more than 20 daytime break-ins in the area I call home.

I stopped by the farm with Jewish roots a week ago and the sight of that bountiful winter greens garden made me want to do a happy dance.

And I was reminded that good things happen in areas hit by bad news, and the people who strive to make positive change in a community deserve support and recognition.

This year, I’ve had the opportunity to ask the farm’s executive director, Adam Berman, about the genesis of the faith-based program and plans to replicate this model elsewhere in a profile for Grist.

And I featured the farm in depth for a cover story for the spring issue of Edible East Bay.

Care to learn more about the farm’s approach to urban agriculture, environmental education, food security, community building, and spiritual growth?

Walk on over to these stories and dig in.

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The new store in cool light. Photo: Alison Cross

Alison Cross and her older brother Alphonzo saw a vast need for fresh food in the Castleberry Hill neighborhood of Atlanta, where they’d spent time since they were kids. The community, which is adjacent to the Atlanta University Center, had seen both vibrance and decay, and was begging for transformation.

So the siblings decided to fill that need, and hatched a plan to open The Boxcar Grocer, a new food business. Alison, who studied architecture and worked as a video editor, and Alphonzo, with a background in fashion, describe the independent grocery store, which stocks local, organic, whole foods, as being at “the intersection of food justice and high-concept retail.”

And they’re right; it’s not your average corner store. The market looks modern, with lots of light, stainless steel, and wood. The shop, which had a “soft” opening in late October and celebrated its grand opening on Monday, sits in an area dotted with old railroad warehouses. African Americans own the majority of the storefront businesses. The neighborhood is undergoing a renaissance with small art galleries, graphic design firms, and a tattoo parlor that attract the typical urban mix of students, artists, and free thinkers.

Alison, 36, has also written about the personal inspiration for Boxcar (“This is Our Land“), the socioeconomic challenges of the food movement (“All the Foodies are Rich, All of the Farmers are White, But Some of Us are Still Cookin’“), and its shortcomings (“A Limited Engagement“) on the store’s blog.

I spoke with her recently about her hopes for the family business and the obstacles she and her brother have faced along the way.

Q.  Why did you decide to open a corner store in Atlanta?

A. For years we recognized a lack of stores in the area where we could get food we liked when we came to town. The space became vacant in May 2009 but we couldn’t find anyone willing to put in a store. So we researched, wrote a business plan, and started submitting to banks for financing.

In the meantime, I was working at The San Francisco Foundation part-time and part-time at Feldman Architecture, so I was getting this great vision of what could happen when social ideals merge with beautiful design. We felt no one had done that. And there were very few people actually creating something new in terms of for-profit business models for food access. We also figured if we were going to uproot our lives and move away from the Bay Area, it had to be for something extraordinary.

Alison and Alphonzo Cross (with silent partner and friend) on the natural food depot's "soft" opening day.

Q. Did you run into any challenges?

A. Unfortunately, the economic crisis meant the process took us two years to complete. Banks flat-out weren’t lending, especially not commercial loans to novices. But we kept charging along. We applied to nine different banks and one foundation and all said no. All we needed was one yes, and that happened in March 2011.

Q. Did you get support from the healthy corner store movement?

A. People we approached in the national food movement didn’t really take us seriously until we actually opened the store. Maybe it’s because we came out of nowhere. We were not involved in politics, nor did we run in foodie circles. We’d meet people at food movement events and when I mentioned opening a store I got the sense that people were dismissive.

Q. What kind of response have you had from local residents?

A. We have had overwhelming support from the community. That’s a wonderful validation because for so long it was this thing rattling around in our heads and on paper. People have been amazingly patient with our mistakes. People are just so grateful to have a grocery store here after all these years. On opening day — which we tried to do quietly to work out the kinks — there was so much buzz about the business we had a line outside the door before we even opened. It was insanity.

Q. Can you tell us about the farmers you work with?

A. Locating local farmers has been a discovery process — we thought we’d be dealing with rural farms — so to find such well-established urban farms as Truly Living Well, Metro Atlanta Urban Farm, HABESHA, and Patchwork City Farms right here in the inner city has been incredible. It’s allowed us to tap their network of supporters and access a knowledge base that is helping us learn about organic farm operations.

I spent last summer riding my bike from farmers’ market to farmers’ market meeting vendors, tasting food, and connecting with the producers.

The grand opening celebration at Boxcar in January.

Q. What about some of the craft products in the store?

A. One couple make these phenomenal pulled pork sandwiches and organic barbecue sauce called The Heat Legend. A product like that speaks to our diverse community. It allows us to meet people where they are with their diet but offer a healthier option that is culturally appropriate. Another producer makes these kale salads with sun-dried tomatoes that people go bananas over. We can barely keep them in stock. It feels good to offer a healthy fast food that people can snack on.

Q. What’s it like running a business with your brother?

A. It’s awesome. We’ve always been close and we’ve always wanted to work together. I’m in awe of his creativity, social nature, and energy. He appreciates the way I dig down in the details and my diligence in seeing things through. We respect each other’s visions and know that we get more done together than we do on our own because of our complementary skills.

Q. Can you give us some background about your own relationship to food?

A. I was a notoriously picky eater as a child. Left to my own devices I’d consume nothing but Frosted Flakes and Kraft macaroni and cheese. Both my parents cooked. My mom made Cajun spiced red snapper, jambalaya, and gumbo, foods influenced by her mother, who was from Louisiana. My dad liked to cook us breakfast. We weren’t really allowed candy or lots of fast food, which was maybe a once-a-month treat. After my dad passed away in 2001, I went to Grenada, West Indies. It was the first time I was really surrounded by utterly fresh food. I was eating fruit right off the trees, vegetables directly from the ground, and seafood caught the same day it ended up on my plate. It was healing and cleansing and opened my eyes to what a difference food can make.

Q. What does food justice mean to you?

A. It means approaching food access as an issue that is not reduced to a socioeconomic determinant. It means adding more faces to the cause so people can identify and desire to be part of a lifestyle shift. If Jay-Z and Kanye can create a lifestyle brand that people in urban and suburban areas aspire to, regardless of their actual income, why can’t we do that with organic food?

We have had family members and friends who are highly educated and in the middle class develop diseases directly related to the food they are eating. I like to tell people that we are not in competition with Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s. We’re in competition with KFC, Burger King, and McDonald’s, who are marketing directly to people like me. The food [access] movement is looking at low-income people and telling them to eat better, but not necessarily including the people who CAN afford to eat better but don’t think it’s important or don’t connect with how it has been presented thus far.

Q. What does the future hold for Boxcar?

A. We have always envisioned Boxcar as a national model. We wanted to be able to create something that would inspire other social entrepreneurs to replicate and hopefully get more healthy corner stores popping up in food deserts to show the demand is there for these businesses. What Alphonzo and I have done is an incredibly risky venture from a financial perspective. But we made a healthy gamble that was deeply rooted in the strength of our education, experience, work ethic, and commitment to seeing the model thrive in different incarnations across the country.

For now, we are focused on building this brand into a strong foundation. We would love Boxcar to be the Walgreen’s of healthy corner stores. We’d like to see at least another five to 10 stores like Boxcar in the next five years.

This post was originally published on Grist and reprinted on Civil Eats.

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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.

Tomato pickers in Immokalee, Florida. Photo: Scott Robertson

As the nation’s annual food fest approaches, let’s take a moment to express gratitude for farmworkers, the hard-working field hands who grow and harvest the abundance we’re about to eat on Thanksgiving.

It’s so easy in the food-obsessed Bay Area to focus on whether our D.I.Y., made-from-scratch meals are perfect or if the raw ingredients of our culinary creations have a pristine pedigree.

But enough food narcissism already: let’s talk about the plight of the people who make this holiday possible.

Some food for thought:

• Check out the videos from the recent conference TedxFruitvale: Harvesting Change hosted by the foundation wing of the sustainable-food focused Bon Appétit Management Company (BAMCO). The event, held at Mills College in Oakland, revealed in sharp relief and from first-hand accounts the back-breaking labor of those in the fields, many of whom are still exposed to life-threatening pesticides and labor in shocking conditions. But this day-long event was anything but a downer: The program also highlighted farmworker success stories and alternative ownership models to BigAg.

The well-curated program (hat tip to BAMCO’s Maisie Greenawalt, Bonnie Powell, Haven Bourque and crew) featured a diverse group of speakers that went well beyond the usual suspects who typically wax on at such meet ups — along with great food, good music, and an inclusive vibe. There were breast-feeding activists and Spanish-speaking farmhands and everyone found a place on the stage and at the table.

Recurring themes from the day: Hard work, determination in the face of adversity, and the importance of family ties, which seems fitting to mention in a Thanksgiving post. Local organic farmers’ market regular Maria Catalán, one of the first Latina farm owners in the country, talked about giving back to her community and the pleasures of working with her children, as did Napa grape grower and wine maker Amelia Ceja.Adelfo Antonio of Swanton Berry Farm recounted the benefits of working on a unionized organic farm (one with panoramic ocean views, no less). Former farmworker, José Gutierrez, who once toiled alongside his father in the fields now studies agromedicine, so that workers like his dad can have a healthier life. Reporter Roberto Romano simply let his film La Cosecha/The Harvest, which chronicles the plight of three teenage migrant workers, speak for itself.

• Stay tuned for the pending posting of the Edible Education 101 lecture that included Fast Food Nation author Eric Schlosser. Not one to mince words, Schlosser says simply that racism is at the heart of the long history of exploitation and abuse that characterizes farmworkers’ struggles. He urges us all to stop being consumers, start being citizens, and take some personal responsibility for what we eat.

Also speaking that evening, the man Schlosser refers to as the next Cesar Chavez, Lucas Benitez, co-founder of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), an organized group of tomato pickers from Florida who have made great strides in improving simply horrendous living and working conditions for produce pickers. (A detailed account of the squalor, abuse, and danger these workers encounter can be found in Tomatoland by Barry Estabrook, who first brought national attention to this issue in a James Beard award-winning story for the late Gourmet magazine.)

In the past decade, the CIW’s Campaign For Fair Food has forced major fast food restaurants, food service companies, and tomato growers to agree to a pay increase for workers and a code of conduct that recognizes workers’ rights. (Still to come to the table: grocery store chains such as Kroger, Publix, Walmart, and Trader Joe’s, see below.) The Oakland-based Just Harvest USA is a CIW partner and works on fair food campaigns close to home.

• Take action: Get to know your local farmers. Visit your favorite farms (a green tour guide has been amazed to discover how many people — Bay Area residents no less — have never set foot on a farm.) Even heavy hitters like farmer friend Alice Waters, who herself had a recent epiphany about the plight of farmworkers, are showing support for farmworkers’ struggles. Waters sent snacks from Chez Panisse to feed protesters at the recent Trader Joe’s rally (covered on Bay Area Bites).

Protest march to Trader Joe’s in Oakland. Photo: Wendy Goodfriend

•  Try farming: Got what it takes to harvest in the heat under difficult conditions for low pay and no benefits? The United Farm Workers invites American citizens who think immigrant and undocumented farm workers are stealing all the good jobs to sign up for field work as part of their Take Our Jobs campaign, which caught the attention of The Colbert Report, among others, last year.

Have ideas about how to stay connected to farmworkers and their concerns?

Bring ‘em on below.

Oh, and Happy Thanksgiving.

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

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Andre Green, who cooks for the homeless, believes no one should go hungry. Photo: Tracey Taylor

Andre Green’s mission is both simple and heartfelt: no one should go hungry. It’s a mantra that has worked for him in his more than seven years serving food to the homeless and poor.

After a long stint in the kitchen at the East Oakland Community Project, Green began cooking for Berkeley’s most vulnerable residents on Valentine’s Day this year, as the new food services coordinator for Berkeley Food & Housing Project. The non-profit group serves hot meals to homeless men, women, and children from food purchased from the Alameda County Community Food Bank and wholesale grocery stores, along with donations from individuals, organizations, and businesses.

The 49-year-old San Leandro resident, who cooks out of the women’s shelter kitchen, is excited about coordinating his first Thanksgiving here. In the short time he’s worked for the non-profit agency, he’s revamped the menu and made systemic changes to increase efficiency, reduce waste and loss, and stay within budget. When he first started few came to eat at the women’s shelter. But word has spread about Green’s meals and these days there’s often a line out the door for lunch or dinner, known as the Quarter Meal (that’s what it used to cost to make back in the 1970s) which is served at the Bancroft Way site five nights a week. Monday-Wednesday it’s a sit-down dinner; on Thursday and Friday a take-away brown bag meal is handed out.

The Quarter Meal is Berkeley’s longest running daily free meal program for the poor. This year about 36,000 such meals will be served, a 12% increase from last year, due to the continued economic crisis. BFHP’s food program is funded through city and county moneys and private grants. More than three quarters of the people who come for meals have physical disabilities, mental illness, and/or a history of substance abuse; all are homeless or transitioning to housing.

Green is mindful of his clientele: dishes are well cooked and soft, to accommodate those without teeth, and he uses seasonings aside from salt, in deference to those with high blood pressure. He has fruit juice on hand for diabetics and fresh fruit and green salad for those who can and want to eat it. Along with a focus on nutrition, dietary needs, and taste, Green wants all the food coming out of his kitchen to look good too.

We spoke earlier this week before lunch service at the women’s shelter on Dwight Way.

What’s on the menu for Thanksgiving?

It’s going to be a feast: we have turkey, ham, gravy, macaroni and cheese, sweet rolls, stuffing, yams, green beans, cranberry sauce, green salad, and apple cider. For the vegetarians we have tofu casserole and saffron rice. And for dessert we have apple, sweet potato, and pumpkin pies. The multi-service center will be decked out with tablecloths. We expect to feed anywhere from 350-500 people.

Lulu Robinson and Andre Green in the women's shelter kitchen on Dwight Way. Photo: Tracey Taylor

What’s your philosophy in the kitchen?

I tell all my staff and volunteers that we only serve food that we would eat ourselves. I also say: everyone eats. Our job is to be of service to the needy.

How do you feel about the people that you cook for?

Most of these people are just down on their luck; it’s hard to come in and ask for help. They just need a second chance. Last week one lady came in with two little boys and one of her sons asked where they were going next and she said: “I don’t know.”  That really got to me. I still care. When you stop caring you need to go do something else.

How do you think the clients feel about you?

They appreciative what we do. They can tell if it’s cooking that comes from the heart.

Has anything in your own background influenced your choice of work?

I grew up around a lot of people from single-parent homes who never had enough. I was blessed to have both my parents. We were poor but I didn’t know it. There was always food on the table. My mom was a great cook.

Volunteers serve food at the Berkeley Food & Housing Project. Photo: BFHP

How is your program placed in terms of food donations and kitchen volunteers?

Sometimes we have so many volunteers we have to turn some people away, but not on Thanksgiving. We take all-comers then. During the year, different groups come in and volunteer their time to cook and serve. Loaves and Fishes are a favorite; they’re really clean and efficient.

We get our coffee from Peet’s and Starbucks. We get bread from Semifreddi’s. And Berkeley Bowl supplies our milk. We just have to arrange for pick-up.

Some people, like Natasha Boissier, donate fresh fruit, and she also volunteers in the kitchen. She is so professional and kind to the clients. I’m fond of her.

What do you need in the kitchen?

We could use an energy-efficient dishwasher.  And our roasting pans, pots, and skillets are old — we need industrial-sized, quality kitchenware, serving spoons, and tongs.

As far as food, I’d like to offer our clients more baked goods. And I buy a lot of cheese; it would be good to have a donation source for cheese.

Have you seen any success stories in your short time here?

We had one guy, a regular, who is a mechanic. One day I pulled up at a traffic light and he was driving a Jaguar. He’d gotten his stuff together, had a job, he waved. Not every story is as dramatic, but they all get to me: One lady showed me when she had keys to her own home and she told me she’d gotten custody of her kids back. That was priceless.

Hans Johnny Meier with a salad he prepared in Andre Green's kitchen. Photo: Tracey Taylor

What do you like about working in this community?

I like the people: We’re in the middle of Berkeley, a homeless shelter, you’d never know it and people are fine with it.

We have a lot of long-time donors who give out of the goodness of their heart, they don’t want recognition and they don’t expect anything in return. Just last week a lady came by with gingerbread houses for all the kids. She’s done it for years.

What’s hard about this work?

There’s administrative stuff like keeping in compliance with the health department, staying in the black in terms of the budget, and coming up with creative meals and menus that everyone can eat. But I can do all that. What really gets to me is the kids. They don’t ask to be here, to have this life. All I can do is make them smile and fill their bellies with good food.

What role do you play in your clients’ success?

Well, I don’t want to have a big head or anything…my role is just to feed and nourish them so they can go on to do all the other things they need to do to get back on track.

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

The Bread  Project: Cooking up a Future for People in Need
Berkeley’s Natasha Boissier, Forages Fruit, Feeds Hungry
Berkeley’s Food Programs Short on Funds as Demand Rises