Food for Thought
Meet the Harvest Made Market Cart
No more aching arms and squashed strawberries By Rachel Trachten Have you seen someone like me at your local farmers’ market—a bedraggled shopper with an overloaded bag on each arm and a bulging backpack bringing up the rear? Even as I’m leaving the market, I can’t help making one last impulse purchase, stuffing…
Read MoreYou Mean Fish Have Seasons?
Two local architects depict seasonality through food, flowers, and whale migrations By Rachel Trachten Brian Friel and Meghan Dorrian of Young America Creative (YAC) put their skills to work on a set of posters that depict seasonality of food, flowers, and whale migrations. (Photos courtesy of YAC) It was the summer of…
Read MoreEditor’s Mixing Bowl | Spring 2021
When our Spring issue went to press a year ago, nobody was imagining we would spend much of the next 12 months in some degree of pandemic lockdown. Since that time, home has been the safest place to be. It’s where we have learned how to wait, be patient, and make a better practice of soothing…
Read MoreZero-Waste Warriors and Art Activists Do Battle with Plastics
If Wishes Were Fishes Untangling the plastics problem during the pandemic An interview with Martin Bourque, Executive Director of the Ecology Center No amount of wishing has made the pandemic depart our shores, nor will it do away with the plastics polluting our planet. Can the East Bay, a stronghold of environmental action, make headway…
Read MoreEditor’s Mixing Bowl
The Sweetness Inside the Oyster Even during this difficult time, our editors’ experience creating this holiday issue of Edible East Bay has been sweet. Certainly, much of that has to do with all those recipes for pies, candied yams, cookies, truffles, and fruity drinks. But the true pleasure has been in all the connections…
Read MoreAlmond, Lemon, Poppy Seed Bites
One Calm Cookie Nerve-Soothing Almond, Lemon, Poppy Seed Bites Story and Photo By Alexandra Hudson As a certified clinical herbalist and holistic educator with a passion for combining therapeutic and pleasurable experiences, I like to find ways to make recipes more nutrient dense. To start, I note which parts include a fat or liquid,…
Read MoreEditors Mixing Bowl
It’s been five long months since we last met on this page. During the early weeks of the pandemic shutdowns, it was hard to see how to continue making a magazine. Would our stories be relevant? Would our advertisers—who provide 99% of our operating funds—remain in business? How would readers find their free copies?…
Read MoreBerkeley’s Perfume Museum
A Visit to the Aftel Archive of Curious Scents Mandy Aftel wants you to get to know your nose. Smells—both pleasant and unpleasant—are all around us, but we often take them for granted. Opening our senses to the world of scents can heighten our awareness and bring daily pleasure. This was Mandy Aftel’s midlife…
Read MoreEditor’s Mixing Bowl Spring 2020
Whether we realize it or not, we live in a designed world. The question is: Will this be a design for destruction or for a sustainable new world that we can safely hand down to our children and our children’s children? —from brucemaudesign.com/work/massive-change The times may feel particularly dark and challenging right…
Read MoreLast Bite
Fellow Artists Honor Margo Rivera-Weiss in Words and Imagery Margo was a friend and supporter of my work, both as a teaching artist and illustrator. Last year I did a project with my first graders based on Margo’s food illustrations in Edible East Bay. They will be sorely and deeply missed. —Dawline-Jane Oni-Eseleh…
Read MoreOn Margo Rivera-Weiss
During one of the last weeks of staff artist Margo Rivera-Weiss’s life, we were comforted to be able to offer some bit of joy by roughing out an idea for what would become the cover of this issue. Margo (who uses nongendered pronouns) made the cover’s illustrations of a set of kitchen tools several…
Read MoreLess Meat is More at Anaviv’s Table
The chefs at Anaviv’s Table have added a new intention for their Richmond restaurant’s unique one-seating, set-menu dining experience. Thursday night dinners now give vegetables and grains center stage and include less meat while still providing a fully satisfying meal. The idea came about after the restaurant’s chefs, Arnon Oren and Kadie Vita, collaborated with…
Read MoreEditor’s Mixing Bowl
Never before has Edible East Bay come up with such a basketful of sweets, and since an indulgence is good for the soul on occasion, go ahead and take some slow, sweet time with this magazine. We hope you’ll enjoy reading it as much as we did while putting it together. More than…
Read MoreGary Handman’s Culinary Notebooks
My Journal Culinaire By Gary Handman A major part of what I know about cooking and about bringing friends and loved ones together to celebrate around the table I learned from my redoubtable mother-in-law, Shirley. An intuitive and largely self-taught cook (with the aid of a constantly expanding cookbook library), Shirley rocked her Lilliputian…
Read MorePollinate Farm & Garden teams up with Frailty Myths
Frailty Myths workshop participants collaborate to construct a three-part compost bin. The Power in Our Own Hands Building self-reliance with Pollinate Farm & Garden and Frailty Myths By Rachel Trachten | Photos by Cynthia Matzger Hammers are pounding, saws are buzzing, and sawdust is flying. Suddenly someone yells out, “I f***ed up!” The reaction all…
Read MoreBiochar in Berkeley?
Yes, and we can thank Burning Man . . . . . . well, not the man that gets burned each year at the festival, but rather a group of artists and fabricators who in 2001 set up some shipping containers on a lot near Urban Ore in Berkeley to serve as workspaces for building…
Read MoreBerkeley’s First Reusable Cup Service
An Old-Fashioned Solution with a Tech Twist Tired of tossing disposable cups into the trash or just hoping they’ll be recycled? Join the reuse revolution, starting with reusable cups for your coffee, tea, juice, and water. The Ecology Center is paving the way through a partnership with Vessel, a reusable cup service. Their pilot program…
Read MoreEditor’s Mixing Bowl
Our foods tell us who we are. These two beautiful dishes were still on my mind a week after I tasted them at this summer’s Lamb Jam San Francisco. It was not just the excellent presentations and satisfying flavors, but also how they seemed to express something of who we are in the…
Read MoreMeet Five Flavors Herbs
Illustration by Margo Rivera-Weiss Think about a dish you love to eat. It might express a perfect balance of sweet, bitter, sour, pungent, and salty flavors, and that balance can leave you feeling healthy, full, and satisfied. Those five flavors were identified two millennia ago by Chinese herbal medicine practitioners, and they continue…
Read MoreGroundbakers
A Mother-Daughter Cookbook Collaboration By Rachel Trachten When Mackenzie Feldman started at Cal in 2014, she was planning to major in business and play beach volleyball. In need of an afternoon class to fit with her practice schedule, she signed up for Edible Education 101, the course on the future of food and food…
Read MoreHealthy Cooking, Filipino Style
With a little help from the farmers’ market Story, photo, and recipe by Rezel Kealoha Filipino cuisine is trending these days, but even so, it can be hard to move beyond misconceptions that this food is unhealthy, exotic, or just hard to make at home. As a Filipina home cook, food blogger, and recipe developer,…
Read MoreEditor’s Mixing Bowl
Three summers ago, we noticed an empty spot on our cover above Wendy Yoshimura’s watercolor painting of cherries. For some compelling reason, it called out for the word “pleasure” to be added. No such spot exists on this cover, but if it did, we might add the word “visionary.” This issue is filled with people…
Read MoreChicken Curry Day
By Prerna Singh My brother: He is Mummy’s favorite kid. She never admits to it and always gives me that what-on-earth-are-you-talking-about look every time I say this to her, but I know. He is the gentler of us two (at least on the outside), doesn’t leave any trail of his crimes, and he…
Read MoreSplit Jaw • Split Pea
By Garth Grimball | Illustration by Jessica Caisse “You know how I always say I’ve never met a soup I didn’t like?” It is remarkable how many stories my grandfather begins with this rhetorical question. The man lives for soup and talks about it at length to anyone, so much so that my family…
Read MoreDisposable-Free Dining
Berkeley takes another step forward in its commitment to reducing waste in our landfills The City of Berkeley has taken its commitment to zero waste a step further, passing new legislation that changes the rules on throwaway cups, containers, and other disposable food ware. In late January, the Berkeley City Council gave a unanimous…
Read MoreEditor’s Mixing Bowl
They say that appearances are everything, and that certainly goes for a magazine cover. In order to succeed, a print publication must quickly convince folks walking by to reach out and take a copy home for a closer look. In theory, a dog stepping up to announce the Spring 2019 issue of Edible East Bay…
Read MoreLocal Delivery by Piikup
MEET PIIKUP the local company that brings our magazines to you It was a very hot day at the O2AA West Oakland Artisans Festival in June 2017, but a stroke of luck landed our Edible East Bay booth next to the Civil Pops cart. Those deliciously healthy, Oakland youth–made, frozen-fruit treats were drawing a steady…
Read MoreEditor’s Mixing Bowl
Anticipation is a word I easily associate with the approach of the holiday season. It’s that wistful feeling from childhood, when we scribbled our names in catalogs next to pictures of toys as little voices in our excited dreaming heads called out to our parents to bestow these things upon us. I always drew two…
Read MoreCooking with Gratitude
Cherishing What We Have and Wasting Less Around the world, feasts of gratitude for a good harvest are among the oldest traditions, marked by a rest from working the fields and plentiful meals. An abundance of food is at the center of our Thanksgiving celebrations as well, yet few of us have a deep connection…
Read MoreWitty Tunes for Foodie Families
Songs about liver, ten thousand pancakes, and eating worms? Absolutely! These are just a few of the topics Gunnar Madsen covers in his 2018 Parents’ Choice Awards Gold Medal–winning CD, I Am Your Food. Kids and kids-at-heart will appreciate the singer-songwriter’s charming, catchy tunes and clever, sometimes poetic, lyrics. Chew on this: “Liver, it’s the…
Read MoreEditor’s Mixing Bowl
T he slightly gritty feel of the paring knife cutting through the skin of a perfectly ripe avocado … the oily-smooth resistance while twisting the halves apart … two buttery-green surfaces revealed … a drizzle of peppery extra-virgin olive oil, a sprinkle of fleur de sel, and you have a great-but-simple moment to celebrate. It comes…
Read MoreMap of East Bay Food Justice Organizations
Margo suggested we share this recent story written by members of the Phat Beets crew in collaboration with Food First.
Read MoreKitchen Note
Cooking is an Act of Kindness A Teacher’s Story By Laura E. Miller The best cookbooks and recipes are messy: food-stained, dog-eared, drawn-on, and annotated. Cooks write all sorts of things on their recipes, like what substitutes they used when they didn’t have an ingredient, who they fed and when, what other dishes they served on the…
Read MoreAbout Our Cover Artist
Once again we have the privilege of showcasing the breathtaking work of Oakland watercolor artist Wendy Yoshimura on the cover of Edible East Bay. At left are her past covers. Read more details about Wendy’s life and development as an artist in our Winter 2013 issue: She was born in the World War II Manzanar…
Read MoreThe Cost of Progress
What Should a Tomato Cost? A farmer’s essay on the real price of modern farm technology By Mike Madison Take the example of processing tomatoes, an important crop in our area. The farmer prepares the soil, plants the crop, irrigates it, fertilizes it, protects it from pests and diseases, manages the weeds, harvests it, and…
Read MoreBubble Tea
BOBA BY THE BAY: A Brief Guide to Bubble Tea When Edible East Bay’s teenage intern Kiani Laigo told us of her bubble tea obsession—like, with an “it changed my life” kind of enthusiasm—we had to admit to our huge dearth of knowledge on the beverage sensation also known as boba tea. We asked her…
Read MoreEditor’s Mixing Bowl
“I hope this isn’t going to be gloomy,” my friend Mary Tilson grumbles jokingly one rainy evening in early April as I drag her off to a showing of Demain (Tomorrow), a documentary in which French filmmakers Cyril Dion and Mélanie Laurent visit 10 different countries to look in on projects offering real-time solutions to…
Read MoreEditor’s Mixing Bowl Spring 2018
Perhaps the subject of locally grown hops, as announced on our cover, is sending you off for a cold mug of local ale, and I certainly won’t stop you. But as you settle back into your chair to quaff that brew, please turn back for a closer look at the cover. Artist Susan Tibbon’s striking…
Read MoreLa Marcha Tapas Bar
A Young Writer Explores Old-World Food Traditions at a favorite local eatery My Night at La Marcha By Kiani Laigo At Edible East Bay, we don’t offer formal internships, but occasionally we get an inquiry that makes us want to create an opportunity for a bright, motivated young person. That happened last fall when we…
Read MoreFood for Thought
A New Exhibit Takes Root at the Oakland Museum Urban agriculture is thriving in Oakland, and a new museum exhibit shows us how and why this is happening. Take Root: Oakland Grows Food, now on display at the Oakland Museum of California, invokes the joy of gardening and inspires visitors of all ages to…
Read MoreGary Handman Presents
With so many interesting places to eat in the East Bay, choosing among them can be quite problematic. Professor G.P. Handman’s newest invention comes to the rescue! Undecided diner wanders into café to sit and ponder choices. Over-zealous barista (A) sees potential customer and pulls triple macchiato. Jumpy UC meteorologist (B) sees steam rising from…
Read MorePlaying Climate Oasis
Board Games for Humanity Climate Oasis offers an entertaining spin on coping with global threats Story and Photo By Sam Tillis The mood is tense at the Oasis. Our little community has done well for itself, but a series of crises threatens to destroy all we have built. We have only just dealt with the…
Read MoreEditor’s Mixing Bowl
These Luminous Things No resident of the East Bay has gone untouched by the October tragedy brought on by massive wildfires in our North Bay region. We all breathed in the smoke, and we all know someone who has been more deeply affected.…
Read MoreThey Always Wore Aprons
Lorraine Battle renews a forgotten kitchen tradition Story and photos by Helen Krayenhoff “I don’t use an apron.” Lorraine Battle hears this over and over again as young people walk by the booth where she sells aprons near the Grand Lake Farmers’ Market. Often these same people stop anyway because they are attracted by Lorraine’s…
Read MoreDeaf Chefs Compete
What’s the Sign for Mozzarella Balloon? Culinary education thrives at the California School for the Deaf By Anna Mindess | photos by Nick Wolf High school students dressed in chef’s whites scurry around the kitchen preparing an ambitious Modernist Caprese Salad composed of mozzarella balloons, tomato sorbet, and colorful sliced tomatoes garnished with fried basil…
Read MoreEditor’s Mixing Bowl
It was well over a year ago that I first got a look at the painting destined to grace this issue’s cover. Helen Krayenhoff’s startlingly beautiful portrait of an autumn haul from the farmers’ market speaks eloquently of the season’s gifts to hungry creatures. (Yes, squirrels and bears are enjoying those now as well.) Throughout…
Read MoreArtwork by Margo Rivera Weiss
Watercolor and collage by Margo Rivera-Weiss Pollinate Farm & Garden proprietor Yolanda Burrell with her family. Ink and watercolor, by Margo Rivera-Weiss
Read MoreFun with Food Insults
By Anna Mindess, Collector of Food Insults | Illustrations by Lila Volkas Place an eggplant on a plate and the shiny purple globe freely rolls from side to side. You may have never considered the vegetable in this light, but for Hindi speakers, the phrase “thali ka baingan” (eggplant on a plate) is a disparaging put-down…
Read MoreArtwork by Susan Tibbon
Artist and farmer Susan Tibbon stewards a small organic, biodynamic farm in northern Mendocino County and celebrates the wonder of nature in her etchings, paintings, and sculpture. “Zucchini” is the 26th in a 26-image series of vegetables (one for each letter of the alphabet) celebrating the gifts of the land. “Eggplant” is the fifth in the…
Read MoreLocal Harvest as Spotted on Instagram
We traveled around the Bay Area on Instagram for some local harvest inspiration. Here are some of our top picks. Instagram your food moments and use #edibleeastbay. You might see your photo here in next season’s roundup.
Read MoreArtworks by Margo Rivera-Weiss
“Pomegranates Plus” at Ba-Bite Readers of Edible East Bay’s Summer 2017 issue have been taking special notice of the art piece on the inside back cover: “At Oakland’s Ba-Bite,” a work on paper done in ink, watercolor, and collage, is by regular Edible East Bay illustrator and community artist, Margo Rivera-Weiss. The piece is now being…
Read MoreEditor’s Mixing Bowl
As spring unfolds into summer, the world suddenly pulses with startling energy. In California, the season came on as a howling green wave, thanks to the record-breaking winter rains. But here, as all over the country, nature’s extravagance was nearly outshouted by the eruption of activism brought on by political disruption. What started with the…
Read MoreFruitful Labor
The Measure of Everything Author/farmer Mike Madison’s view from the tractor seat A book review by Cheryl Angelina Koehler Photos by Scott Peterson Mike Madison is a farmer by day and a writer by night. Well … that may not be a fair statement, since fruitful ruminations rarely ebb and flow with the diurnal…
Read MoreOp-Ed
Could There Be an Uber for Home-Cooked Food? Yes, but let’s create laws and apps that actually benefit the community By Christina Oatfield | Illustrations by Janelle Orsi I used to run an underground restaurant out of my house with a like-minded friend. We called it the Wild Onion after the green onions that spring…
Read MoreMargo Rivera-Weiss
COVER ARTIST MARGO RIVERA-WEISS SPEAKS ABOUT ART AND HEALTH CHALLENGES I have been creating art for three decades and practically every day for the past three years. I enjoy working in many mediums including pen and ink, watercolor, collage, printmaking, and mixed media. Art sustains me in a daily way—it is my meditation practice,…
Read MoreEast Bay Bookshelf
In 2012, Luz Calvo noticed some students at a fundraiser selling donuts with the claim that the fried cakes were “healthy” because they didn’t contain trans fats. A professor of ethnic studies at Cal State East Bay, Calvo was studying how rates of diabetes, cancer, and other chronic and life-threatening illness have been rising among…
Read MoreEditor’s Mixing Bowl
A year and a half ago, on the occasion of this magazine’s 10th anniversary, I decided to change the tagline below our logo on our cover. One impulse for doing so was to clarify for people outside our region which one of the world’s watery bays our community lies to the east of. I also wondered…
Read MoreEating Our Hearts Out
By Caitlin Morgan | Illustrations by Lila Volkas It was in Cloyne that I learned how to eat. Cloyne, the rambling, century-old, hotel-turned-co-op. Nearly 150 of us roamed its red-carpeted hallways during our time as students on the UC Berkeley campus. Reggae wafted from the windows down to the courtyard, where college kids were drinking…
Read MoreEditor’s Mixing Bowl
In late summer, when good tomatoes are filling the bins at every market, I can’t help going back to my best tomato moment. I’m a kid in my father’s marvelous vegetable garden, plucking a ripe, hot tomato from a sturdy vine that’s trellised up to my five-year-old eye level. A terrifying hornworm is tearing through…
Read MoreFibershed
FIBERSHED Fashion gets a slow-food-style makeover By Jillian Laurel Steinberger Where does our clothing come from and where does it end up? We’ve grown accustomed to asking such questions about our food and our water, but why not about our fabrics and dyes? What if we could get sweaters, jeans, and hats made from locally…
Read MoreSIDE DISH
CAN OYSTERS COME BACK TO THE BAY? BY SARAH HENRY ILLUSTRATIONS BY SARAH HODGSON PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANDREW WHITMORE Christopher Lim is on a mission to educate eaters about the connection between the health of the planet and what’s on our plate. For him, it’s all about oysters, those sea-kissed, succulent shellfish whose sustainability standing makes…
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