An Oakland Cookbook

Oakland: New Urban Eating is a cookbook I self-published in 2015 with a little help from Kickstarter. The book captures the developing food scene in Oakland, California through interviews and recipes. Originally conceived as a traditional cookbook of Oakland restaurants and artisans, I quickly became aware of the number of food-based organizations working towards food equity and the importance of their work. With this new development, I shifted my focus and began interviewing urban farmers, foragers, food justice advocates, restaurateurs, artisans, and residents, asking them all a unifying question—“What will Oakland look like in 10 years?” Introduction below…

Press

New Urban Eating: Oakland’s Food Story, with Recipes
What will Oakland food scene look like in 10 years?

What will Oakland look like in ten years?

For the past two years, I posed this question to the chefs, artisans and food-based organizations who are transforming the food scene in Oakland. In doing so, my goal has been to provide a snapshot of the city during a period of rapid and dramatic cultural transformation.

Of course Oakland has existed in a state of transition since its beginnings. Oakland's long history of newer populations arriving, disrupting, pushing out, and “refining” begins with its incorporation in May 1852, initially as a town and two years later as a city. Recognized today as one of the most diverse cities in the US, it was originally inhabited by the Huchiun tribe. Long before our cafes and dive bars existed, the Huchiun were collecting food in Temescal and Lake Merritt, where we currently enjoy gondola rides and food options that range from Eritrean cuisine to Cambodian to soul food.

When the Spanish settlers arrived in 1772, as is customary, the original inhabitants were forced out. The Spanish named the land Encinal, meaning “oak grove,” after the oak trees that flourished in the area at the time. Major deforestation occurred throughout the Spanish colonial era and through the Gold Rush as a result of the premium placed on lumber, needed for the development and urbanization of the Bay Area. This demand proved especially acute in San Francisco, after the 1906 earthquake (and the countless fires that followed) destroyed a majority of the city and left thousands without homes. Although Oakland suffered tremendous damage as well, the city remained prosperous in the early years of the 20th century. With its abundance of valuable resources, it enjoyed mutually beneficial relationships with its neighbors throughout the region.

During the first several decades of the 20th century, Oakland became increasingly diverse, as hundreds of thousands migrated to the area to fill the demand for labor in the city’s automobile, shipbuilding and canning industries. Waves of African-American and Latino migrants, from the South and Southwest respectively, arrived in Oakland, where jobs were plentiful.

However, after the end of World War II, the shipbuilding industry and the jobs it had supported entered a period of steady decline. As these jobs disappeared, those who could afford to, moved to neighboring suburbs, including Berkeley and Alameda. The city that remained was forced to cope for the next several decades with gang violence, racism, poverty, and drugs. Oakland’s reputation through those years deteriorated from that of a city of burgeoning prosperity to, as one San Franciscan put it to me when I moved here nearly three years ago, a place “where you'll get shot.”

I’ve found this to be a common sentiment among San Francisco folks, especially the tech-savvy younger generation who undoubtedly are familiar with the Oakland Crimespotting website (on which an interactive map shows crime throughout Oakland by location and time). Armed with an up-to-date map plotting misdemeanors, petty theft, and, yes, homicide, one can also point to any number of unfavorable facts in recent Oakland history. And Oakland has no shortage of horrific or traumatic events in its past. There is of course the crack epidemic in the 80’s, gang violence in the decades since, the 2009 killing of Oscar Grant—indicative of the omnipresent racial tensions between the police force and Oakland’s black community—and most recently, the Occupy Oakland demonstrations. Yet, Oakland simultaneously has become a highly desirable city for many transplants. Why is that, and what occurred before the New York Times called it the “Brooklyn by the Bay”? And is that a desirable label?

Oakland’s “transformation” began to take shape in 1998, when former (and future) governor, and then-mayoral candidate, Jerry Brown’s “10K Plan” launched. Its goal was to attract 10,000 new residents to Downtown and Jack London Square with a number of new housing developments. The following year, as the dot-com boom drove rents higher and led to increases in evictions, housing advocates demanded that affordable housing be made available as part of the implementation of Brown’s 10K Plan. By 2009, along with the arrival of thousands of incoming residents, 160 new businesses had opened up in the Downtown area with the aid of city redevelopment agencies. Sixty-five of those were new restaurants. Although Governor Brown dissolved the redevelopment agencies in 2012, the number of restaurants that have opened since the dissolution has only increased. Residents and businesses initially may have been drawn to the affordability of Oakland’s neighborhoods, yet the continued growth reveals additional factors at work.

Oakland has emerged out of the shadows, especially in the culinary world where a majority of chefs and artisans have arrived from neighboring Berkeley and San Francisco. No longer the “Baja Berkeley” it was once known as, and not quite attuned to the community that has been here for decades, Oakland has a new struggle: to remain authentic and diverse while simultaneously embracing the new. Today, much of the discussion about the city focuses on skyrocketing rents and changing demographics. In the 1980’s, Oakland’s African-American population was at 46%. That number has decreased significantly to approximately 27% today, which is about equal to the size of the Hispanic and White populations (at around 25% each). The Asian population remains sizable at 16%. Oakland has often been compared to Brooklyn, as a younger, affluent demographic has “discovered” what for decades had been a number of middle-class and working-class neighborhoods and claimed them as their own. Countless newcomers express tremendous pride in the Oakland of today, even if many might have kept their distance in earlier decades. The city’s transformation is underway and seemingly irreversible, yet no one is quite sure of what to make of it. Even those most responsible for these changes remain ambivalent. Is it okay to be excited by a new cafe on your block serving Blue Bottle Coffee? Or is it better to support the corner store that’s been there for twenty-some years? Or should we not have arrived here at all? The city may be “improving,” but who benefits? The gentrification question is here and food is unquestionably a major part of that conversation.

In the last few years, Oakland has undoubtedly become an exciting place for food lovers. One minute, you’re in Chinatown eating rice porridge and dim sum, the next you’re strolling through a Yemeni neighborhood with an ornate mosque, halal butcher shop, and falafel joint. And a further walk down that same road might lead to an Italian delicatessen for a tri-tip sandwich on sourdough and espresso, or to the new cafe serving a $4 drip coffee from Sightglass that even I’m inclined to fall for. Along with those existing culinary options, of which there are many, there are also the newer cafes and restaurants serving equally delicious food with fusions and influences from such disparate origins as Korea and Louisiana.

It’s this contrast that makes a city in transition both exhilarating and unnerving—exhilarating for the diversity, authenticity, and potential we all see, and unnerving because of the inevitable homogenization that accompanies gentrification and our understanding that transitions do not last. At a certain point, we lose that thing that made it special if we do not take measures to keep that diversity here.

The question “What will Oakland look like in 10 years?” is posed repeatedly throughout the following pages in the hope of continuing that (ongoing) conversation from the perspective of those in the food industry. Some predict that Oakland will become merely an extension of San Francisco’s food scene and broader culture, for better or worse. Others express the wish that Oakland might someday celebrate its own regional fare, and hope that Oakland becomes capable of sustaining itself by growing its own ingredients and supplying the restaurants and artisans who make its food.

With all of the accolades Oakland has received from national and international press, it might seem to an outsider that the city is overwhelmed with food options. Although that may be true of certain neighborhoods, the majority of Oakland’s residents in East and West Oakland live without easy access to healthy, affordable food options. To address issues related to food justice, a number of community-based organizations have emerged, including City Slicker Farms, Mandela Marketplace, and Acta Non Verba. Their initiatives hope to build stronger communities, to improve the local economy, and to educate and inspire people to grow their own food and make healthy choices.

Each of the three sections of this book (restaurants, community based-food organizations, and artisans) are arranged by the opening date of the business. This structure aims to convey both the vast array of food cultures that exist here in Oakland and the ways that the city has changed over time. The interviews that follow focus on the personal experiences of food-makers and advocates of food justice, with the goal of providing varying perspectives of a city in transition and highlighting each community’s relationship to food. The recipes have been collected from artisans, chefs, and residents living in different neighborhoods throughout the city, representing the diversity of the population and numerous approaches to lifestyle and traditions around food. Ultimately, I hope that this documentation of the city’s transition might contribute to the discourse about where we’re headed and what type of future we want to shape for Oakland.