EL SOBRANTE — There’s a growing push to get healthy food into lower-income communities, and it’s changing people’s perspectives on how and where their food is grown. Now, an Oakland agricultural nonprofit is focusing its efforts on transforming one Contra Costa County neighborhood.
Like many small towns, El Sobrante doesn’t often get a lot of new things. The town’s Spanish name actually means “the leftovers.” So it seemed like the perfect place for a group called Planting Justice to create a new weekly farmers market.
“It was a farming community for a long, long, long time. So, now that this is back … there’s kind of a welcoming, familiar feeling,” said Planting Justice Market Manager Sam Lustig.
The building on Sobrante Avenue is the former site of the Adachi family’s nursery, which closed in 2017.
“And this would become a gas station and a car wash, which is the last thing this community needs,” Lustig said.
Instead, Planting Justice bought the property and is building a complex called “The Good Table,” which will include a new garden and nursery and, inside, a cafe decked out in reclaimed wood from Castlemont High School’s old bleacher seats. At the restaurant, people are asked to pay only “what you can.” That spirit extends to the farmers market, where vendors don’t have to pay a fee to participate. That works well for food vendor Hal Stevens, who experimented with a new sandwich featuring black-eyed pea and portabella mushrooms.
“Not paying any fees, just coming in and building your customer base is great,” he said. “It builds your brand and looks great and makes the community look good.”
Whatever the vendors can’t sell is purchased by the nonprofit for distribution in its new mobile food truck or used as ingredients for food and baked goods prepared in a soon-to-be-built commercial kitchen. It’s all part of the mission of Planting Justice, which is based in a sprawling commercial nursery in East Oakland. Years ago, they sponsored a horticulture program at San Quentin State Prison.
“That’s what led to our re-entry program,” Lustig said. “Because people who had been in that program came out and had no place to go.”
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So far, the daycare has created more than 165 living-wage jobs for formerly incarcerated people, like Simone Robinson, who is now the Mother Lead at the daycare in Oakland.
“When you come here and you are with the plants, you take care of the plants and you see the plants grow, you grow too!” she said.
If there is a common theme in the enterprise, it is that nothing should be wasted — no food, no wood, and certainly no people. Where better to cook something new than in a place called “leftovers”?
Planting Justice relies on grants and public donations and currently employs approximately 50 people on living wages. There is more information on their website.
