The Beet Blog

MARCH 4th North Oakland Flatlands Community Brunch and Forum

What do you want to see in the North Oakland Flatlands? Join Phat Beets Produce for a Free Community Brunch and Forum to meet your neighbors and to share your vision for a healthier, safer,  more resilient North Oakland community.  Bring 3 concerns, 3 big ideas and 3 of your neighbors (or more) to Bethany Baptist Church on 54th and Adeline to break bread, share ideas, dialogue, and organize a healthier North Oakland.

Topics to include: community health, urban greening, affordable housing, food justice and beyond.  Information from these breakout sessions will be used to shape the direction of community based work in the neighborhood by Phat Beets Produce and community partners.   A community resource fair will also be held in the lobby of the church.  Full meal will be provided including vegan and gluten free options.

Who: North Oakland Farmers’ Market Group and Phat Beets Produce

What:  North Oakland Flatlands Community Forum and Brunch

Where: Bethany Baptist Church 5400 Adeline, Oakland 94608

When: 2-5pm Sunday, March 4th

Why: Join us for a free community meal and break out discussion to vision what we want our North Oakland community to look like and how we will get there! All North Oakland residents welcome! Topics to include community health, urban greening, affordable housing, food justice, and more.  Bring a 3 concerns and 3 big ideas to discuss and 3 of you neighbors neighbors.  Music and open speaker TBA

Cost: FREE!! Meal and speaker included.  RSVP by phone at 510-250-7957 or http://tinyurl.com/798b6s7

Contact: max@phatbeetsproduce.org or 510-689-3068, www.phatbeetsproduce.org

**If you can help cook, provide dessert, or help with outreach by becoming a community outreach block captain then please hit us up at info@phatbeetsproduce.org or 510-689-3068.

Phat Beets Produce 2012 Wishlist

Phat Beets Produce runs on a very small budget, this is our wishlist for 2012.  Please hit up max@phatbeetsproduce.org if you have something to donate (tax deductible):

• Laser Printer
• Macbook laptop or 2006+ Mac Desktop
• Small pickup truck with less than 100,000 miles
• Wheelbarrows
• Working Fridges
• Shovels
• Gloves
• Technical Service (business plan)
• Office space in North Oakland
• Leading a workshop for our Food N’ Justice Workshop Series

THANK YOU!

By Jay Holecek, Therapeutic Chef/educator

It starts with that scratchy throat, then dread: “Uh-oh, I’m getting sick.” I used to consider it a good thing, it meant a few days away from the rigors of school. But now I don’t have that luxury, I need to work. And my immune system’s efforts to defeat the infectious agent will likely result in additional symptoms. So, in order to continue working, I need to both reduce the symptoms and speed up my recovery. I’ve learned over the years that medications for suppressing these symptoms actually suppress my immune system and only prolong the suffering. They also allow for a false sense of wellness. So I think back to those times of illness and recovery that my mother and others have helped me through and they all tended to include soups and teas.

Just soup? Continue reading →

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
6/3/2011

510-689-3068

MEDIA ADVISORY

PROTECT FRUIT TREES IN OAKLAND PUBLIC PARKS AND REQUEST POLICY CHANGE TO ALLOW PUBLIC FOOD PRODUCTION IN PUBLIC SPACES
North Oakland Neighbors are encouraged to join Oakland’s Phat Beets Produce and the Dover St. Neighborhood Group Wednesday, June 8th at the Oakland Parks and Recreation Advisory Committee (PRAC) to support the nation’s first clinic based community orchard and garden.  The Healthy Hearts Youth Market Garden and Orchard is located at Dover St Park on 57th and Dover St. in North Oakland. Continue reading →

Am I a Poverty Pimp? by Max Cadji

Am I a “Poverty Pimp?” I heard Davey D, a local media activist and political hip hop host, use the term, and I was really taken aback by it. The phrase really says it all, someone who is getting rich by riding the moving story of the nation’s poor, or as one urban dictionary defines it, “Any social worker, do-gooder, social service agency, or faith-based organization who comes into a hood not their own and plays at being the savior to folks that don’t need savin’.” I am an urban horticulturalist and organize around food sovereignty and food justice locally in Oakland as well as in Madagascar. Being that most of my work falls under the non-profit umbrella, I realized that if I wanted to get projects “for the community” funded, then I needed to learn how to tell a story and beg for the crumbs fallen off of the corporate plates of foundations such as Rockefellers, Gates’, and others. This begging is also known as grant writing. Continue reading →

Mr Scott, president of the California Branch of the African-American Farmers Association and owner of Scott’s Family Farm, told me all about his forty-acre farm in Fresno, his move from Oklahoma “way back when” and the black-owned restaurants he sells to in the Bay Area (Guerilla Cafe and Farmer Brown). Mr. Scott is one of the founding farmers of the West Oakland Farmers’ Market and a contributor to the North Oakland Farmers’ Market and Beet Box CSA. He is a farmer for the everyday man. What struck me was when we spoke about young farmers, he said to me “We (African-Americans farmers) are a dying breed…”  In fact in 1910 there were over one million African American Farmers and now there are less than 17,000. Continue reading →

Written by Tanea Lunsford.

Growing up, I can remember taking trips to the corner store much more vividly and frequently than trips to the grocery store. While we had to drive ten to fifteen minutes across the city to get to the closest grocery store, the corner store was always two blocks in any direction. We were seemingly forgotten by the supermarket and grocery stores that were distributed generously in other parts of the city. I remember listening to the complaints and discussions about the lack of different resources and businesses within my neighborhood.

As a child however, I was easily appeased by the presence of sugary drinks and salty, hydrogenated snacks. I had no idea that I was living in the middle of a food desert. Continue reading →