The People’s Grocery

May 2005

West Oakland isn’t the kind of place you’d expect to find many vegetarians—or even vegetables for that matter. An economically depressed neighborhood of freeways, half-completed redevelopment projects, abandoned factories, and port facilities, the community here seems an afterthought: people living in a place not meant for people.

But in the middle of all this I found a bright orange and purple truck, happy beats pumping out from a solar music system on its roof, and a steady trickle of people walking in and out. This is the People’s Grocery Mobile Market.

Twice a week the Mobile Market brings fresh organic produce and healthy packaged foods to several locations around West Oakland. It’s a tiny natural foods store, complete with gorgeous lettuce and carrots, Fig Newmans, bulk organic cereal, Dr Bronner’s soap and many of the other things you’d find in more upscale neighborhoods around the Bay Area.

Brahm Ahmadi, one of the founders of the People’s Grocery and a resident of West Oakland, knows from experience how crucial this service is. “I was already more or less an organic shopper when I moved here,” he told me in a West Oakland park as customers went in and out of the Mobile Market behind us, “but even getting conventional foods here was a challenge.”

With 30,000 residents, West Oakland has just one grocery store—and even that shop caters mostly to a clientele distinct from the predominately African American and Latino neighborhood. Instead, residents were relying on the more than 40 liquor stores in the area for canned and processed foods. “There’s not much fresh produce to speak of and it’s definitely not organic,” Ahmadi says. Worse, much of the local diet is made up of fast food, which is cheap and convenient.

“The overall consequence of these conditions is an epidemic of diet-related diseases,” says Ahmadi. “Specifically heart disease, diabetes, and obesity. There’s not a family in West Oakland that’s not affected personally by these diseases—the numbers are devastating.”

That’s where the People’s Grocery comes in. Founded three years ago, the organization’s mission is to make wholesome food available at competitive prices (the organization is a nonprofit, and with discounts from natural food distributor Mountain People’s Warehouse can offer food at wholesale prices). In addition, People’s Grocery trains local youth in nutrition, cooking, food security and, through the operations of the Mobile Marketplace, business administration.

“I went to the Scott Farm in Fresno,” says Charletta Harris, 16, one of six youths currently employed by People’s Grocery, “and it changed my whole viewpoint. Farmers work really hard, you know what I’m saying? He’s organic and just about six miles down you’ve got the guy who’s spraying from an airplane with pesticides. That was a wakeup call for me.”

“Their own personal choices — how they eat and shop — have changed dramatically,” confirms Ahmadi. “All the young people coming into the organization are just like any teenager — junk food eating, clueless about health, eating fast food. But we saw dramatic shifts where by the end of their first year in the summer program they were very clear that they wanted to eat mostly organic and mostly vegetarian—some of them are now fully vegetarian.”

Harris is one of them. “It changed the way I eat completely,” she says. “I’m a vegetarian—the whole way I think about food is different.” And Harris has changed her family’s diet as well. “My mom still eats meat like chicken and stuff, but now she eats more vegetables,” she says. “Now we bring vegetables home all the time so we can cook them more, and she’s more open-minded.”

Ahmadi hopes that personal change brought about by these experiences will be the start of change for the whole community. “You see it at the personal and family levels,” he says. “We’re seeing a growing clientele—people come and shop with us who a year ago looked at us like we were nuts.” Up to 100 people shop at the Mobile Market each week

Still, Ahmadi is careful not to proselytize. “We came in very clear that our agenda was not to change how people eat. Our agenda was to offer information and offer access.” He’s learned that the two go hand-in-hand. “If you go in and educate all day long about how crappy fast food and the industrial food system are,” he told me, “but there are no access points for that educated population, it’s defeated. And conversely, if you set up venues that make available healthy food without community education to build awareness, that’s not going to fly either.”

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