- You never know what situation in life could bring you to a point where you need the basics.

- [Tre] Gleaning in the North Bay, food sovereignty in the South Bay, community gardens and unhousd communities in the East Bay.

Tonight, "Bay Area Bountiful" explores food insecurity in our region.

- What would you do if you didn't have the basics?

- [Narrator] Bay Area Bountiful is about agriculture.

It's about feeding us.

It's about land and water.

It's about the health of our planet.

It's about stories that matter.

Bay Area Bountiful.

Cultivate.

Celebrate.

Connect.

- [Female voiceover] Bay Area Bountiful is made possible in part by Rocky the Free Range Chicken and Rosie the Original Organic Chicken, the Sonoma County Agricultural Preservation and Open Space District, Made Local magazine and Sonoma County GO LOCAL, and the through the generous support of Sonoma Water.

- [Tre] One important aspect of food insecurity is food waste.

In Sonoma County, Farm to Pantry is committed to salvaging excess food that would otherwise go to waste.

- Food insecurity is something you may not believ, and you may not see it, 'cause it's not something people proudly talk about.

But there are many, many families who can't get food onto the table.

What is crazy about this is that Sonoma County is Mecca.

Like we are the bounty.

We grow all the food for the closely-knit farm to table restaurant scene in the bay area.

We are where everything grows.

And at the same time, there is so much hunger that people don't even see or know.

One in three people in Sonoma County is facing food insecurity.

In our country, 40% of the food that is grown is wasted.

And 10% of greenhouse gas emissions are attributed to food waste.

What was crazy in the pandemic, was that the food distribution system entirely broke in Northern California.

We have such a tightly-knit farm to table movement that most farms sell directly to restaurants.

So, when the restaurant shuttered overnight, all the farms lost their buyer overnight.

Meanwhile, the food lines, for example, at one of our nonprofits Corazon, we used to go every before the pandemic to about 40 high need families.

And then during the pandemic, it was 2 to 400 families.

So, the needs skyrocketed.

And we were in a lucky position with Farm to Pantry because I was a farm to table chef, and I knew all the farmers here.

Gleaning is actually a term that comes from the Bible.

But what it means is to gather bit by bit.

And so, we go to over 250 properties in farms with over 300 volunteers, and we gather and rescue food that would otherwise go wasted, and we share it with families in need.

This amazing farm Front Porch, lets us take the food because it's excess food that is not worth harvesting but there's still so much edible, good food out there.

- When you're farming, there's all sorts of conditions where you would end up with excess crop that can't harvest, or maybe it's at a stage where it's not efficient to harvest, or it has a cosmetic defect, any number of conditions, so we're not gonna harvest them for our customers but they're really tasty.

We're eating them all the time ourselves.

And it would be wasted, but for Farm to Pantry.

- So what is most available in our food bank system for people facing food insecurity, is are the dried and canned goods that are shelf stable.

Because when you work with a perishable product, you have a couple of days to move stuff around.

And many food banks don't even have refrigerated truck.

So, what Farm to Pantry does, is show up with all the fruits and vegetables to augment all those shelf stable things, but we have to move fast.

We too have no refrigeration.

So, we basically have made this tight-knit group of community partners that cn get it out in the same day.

We harvest same day and distribute same day.

- [Tre] Community minded farms like Front Porch Farm are vitally important to people experiencing food insecurity in the north bay.

But climate change is beginning to take a toll on the generosity we've come to expect from these farmers.

- Typically at this time of year, we are in peak production.

Everybody is harvesting, planting, weeding, washing, packing, selling, going to market.

- This farm that we're standing on right now, we were getting over a 1000 pounds a week here last year.

In the either next two weeks or a month, this farm will have their water entirely cut off to thm because of the drought.

- Drought conditions put us in a position where we have to change how we're gonna farm for this year.

- We were ready to plant out almost two acres of food when we got the order that we needed to stop.

- Because we're anticipating that the State Water Resources Board will issue a curtailment order.

But even if they don't, we just don't think it's the ethical thing to do.

So, we will not have any fall crops or winter crops.

You know, our number one allegiance is to the health of the river.

- I have a lot of concern about how we're gonna address food insecurity.

It's still a problem that needs a fix.

(chuckles) And if you wanna support this work, you can go to our website farmtopantry.org.

We have three buttons there, Giver, Grower or Gleaner.

So, if you wanna be a member of our glean team, you sign up on the Gleaner button.

If you have a property or a tree, even just one tree in your backyard, sign up on the grower button.

And if you just wanna give, we love that too.

The farmers now go into this growing season very aware of their buyer's level, so there won't be the same excess for us to go scoop up, yet the need is still crazy high.

So, what we have done this spring instead, is really shift our focus to encourage people to plant food for each other.

So that's called our Grow Row Program.

Whether if they needed starts, compost, know-how, a connection to land.

- I really think getting through climate change in what we're looking at down the road is our food sources are all gonna be unreliable.

So, I think the more people can rely on themselves for some of their own food, the stuff that's easy to gro, that's fun to grow that's successful.

So, the more people know how to do for themselves, I think it's just better and better.

- [Tre] From Sonoma County farmland, we traveled to the South Bay where a master gardener teaches community members how to grow their own food and reconnect with their food heritage.

(bell gonging) In downtown San Jose, the nonprofit plant nursery, Valley Verde has established a new kind of participatory food system to promote food justice.

Its demonstration garden is open to the public.

(smooth guitar music) - Our mission is to teach low income families how to grow whole organic vegetable gardens in their yards.

Valley Verde started doing this to address issues of food insecurity and access to fresh organic vegetables that are usually too expensie for low income families.

We usually average between 90 and about 130 families per year, and most of these families are multi-ethnic.

We regularly grow between 12,000 and 15,000 seedlings.

- [Tre] A dedicated team of seven runs the organization.

- We realized there was such a huge need for food access.

We have a lot of underserved communities that are living in food deserts.

We needed to make sure that they had food on their table.

- [Tre] Valley Verde is unique in promoting a healthy, homegrown diet for the underserved, by specializing in hard-to-find culturally specific plants.

- So, there are peoples from different countries and they weren't able to find their cultural foods.

I am from Peru.

And for example, in Peru, we use this herb called Huacatay, and there's no way I can find Huacatay here, except, that I can find it here.

(laughs) And that is what we want to do, to reach people who are having a hard time finding i.

- We wanna give them the opportunity to grow vegetabls that they are familiar with.

And no other nursery that we know of is doing that.

We decided to go into these communities, basically, teaching 'em how to practice food sovereignty, so they have ownership of how they access their food.

- Thank you.

(smooth guitar music) - At valley Verde, we really try to reach out to the people whose voices have not been included in the mainstream food system.

We enroll families who are low income, who have the space and the time to invest in the program for 12 months.

- I learned personally learn a lot from Valley Verde.

How home gardening help us to be self-sustained with the food supply and authentic food we bring from our own countries.

We have Thai basal, this one, better melon, definitely authentic from Taiwan, China.

This one, we call it dragon whisker.

(laughs) (speaking in foreign language) To me, it really matters to have the organic food start from the seeds.

So, what can be better than that?

- Some of them grow beautiful, beautiful gardens.

And the first thing they tell me, when they go do a site visit, "Come and look at my garden."

They're so proud of it.

- [Tre] Back at the nursery, both plants and training are available - Super Jardineros are gardeners who went through our program.

And we want to invite them to be part of this three years apprenticeship.

Super Jardineros means a super gardener.

Yeah.

(laugh) Graciela is a Super Jardineros, very prolific gardener.

Around these three years, we teach them how to manage a greenhouse that we actually give to them so they can install it in their backyard.

And then, we kind of like follow up with them while they produce seedlings that we buy it back from them, and we insert them in our distribution.

Graciela and her son, Ndabhi they produce seedling together, and the quality of their seedlings are very good.

- (speaking in foreign language) - The vegetables, giving them water it's been really fun.

Also, I like to help my grandma.

- (speaking in foreign language) - We can make a little bit of a problem for ourselves, but on good cause because at the end of the day, we're spreading awareness about organic plants and making sure that people learn about growing their own plants.

(bell gonging) - I think it's really amazing that we want it to actually be able to offer those multi-ethnic seedlings to everyone, not just the families that we work with.

- Can I buy your eggplant?

- I did.

- Valley Verde has a tool to help our community be more resilient during this time.

- Thank you.

- Everybody wants to help Valley Verde, we're non-profit, you know?

- And to me, this is wonderful.

Every day I see more butterfly, lady bugs, and I feel so excited.

You see how the plants grow.

You see the hope here.

- [Tre] Despite all odds, Gill Tract Community Farm exists in the densely populated east bay because of the dedicated students who fought to keep this farm land safe from urban development.

Today, this beautiful farm is thriving and growing produce for those who are struggling to put healthy food on the table.

- Food insecurity is a reality for so many of us day-to-day especially good, healthy, organic fresh food.

And the opportunity to be a part of the food system as an active participant, is even more rare.

- Gill Tract Community Farm is in an incredibly urban pocket, meaning that there is traffic on the left right, top, bottom, all sides of it, yet, somehow, the way that farmers have stewarded this land, has allowed it to kinda function as this giant crack in the concrete where life is attracted rather than repelled from this place.

- So in 2012, myself and 200 other people marched onto the land, cut that gate right there with a pair of bolt cutters and started a three-week occupation to really raise awareness about the fact that this land was about to get paved and we need it for growing food instead.

Luckily, UC Berkeley responded to that call, and we now have a community farm where almost in our 10th year, and we're growing food, and educating folks, and offering the chance to gt people's hands in the soil.

- You know, living in urban areas, it's hard to find like larger, larger pieces of land areas where you can garden and far.

This is like the only place that I really came across here in the east bay.

- We do the farm stand for a number of reasons.

Part of our, you know, mission vision values is to spread the word about the importance of urban farming and food justice.

And also, you know, the environmental value of having green spaces in urban areas.

We also need to raise money.

But it gives us a steady income that allows us to buy tools, and seeds, and other support items we need to keep this place running.

Besides the farm stand, we send food-to-food pantries.

There's a one down on the Cal Campus for students who can't afford food because its rent is so high and tuition is so high.

- We found out a couple of years ago that students up at Cal are... 40% of the students are food insecure, so they don't know where ther next meal is coming from.

And so, that's a real huge focus for us too, is, you know a lot of these, a lot of these students, of course, is a huge privilege to attend UC, but a lot of people are sacrificing a lot to be here.

- We get a lot of food out to them, at Cal.

And also, we're looking to work with Berkeley Food Network and getting out produce to their CSAs, and those go to people in need.

- The most beautiful thing is I see so many people coming to this farm for food, and my that's myself included.

And it's so incredible, not only are you harvesting it, but you're also making friends and community, and you're learning.

- For my daughter, to see her building community at such a small age.

You know, she has...

Yes, she has friends and everything, but she sees the farmers working like she sees it hands-on.

She sees what they're doing.

She sees the plants growing.

We harvest our greens and our herbs, and we take them home and clean them.

- [Tre] Gill Tract Community Farm still exists because UC Berkeley granted at a 10-year lease back in 2013.

But once again, the universiy has development plans for this land and adjacent areas.

We are hoping that institutions that are... That want to build a six-story building just to neighboring, we're hoping that they will also take into account as they're creating structural plans.

Perhaps create a redwood corridor between the building and our farm.

Or make sure that the sunlight be blocked with the six-stories that they're building.

Maybe make shorter buildings.

Basically, have an ecologically conscious building models.

- Looking to the future, we're so grateful and happy that we're partnering with so many amazing community organizations and with so many incredible folks up at UC as well.

We need to protect this.

We need to understand this better.

We need us a site management plan.

So, we're looking to UC Berkeley for more support on that of how to implement that in, in all the plans going forward.

From the food that we're growing, to the allocation of space, to the development projects that we need to answer questions about how do we house people.

- There's a commonly held notion in our culture where human beings are essentially damaging to life on earth.

Gill Tract Community Farm is a Testament to the fact that it's not human beings ourselves, but the systems that we create that can either harm life or create life.

- We're trying to build an alternative model of a society that functions with, you know, respect for all.

- The more people are investd and care about this place, the more likely it will be around for future generation.

And for me, that's the point.

- She's seeing everything happening from seed to the table, from farm to table, as they say.

And that's really important for me.

I didn't have that growing up, but my ancestors did tha.

And so, now I'm grateful that I'm able to provide that for her.

- I don't just want it around here for me, I want the next generation and the generation after that to have access to this land, and to be able to farm and connect with, like people and the land, and the animals that live here in the soil.

I just think, you know, living in an urban area, we just don't get enough of that, and it's an essential part of being human.

- So, Cob on Wood it's kind of this area that's actually encompasses the largest houseless encampment in the, probably the state, if not the region.

Some of us both volunteer here and there.

So, there's kind of a convergence of organizations that began doing mutual aid work there, bringing food, hygiene items, medicine, and it was the product of a relationship with Essential Food and Medicine.

And Essential Food and Medicine or EFAM for short has a really deep and kinda overlapping relationship with Gill Tract Farm here.

- [Tre] Food insecurity is something one might expect to discover in an unhoused encampment.

But at Cobb on Wood in west Oakland, we also discovered an encampment that has become a community.

- Well, we have like help support in bringing many pieces together in this space.

There's also many other organizations involved.

This is a huge collaboration, and the residents have here for years and years.

There's almost 2 to 300 people living here on this 29 acre lot.

- The face of homelessness has changed.

You know, it's not what the stigma is, or what it used to be, the old, you know, Vietnam vet or whatever with big old beard.

It's like, you know, ages like 20s to 50, probably.

- [Tre] Named for the construction method used to build its communal structures, "Cob," and its location Wood Street, Cob on Wood is a center of a vibrant community under the 880 Freeway.

- Cob, the building material that we use is a mixture of sand clay and straw, and indigenous people from all over the world have been using this building method for thousands and thousands of years, and so, it's nothing new.

When we think of the question of food insecurity, it's a little bit different depending on where you are.

Many encampments here in Oakland maybe they'll have access to some groceries, someone will drop off a box of produce.

Well, what are you gonna do with a box of produce if you don't have a place to cook it?

That's why we built a community kitchen here.

- The main place where we source the food to keep the community kitchen stocked is from from Good Eggs and other sort of like waste streams that otherwise all the food would end up in the trash.

So, we do a lot of gleaning of prepared foods and bring it here to the kitchen.

- Having the kitchen here really helps people, one that they can have well-rounded meals.

We get meats, and dairy, and vegetables, and all kinds of stuff.

- It's a better quality of food, better than what most people are used to.

The biggest part of it is we got somewhere to come to.

We have somewhere to come and cook some food, not just have somebody bring you some already cooked and you don't know really where it came from or anything like that.

You can actually go in here and make you a meal.

You know what I'm saying?

You can cook dinner for a group of people or whatever.

- It's really been special fr us here having the kitchen.

Yeah.

There's always people cooking all throughout the day.

They're welcoming and a warm place to be at in the middle of the night.

And community in itself, just being able to, you know, be around our neighbors and build that, the family that we have here.

And to be able to look out for each other so that everybody can be able to eat, so that nobody has to go hungry here.

- [Tre] As residents strive for dignity and a chance to improve their situation, they're faced with a threat of eviction as Caltrans makes plans to remove them from their home under the freeway.

- The biggest obstacle is just land access and ongoing land stability.

So, right now, we are sort of in a confrontation, in a conversation with Caltrans, the State Department of Transportation.

And they are, they have plans to evict people from this site.

- Caltrans is one of the largest landowners in the state of California, and also has the largest population of unhoused people living on it.

They have no budget to deal with rehousing people.

They have no budget to deal with the effects that their displacement causes.

They have a lot of lawyers ad they have a lot of rhetoric about commitment to ecological change, to social justice, to equity.

But for the people living in this commons, this encampment, what they're seeing is a very different side of Caltrans.

- Officials referred to these displacements as Sweeps, which have you really think about that term, it's like you sweep the garbage out.

So, even the rhetoric that is used to talk about the conditions and the issues present here, implies that the people who live here are, are trash as And changing that narrative is a big part of this eviction defense work.

It's like, there's beauty here, there is vision here.

There is purpose, and people are human, there's basic human dignity here.

- We hope that this can serve as a model for other encampments here in Oakland, across the country, and truly across the world.

This is deep work and we're in it, you know, walking the long road.

This is the long game.

- When you walk in your door, you have the kitchen, and there's food in there.

You know what I'm saying?

You have a toilet, a bathroom, it's a shower.

You got soap, you know what I mean?

And they brought it here.

You never know what situation in life could bring you to a point where you need the basics.

Would you have to struggle to have the basics?

If you always got it then you never really understand that point of getting to a place where you don't have the basics.

What would you do if you didn't have the basics?