Transformation at the Corner Store

Lina Ghanem takes on food apartheid with Saba Grocers Initiative

By Cheryl Angelina Koehler  |  Photos by Scott Chernis

 

LINA GHANEM, THE 30-YEAR-OLD FOUNDER OF SABA GROCERS INITIATIVE, is a force to be reckoned with. Her spirit and determination make it hard to imagine this poised young woman crying over a bagful of McDonald’s fries. But that’s what it had come to on a pivotal day in 2017.

“Before starting Saba, I was working in Ashland-Cherryland [unincorporated Alameda County] as a community organizer with the Ashland Community Association,” she says. “I had another part-time job in Berkeley with the public health think tank Berkeley Food Institute that was funded by the NIH to look at the distribution of alcohol and tobacco—and sometimes food and soda—in underserved neighborhoods in Alameda County. I was the person on the team that was going out and doing the ethnographic research, and so it my task was to visit 400 stores in Alameda County.”

Ghanem had a hard commute via bike and public transportation from her home in North Oakland to the unincorporated areas on the far eastern side of Oakland, and on the day when she broke down in tears, she hadn’t had time to pack her lunch. By 2pm, she was faint with hunger, and the fries were what she could find and afford nearby. Having recently been diagnosed with prediabetes, she was acutely aware of the health costs of poor eating habits.

“I was just like ‘this is so terrible.’ I was having that experience of what food apartheid looks like, the inconveniences and invisible barriers that you’re going through every day. I was just a single person trying to do some work, not a mother with kids and two or three jobs, so you can imagine the additional barriers they have to experience to just get a diet that is meeting their requirements,” she says.

On the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Soda Pipeline

While visiting those 400 stores, Ghanem got a close look at the persistent paradigm of food apartheid that for decades has harmed the health of residents in neighborhoods impacted by bank/real estate industry redlining practices that disfavor Black and immigrant ownership of homes and businesses. Very few of the small neighborhood stores she visited were able to offer fresh, healthy food options, but she began to see the sophisticated infrastructure for distribution of alcohol, tobacco, and soda—but not fresh produce—to small neighborhood stores. And those unhealthy products get delivered with benefits added by the industry.

“Pepsi will pay for the sign up at the top of the store,” Ghanem explains. “They pay for the fridges to stock the soda. They provide marketing materials, so the store owner doesn’t have to think about how to promote this product. These industries see small immigrant businesses and corner stores as their main outlet for distributing to underserved neighborhoods, and there isn’t an equivalent to that with fresh produce. When store owners are asked why they aren’t stocking better products they say, ‘I don’t even know how to get them to my store. There is no distributor that would come out to my store either because of my neighborhood or my volume.’ [These] are structural issues that are beyond the control of the store owners themselves.”

Ghanem comes from a Palestinian farming family and regards food justice as a personal and ancestral matter. “My family farmed the iconic Palestinian Jaffa orange, along with olive and fig trees, for centuries—spanning the Ottoman rule, the British Mandate, and continuing to the current day Israeli occupation of Palestinian land. In my work building food system infrastructure to tackle nutrition apartheid, I share the experience of fighting for food justice with many community members we serve at Saba, from our Hmong and Latino farmers to our BIPOC residents in Oakland.”

 

 

Anchors in Their Communities

A majority of the 400 stores that Ghanem visited during her 2017 research are family-owned and operated. “Most of our store owners in the Bay Area are Yemeni now,” she says, describing patterns of ethnic ownership through the decades that usually track to the world’s various refugee crises. “It started with the East Asian community in Oakland, and there was a lot of Black ownership in Oakland in the ‘60s and ‘70s….  At some point before the Yemenis started owning the stores, there was some Palestinian ownership of corner stores in Oakland.”

In 2017, Lina Ghanem was a Bay Area newcomer and had yet to establish many friendships. As an Arabic-speaking Muslim, she easily made connections with the Yemeni store owners and their families and would often hang out behind the counter and help out. She fondly recalls when a store owner she became friends with baked a traditional bread at the back of the store. “It was full of butter and different seeds and honey,” Ghanem says. “She put it in this woven basket and brought it to me behind the counter.”

These small stores are chronically understaffed, so it was not uncommon for Ghanem to be asked to mind the cash register when an owner needed to handle an errand. It was on one of those occasions at a corner store in East Oakland that the seed idea for Saba Grocers Initiative took root in her mind.

The store owner asked, “Hey, can you help me by watching the cash register for the next hour or two? I don’t have anybody else.” As Ghanem rang up sales, she noticed that almost every other person was buying soda, and that each of those receipts showed the recently enacted Oakland soda tax. “Almost every customer had a very strong opinion about it,” she says. “When that store owner came back, he took like a whole 30 minutes to tell me about the soda tax. I talked to a few store owners and said, ‘What do you think about organizing, like, let’s go to City Council and talk to them about the soda tax. It’s bringing in revenues for an important cause we can help with if we reinvest in healthy foodways.’”

Ghanem organized over 120 community members and store owners who drew up a resolution to present to the City Council. They said they wanted their stores to be community health resources selling healthy products that would feed families, including their own. They reminded the City Council that Oakland had scored 1 out of 10 in children’s health according to the City’s own equity report, which estimates that one third of Oakland’s children and nearly half of its African American and Latino children are predicted to develop diabetes in their lifetimes. They made the important point that grocery chains had abandoned the Oakland flatlands while corner stores remained anchors in their communities. And they talked about those structural issues in the food supply chains that prevent the owners from carrying healthier products.

“But now [the people of Oakland] are being taxed for unhealthy products,” says Ghanem. “It’s a good initiative, but unless you’re providing that alternative structural access to healthy products, are you really addressing public health or is this just a tax?”

The group was elated when the City Council approved $200,000 for a pilot. It allowed an initial launch of Saba’s grocery deliveries to three stores.

Building New Infrastructure

First, Ghanem had to address the small stores’ refrigeration infrastructure for produce. “They need specific fridges with wet racks, and that is very expensive,” an average of $12,000 to $30,000 per unit, she says. For these funds, Saba tapped California’s healthy refrigeration grant program, which was championed in 2019 by State Assembly member Phil Ting to address greenhouse gases through equipment for small businesses.

Saba now operates from a warehouse in Oakland’s historic produce district north of Jack London Square, but for the first two years, they used borrowed space at a San Francisco corner store and purchased primarily from the City’s wholesale produce market. “We didn’t have a space for the products we were moving,” Ghanem says, “but we knew a lot of people in the supply chain that [would say] ‘you can leave it in my truck tonight since you just need it tomorrow.’ So, we ended up having a few years with very low overhead, which set us up pretty well.”

In 2021, Saba found new opportunities in partnerships with organizations like the Alameda County Community Food Bank that suddenly needed to feed large populations impacted by the pandemic. “That’s when we started going to the Central Valley,” Ghanem says. “Before that, our store volumes were so small it wouldn’t justify the transportation.” They also made the decision to buy specifically from BIPOC farmers. “After four years, we’ve moved a total of three and a half million dollars’ worth of produce from BIPOC farmers into the Bay Area,” she adds.

Is There Demand?

Ghanem says that people ask all the time if their market research shows demand for fresh produce, but it’s abundantly clear that there is. “People want it. It’s just not available,” Ghanem says. “Our nutrition incentive program—SNAP Match—has about a 92 percent redemption rate. If you put produce there and it looks good and it’s affordable, people want it. Sometimes when you go to one of the stores, the shelves will be empty and that’s because people bought it all.”

Just ask 74-year-old Anita Brooks. This longtime East Oakland resident, home gardener, and retired Oakland Unified School District music teacher is cultivating vibrance in her neighborhood with a new music and arts center she opened right next door to Isler’s, her local corner store, which began partnering with Saba for weekly produce delivery two years ago.

“It changed when you could just go right down the street to buy fresh vegetables,” says Brooks. “If I’m not there first on Tuesdays when they have deliveries, there are things that they run out of, so I try to be there right after the delivery.”

But do the city’s young people appreciate having fresh produce at their corner stores?

Lina Ghanem describes an occasion when she took a few of Saba’s partners and funders around to talk to the store owners. They met a customer who was volunteering to help stock the produce because she loved it so much. “She said she doesn’t have the best eyesight and couldn’t see far in the store,” says Ghanem, “but she said that one day she looks up and sees this young person buying these little oranges, and then she goes back to her work, and then she looks up again like, ‘is that my son?’ So, she walks up to the store owner, and she’s like ‘was that my son?’ He’s like, ‘yeah, I think that was your son.’”

Ghanem is both passionate and pragmatic in discussing the future of Saba. “The long-term vision and where my heart lands is to ensure that every store has the option of making the decision to be that community health resource selling healthy products to feed families,” she says. “If it is soda, then OK, but just know that you have another option for produce as well, and as a small business you don’t have to be left out of the supply chain.” ♦

Learn more at sabagrocers.org.

 

 

 

Writer Cheryl Angelina Koehler is the editor of Edible East Bay.
Scott Chernis is a freelance photographer based in San Francisco. Learn more at scottchernis.com.

 

 

Lina Ghanem’s Ma-Hend-Ba

This traditional springtime dip made with dandelion greens is from the Lyd and Ramleh area of 1948 Palestine, where Lina Ghanem’s grandfather was born and raised. 

Makes about 1 cup

• 1 bunch dandelion greens
• 1–2 tablespoons sesame tahini
• Juice of ½ lemon
• 3–5 garlic cloves
• Salt
• Chile oil or chile flakes (optional)
• Extra virgin olive oil
• Pita bread

Wash the greens and chop into ½-inch strips. Heat up a saucepan full of water. Add and submerge the greens and boil them until very tender, about 20 minutes. Drain and thoroughly squeeze out the water. Massage a bit with your hands to break down the plant fibers.

Place the boiled greens in a deep bowl and add the tahini and lemon juice. Crush or pound the garlic cloves and add to the greens along with salt and chile oil or chile flakes to taste. Stir to mix well. The texture should be like a smooth paste resembling hummus but laced with green strips. If it’s too thick, stir in a little warm water. If it’s too watery, add some more tahini. 

Pour into a serving bowl and drizzle the top with olive oil and additional chile oil or chile flakes, if you like. Serve with pita bread.