I was recently in the Bay Area, and had the opportunity to visit Mandela MarketPlace, a 2009 recipient of the competitive USDA Community Food Project grant. I was especially excited to meet folks at Mandela because we have selected them to be part of the pilot year of the WhyHunger/Growing Power Community Learning Project for Food Justice. We will be working with them closely in the next year, facilitating shared learning with their partner groups in LA and Chicago.
Mandela MarketPlace is addressing the food access issues and health disparities of its West Oakland community in innovative and community-led ways. The strategy is to improve the community’s health and economic strength through changing what food is in the local stores. Having already opened a full grocery store in a worker co-op model and partnered with two nearby corner stores to deliver fresh produce, Mandela’s Programs Director Quinton Sankofa sees enormous potential for expansion. “[Our produce distribution] is about to expand to two more stores. There are 20 corner stores in the immediate neighborhood – why not expand to all of them?”
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Nina Altshul recently began working with the beginning farmers at Tohono O’odham Community Action (TOCA) in southern Arizona. TOCA is a community-based organization dedicated to creating a healthy, sustainable, and culturally vital community on the Tohono O’odham Nation, and a recipient of the WhyHunger’s 2010 Harry Chapin Self-Reliance award.
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After driving several miles down a dusty road through the Sonoran desert — the stunning and snow-capped Babaquivari mountain range framing the horizon, the sacred Saguaro cacti and mesquite trees dotting an otherwise dry and scrappy landscape — we pull up to a small oasis of green. There in the middle of a pea field (a traditional variety – though nobody remembers if it’s indigenous or brought over by the Spanish) is a coyote grazing on the new shoots. He barely acknowledges us as we stumble out of the rented Buick (aka “the boat”) with our cameras hoping to capture our close encounter with this iconic desert animal. He takes a few more minutes to finish his snack, decides we’re not to be trusted and bounds off across the desert. We turn to our hosts satisfied by this brush with wildlife and are charmingly reprimanded. “I noticed,” our guide for the day Nina Altshul said, “that none of you tasted the soil.” Our East Coast naiveté has been called out. I look down at my feet at the red, loamy soil and try to decide if she’s serious. She was beaming with something like pride and described to us how the water flow off the mountain range over thousands of years has brought fertile sediment to these desert soils making them rich with nitrogen and the ability to retain water. “We farmers taste the soil to get a sense of its richness,” she tells us, “and to determine what amendments might be needed. Besides,” she quips, “it’s full of minerals and good for you.”
Cissimarie Juan, TOCA Program Associate
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