What’s for lunch? If it’s Thursday and you’re a part of Oakland Unified School District (OUSD), it’s a locally-sourced, #CaliforniaThursdays meal.

Focused on dishing out healthier meals, decreasing their carbon footprint, and increasing access to good food for all students, OUSD Nutrition Services is changing school meals for the better. Nutrition Services Director Jennifer LeBarre’s thoughtful and innovative leadership has made OUSD a rising star of the Good Food Purchasing Program–a program that helps institutions source food that supports five values: nutrition, local economies, animal welfare, valued workforce, and environmental sustainability.

Recently, Jennifer led Oakland Food Policy Council members on a tour of kitchens. We started with a brief history of the national school lunch program and a tour of Prescott Elementary’s kitchen—where a small but mighty crew prepare a whopping 20,000 meals a day for distribution to other schools in the district. Next stop was the site of The Center—a central kitchen, farm, and educational center. The Center, set to open in 2020, will be the site of innovative programming which will provide training and education to everyone from elementary-aged children to adults with special needs. This site will even have its own fruit & vegetable and meat processing rooms, which will decrease reliance on frozen, pre-packaged and processed items.

Our last stop was Madison Academy in East Oakland where the smell of chocolate chip cookies greeted us all the way out in the parking lot. I got to enjoy my first school lunch in many years (no need to get specific here), with a #CaliforniaThursday lunch: mixed vegetables, the sweetest apple I’ve had in a while, and no-antibiotics-ever BBQ chicken. It definitely surpassed my expectations.  

Providing over 40,000 healthy meals every day is a challenge when you have to balance budgetary constraints, differences in taste and perception, outdated infrastructure, and limited capacity. But OUSD, in partnership with the Oakland Food Policy Council and the Good Food Purchasing Program, is pushing boundaries, making changes, and engaging the community. Community engagement has been particularly strong thanks to the Oakland Food Policy Council, which has been leading the charge for good food for all in Oakland, from partnering with the school district for better school food, to organizing the community to fight back against Big Soda.

We celebrate the work of the Oakland Food Policy Council, food policy councils all over the world, and #goodfoodchampions like Jennifer LeBarre and the folks at OUSD and the Good Food Purchasing Program who have been pushing the conversation forward.

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On Tuesday afternoons, North Oakland’s Driver’s Plaza is a lively place. Neighbors gather to listen to music, play chess, hang out and share a meal. The chef is “Aunti” Frances Moore, a former Black Panther and founder of the Love Mission Self Help Hunger Program, which has been serving a weekly meal for much of the past decade. Those gathering at Driver’s are typical of “the old Oakland,” largely but not exclusively African American, and struggling to get by in this rapidly gentrifying city. Many are visibly disabled. Most are elders, though there are also younger adults and children ranging from elementary to high school-age. Some rent rooms nearby while others are homeless, crashing with friends or living in vehicles.

Aunti Frances shares the experiences of those dealing with food insecurity: “I have slept on that sidewalk. I’ve slept on the rooftops. I’ve slept in the campgrounds and the shelters,” she says, “Therefore, I know how to give. I know what you need.” What is needed, according to Aunti Frances, is a healthy, well-balanced meal and a place to spend time with your neighbors and friends. This builds a sense that “we’re in this together, and have to take care of each other.” Aunti Francis pays for much of the food with her SSI check, though there have also been donations from neighbors and even a small grant. More recently, through a partnership with Phat Beets Produce, she has also been able to incorporate locally-grown produce, and volunteers have planted fruit trees and tree collards in the plaza itself.

For the past eight years, Aunti Frances has rented an apartment a few blocks away. But the triplex where it’s located was sold to Natalia Morphy and her parents James and Alexandra Morphy in 2016. Oakland’s rent control laws limit how much landlords can raise the rent on existing tenants, and follow the tenants even when the building is sold. Median rents have skyrocketed in this gentrifying city, and can only be raised to market rates when tenants move out. So even though Aunti Frances pays her rent on time, the Morphys want her out. Aunti Frances was served eviction papers on November 19th. This is the Morphys’ third attempt to push her out. Rent control should make this impossible, but there are gaps in the legislation for unscrupulous landlords to exploit. If the eviction is successful, it is unlikely that Aunti Frances will be able to find other housing. She’ll either be forced out of the city, or into the streets.

In recent years,food justice activists have been reflecting on whether gentrification is an unintended consequence of their work. Detroit’s Patrick Crouch worries that urban agriculture “inevitably attracts young white people” while DC’s Brian Massey is “increasingly finding that our work is being associated with, and even coopted by, the forces that are driving extreme gentrification and displacement.” Phat Beets is no stranger to these debates. In 2012, a local realtor profiled their community garden and farmer’s market as evidence of North Oakland’s “revitalization,” and the ensuing controversy prompted them to more deeply connect with long-term residents, including Aunti Frances. Together, they have tried to insulate the Self Help Hunger Program from the threat of gentrification by forming alliances with neighbors. Bringing people together is one of the Self Help Hunger Program’s fundamental goals, and Aunti Frances’ warmth and generous spirit easily bridges divides between Black and white, rich and poor, and old residents and new.

So it’s no surprise that dozens of food justice, housing rights, and anti-racist organizations, as well as neighborhood residents, have come together to support Aunti Frances. To launch their eviction defense campaign, they are planning a rally this Sunday December 10th that will show the landlords the strength of Aunti Frances’ community support. They are also collecting signatures, accepting donations, and asking supporters to share Aunti Frances’ story.

Just as activists have increased access to healthy food and green spaces in underserved neighborhoods, long-term residents are being displaced. Sustainable and just food means supporting residents who face eviction as well as creating livable, green, and affordable communities.

Alison Alkon is co-editor of the book The New Food Activism, our December #realfoodreads selection. Anna interviews Alison and chapter authors Joann Lo and Tanya Kerssen in this month’s podcast episode. 

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This past weekend, thousands of people around the world from Oakland to Lagos opened their homes, places of worship, and collective spaces to share food and stories with allies and strangers as part of Dream Defenders’ #dayofdinners.

We joined forces with HEAL Food Alliance to gather our community in and around the Bay Area to pull up a chair and pass a plate with us. We hosted our community dinner at the Alena Museum in West Oakland and held our breath to see if people were going to show up – in person! – and connect about what matters to us over a meal. (PSST: it worked!) We shared our migration dishes – food that reminded us of home, family, tradition, or comfort. After some moments of guided reflection, we got ready to share. Each person stood up in a room full of strangers (twenty-something of us) and, with strength in vulnerability, shared the story of their dish. Some stories evoked laughter, others evoked tears.

We even had the pleasure of having Kwesi the Dreamer, a spoken word artist, at our dinner who not only shared his food story, but two original poems as well. We learned so much about each other through the act of sharing food (before we even tried any of it!) and were reminded once again of the power food has to bring people together.

The food itself was delicious, but it all tasted better knowing the personal significance it had to the person who made it. A slice of mango cake was a memory of a mother making sure her child was well-fed. Shepherd’s pie was a journey to find out where one’s family came from. Cauliflower gratin was a generations’ old tradition in times of hardship of creating a variety of dishes from one ingredient.

Our hope with Day of Dinners was to change the narrative by sharing our individual stories, to build community with neighbors we might not have known otherwise. I’d say this one goes down in the books as a success.

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