By Caitlin Donohue
East Oakland’s People’s Grocery puts working people at the forefront of the fight for healthy, sustainable food for their community. Warning: around 7:30 things get very touching.
My recent SFB cover story “Out of Reach: How the sustainable food movement neglects poor workers and eaters” has attracted attention from both those within the “good food” movement and without. Which is good- it was meant to kick up a discussion of where working people stand these days in the fight for a more sustainable food system.
In celebration of this healthy discourse, I wanted to profile another East Bay group who is on the front lines of getting sustainable, pesticide-free eatables to the working class who was brought to our attention by one of the readers of “Out of Reach.” West Oakland’s People’s Grocery was started in 2002 in response to the area’s lack of grocery stores (versus its 50 plus liquor dealers) and has since developed a multi-pronged attack on the dearth of healthy food in poor American neighborhoods.
Currently People’s Grocery runs an urban agriculture program, nutrition classes for community members of all ages and maintains a focus on enterprise and leadership development among West Oakland youth, employing young people at their Grub Box program, which functions as sort of a reverse CSA- using local farms to support the health of the community at the cost of about $12/month per family. In the past they’ve also run a mobile healthy food cart that serves the areas of the city whose distance from proper grocery stores is so far as to be prohibitive to get to.
So rock on, People’s Grocery. The kind of action- along with work on a variety of other levels- is what it’s going to take to convert our country to a sustainable, equitable food system for all. And Guardian readers- you guys are awesome, keep sending in your nominations for food heroes. They deserve all the press, digital or not, that they can get.