Phat Beets Produce is a non-profit food justice collective started by Max Cadji and Brett Brenner in 2007 that organizes produce stands, farmers’ markets, urban gardens, community oriented programs and workshops in order to build a more equitable and sustainable food system. ^[1] Cadji helps residents have access to nutritious food by coordinating between farmers, institutions, and low-income communities to utilize empty land for urban gardening. ^[2] Phat Beets emphasizes food justice, but also supports other intersectional issues, such as gentrification and housing justice, to achieve their goal of solving social justice issues. ^[3] Phat Beets has four community produce spaces located around Oakland: North Oakland Children’s Hospital, Arlington Medical Center Farmer’s Market, Arlington Medical Center Produce Stand and the Saint Martin De Porres Community Produce Stand. ^[4] Three gardens grow their produce: Healthy Hearts Garden (Dover Street Garden), 59th street spiral gardens, and BEET DOWN! Acres. ^[5] Phat Beets uses programs and workshops as methods of reaching out to the community. The “Fresh Fellows” program and the Phat Beets Pickle Company attempt to empower the community’s youth through education and leadership experience. ^[6]Phat Beets is also working to stimulate the local economy by creating a business incubator program that will support local restaurant entrepreneurs in their first year of business. ^[7] Workshops are another method of reaching out to the community, so Phat Beets hosts a variety of weekly workshops like “Decolonize Your Diet” and “Food N’Justice,” to try to demystify social issues and provide more information to community members. ^{[8] [9]}

Ideology

General Information

Phat Beets is a social justice organization that takes an open position on food justice and other social issues, like housing justice, gentrification, and racialized processes within the criminal justice system, to address a variety of issues that “intersect and reinforce one another” ^[3] in hopes of helping community members in need and taking an active role in attempting to solve social problems. ^{[10] [3]} This follows the theory of Intersectionality in that individuals experience multiple forms of oppression at the same time which shape their identity. ^[11] To help solve social issues affecting communities, it is therefore important to take a broader look of issues instead of focusing on one issue at a time. ^[12] Food and housing justice are connected because they share similar factors, like place based city planning and policy, transportation regulations, and commercial real estate development that change and subsequently affect the environment of the food and housing justice movements. ^[13] Phat Beets has also mentioned that racialized processes are in line with food justice because an underrepresented community’s lack of access to nutritious and affordable food now is partially a result of racist policies that prevented the accessibility to healthy food in the first place. Phat Beets does not directly work to fix all of the social issues they have publicly discussed, but they still try to support the issues and stand in solidarity with organizations that do. ^[14]

Food Justice

“ Food justice is communities exercising their right to grow, sell, and eat healthy food.” ^[15] Phat Beets believes that everyone deserves the right to have healthy food that is affordable and easily accessible. ^[16] In order to help strengthen food justice in Oakland, Phat Beets creates opportunities for local farmers and businesses, connects the community to food justice, and finds different methods of making healthy food accessible ^[1]

Farmers of color in the Oakland area have more opportunities to be profitable because Phat Beets offers farmers to sell their produce at farmer’s markets and produce stands at local schools and hospitals. ^[1] The opportunities Phat Beets creates are helpful for local farmers to have enough economic support that will allow them to stay in business and continue to sell their crops in the community. By giving local farmers more opportunities to succeed, Phat Beets strive to lower the dependency residents have on cheap, processed food because there will be more options to buy local, nutritious food.

Phat Beets also makes it a point to connect “community and individual health with our food system” ^[1] in order to give healthcare providers and institutions the incentive to support laws and regulations that promote a healthy lifestyle through nutritious foods. They also connect the community to food justice by focusing on groups that need aid, like residents suffering from obesity, and teaching them how to make healthy lifestyle decisions. ^[1] In order to have a strong food system, programs like “Fresh Fellows” teach youth at risk of chronic diseases how to have a healthy lifestyle regardless of the challenges they face. Lastly, Phat Beets uses different forms of community organizing like workshops and farmers’ markets, with the goal of fostering a sense unity and strength so that the community can come together to fight the issues affecting them, like “those affected by diet related diseases within the North Oakland Flatlands. ^[1]

Another way that they are also working to promote food justice and make healthy food more accessible is by creating new methods of allowing sustainable food to be in the economy. For example Phat Beets is passing policies that would allow residents to utilize public parks for food cultivation. They are working with the Edible Parks Task Force to to create gardens at other public parks. Furthermore, Phat Beets is investing and supporting local entrepreneurs to help boost the local economy by creating The Kitchen Incubator program to to help give small restaurant businesses a stronger chance of being successful. This program is intended to help create a profitable economic environment for sustainable food. ^[1]

Gentrification

Phat Beets has decided to take an open stance against gentrification, “a shift in an urban community toward wealthier residents and/or businesses and increasing property values” ^[17] , because they believe they should fight intersecting social issues in order to allow food justice to thrive. Gentrification pushes residents out of their communities and makes it more difficult for them to have access to healthy, affordable food. So in order to strengthen food justice, Phat Beets must also help fight gentrification. Phat Beets has stated that gentrification is the result of “a politically deliberate program set in motion by real estate companies, developers, big business, government officials and police.” ^[3] Phat Beets believes one way gentrification could be alleviated would be if the City of Oakland provided monetary support for the community. ^[3]

Phat Beets released a “Statement on Gentrification” to elaborate on their gentrification position.
[3] In summary it says that if someone agrees with Phat Beets’ mission, then they are ultimately against gentrification because it forces out residents and therefore prevents low-income minority groups from having access to healthy, affordable food. Phat Beets believes the City of Oakland contributes to the perpetuation of gentrification because it decreases monetary support for North Oakland residents, while it still “selectively funnels funds into better transportation and subsidizes high-end business and housing developments.”
[3] Phat Beets does not support documentaries made by the Better Homes and Real Estate Company that promote NOBE (an acronym that stands for North Oakland, Berkeley, and Emereryvile)
[18] that state “these neighborhoods are being ‘discovered’”
[3] because it is an attempt to make the neighborhood more attractive to richer residents and businesses. Phat Beets understands that new individuals moving into Oakland cannot be blamed for gentrification, but it is important to still understand the systems that are allowing for gentrification and other injustices to continue.
[3]

Urban Gardens Contribution to Gentrification

Urban gardens are generally created to make a positive contribution to their communities, however some arguments have been made that urban gardens promote gentrification because they are placing their needs above those of the underrepresented groups in their community. ^[19] Urban gardens could be used as a “gentrification tool” because their attractiveness might allure higher end businesses and richer residents to move into the area. This would help raise the cost of living and subsequently push the people that the community garden was attempting help out. ^[20]

Some supporters of urban agriculture, like the San Francisco Urban Agriculture alliance oppose such arguments because they believe that there are larger social and economic forces at play that cause gentrification. ^[21] Patrick Crouch, an urban farmer and author, also believes that gentrification is directly influenced by government’s economic incentives to bring in more affluent people, and is not caused by community development. ^[22] Furthermore, there have been instances of some Urban Gardens, like Georgia Street in Detroit, Michigan, that are thought to help the community but not contribute to gentrification because of their location. It is located far from high traffic areas that would make it more alluring for businesses to open. ^[22]

In order to deal with the contribution of gentrification, the San Franischo Urban Agriculture Alliance and Crouch's Urban Garden, like Phat Beets, have decided to incorporate social justice into their organizations framework in order to “make sure urban agriculture is more than just a catalyst for gentrification.” ^[22] This would allow urban gardens to be a positive contribution to the community because they are keeping its issues and needs in mind. Patrick Crouch suggests that understanding the community’s history and policies, supporting community leaders, and paying attention to the people’s needs will allow an urban garden to help combat gentrification from occurring. ^[22]

Historical Influence

Phat Beets position on social issues stems in large part from the civil rights movement and political groups such as The Black Panther Party. Phat Beets incorporates the fundamental ideas of these movements and organizations into their own mission, such as the right to have equal access to food and education. The Black Panther’s Free Breakfast for Children is similar to Phat Beet’s farmer’s markets because they share the value that a community must have healthy and nutritious diets in order to perform at their best to improve their communities. Furthermore, The Black Panther Party, like Phat Beets, believes that “anti-hunger efforts and food-centered campaigns were driven by an implicit understanding of the power of food in battles over racialized definitions of personhood, a forum for both enforcing and resisting hegemonic authority.” ^[23] In other words, these organizations believe that food programs are essential to battling unjust social conditions. Phat Beets continues to promote on food justice notions by providing workshops, like Food N’Justice workshops, to explain how health and food can be used as opportunities for social change.

Farmers' Market & Produce Stands

St. Martin De Porres

Phat Beets was first started by Max Cadjii and Brett Brenner in 2007 at the St. Martin de Porres School, located at the school parking lot on 675 41st Street in Oakland. OBUGS, a garden organization partnered with Phat Beets to create a garden and produce stand that would make healthy food more accessible to children and residents. This produce stand is still available to students, so instead of kids rushing to the ice cream truck, they have various fresh and healthy produce they can choose from. Every Wednesday from September to June, Phat Beets comes to the school and supplies the children with fresh produce. To help the children develop leadership roles, the children help setup, prepare the vegetables, handle transactions, and are a part of food demonstrations. This is effective in helping teach the youth more about food justice. ^[24]

Oakland’s Children’s Hospital

The Oakland’s Children Hospital Farmer’s Market was started by Max Cadji, Dr. Jennifer Matthews, and Brett Brenner in June of 2010. Max Cadji wanted to open up a new produce market and was able to collaborate with Dr. Jennifer Mathews to create a produce stand in the Hospital. This idea met the goals of Phat Beets by increasing healthy food accessibility to residents and of Dr. Mathews because it directly supports the patients of the Healthy Hearts Clinic, a child obesity clinic. Dr. Mathews realized that it was important to create a produce stand when she witnessed how difficult it was for her Healthy Hearts patients to buy the fruits and vegetable she prescribed because they were too expensive or far away. ^[25]

The Oakland’s Children Hospital farmer’s market aim is to offer an extensive variety of fruits, vegetables, plants, seeds, and other treats as cheaply possible. To make the produce as affordable as possible they offer $5 food vouchers (“carrot cash”) and accept food stamps in order to help get people more interested in exploring healthy food. Its location is also convenient because patients have to walk through the farmer’s market as they leave the hospital. ^[25] Furthermore, the farmer’s market is on the same day as the Healthy Hearts Clinic, a pediatric program dedicated to preventing and treating childhood diet related illnesses, so that the patients are more likely to visit the produce stand. ^[26] This farmer’s market and Dover garden now offer a Healthy Hearts Youth Garden in partnership with the Healthy Hearts Clinic. ^[25]

North Oakland Arlington Center

On July 3rd 2010, Phat beets opened a new farmers market in the parking lot of Arlington Medical Center (on 57th and Market Streets) in collaboration with North Oakland Pediatrics to offer their community healthy food and resources. They ensure their produce is affordable food by keeping prices “low and having all vendors accept WIC vouchers.” ^[27] Besides providing healthy, affordable food, there is also entertainment like live music, face painting; and educational components like health, anti-police brutality workshops and free cooking demos. ^[28]

Phat beets moved the North Oakland Arlington Center in June 2013 to 942 Stanford Avenue (at Lowell Street) to utilize an abandoned building at the corner of Stanford and Lowell. This building provides a “unique opportunity to expand the market, and to hold it at a visible space” ^[29] that will be used as a community gathering area. The farmers market offers a healthy cafe and a kitchen that will be used as a “business incubator” for food entrepreneurs (see Community Healthy Food Business Incubator Kitchen Program section). The kitchen is intended to help boost the local economy, by giving disadvantaged residents the chance to create their own businesses. ^[29]

Related Organizations Information

These partners have worked with Phat Beets in the Past: ALBA (Agriculture Based Training Association), The People’s Grocery in Oakland, OBUGS, St.Martin De Porres Elementary, The Healthy Hearts Clinic at the Children’s Hospital Oakland, Arlington Medical Center, The Dover St Neighborhood Group, Oakland Local. ^[30]

References Information