 Hello, friends. We see the room filling up. We see those numbers. And today we are recording on YouTube. So be aware. Please stay muted. And we'll get started here in just a moment, right when the clock hits 11. Good morning, everyone. So nice to see you all. Welcome, all right. Let's jump in and get started. Thank you all for joining us. And just a reminder to all stay muted. We are on format, which means we can see you and we can hear you and we love that. But our cameras do not love to hear you all the time. So please stay muted. All right. Let's jump in. And my slide keeps going forward. We are here for the recording and progress. Okay. Everyone, please stay muted. Robert muted. Alan, you got those mutes for me? I'm clicking them. All right. Hi, friends. Welcome. Today we are here for part of our summer stride and celebrating Shanta Nimbark Sakharov, who is a, you know, a San Francisco legend, I'm going to say. So let's go forward and with some library announcements and then we'll turn it over for today's event. This is part of our big summer stride. And summer stride is not just for kids. It's for all ages. So do your 20 hours reading, get your iconic San Francisco public library tote bag with the fun art by Keelani Juanita. We want to welcome you here to the unceded land of the Ohlone Tribal people. I acknowledge the many Romutish Ohlone Tribal groups and families as the rightful stewards of the lands in which we live here in our Bay Area. Our library is committed to uplifting the names of these nations with whom we live together and encourage you to learn more about first person culture and land rights. I will be sharing in the chat box a link to today's event with, it's a big document that will have all of the library information, a reading list about Ohlone and first person culture, as well as links to Shanta and anything that comes up. I'll try and keep up as she goes along and we'll have all of those resources in one spot for you. Some quick library news today at two o'clock. We are celebrating the amazing life and legacy of Janice Mira Katani, our second San Francisco poet laureate and co-founder of Glide Memorial who passed two weeks ago now. The lineup of poet laureates is amazing that will be there so we encourage you to all come out two o'clock today. It's going to be a powerful one. We have some book initiatives at the library. One is Total SF and this is with SF Chronicles, Peter Hartlub and Heather Knight and August 24th. We'll be coming and joining Daniel Handler and Gary Kamaya and pick up the book, The End of the Golden Gate at your local library. A lot of them are going out this week, I've heard so you should be able to get it. We also have an on the same page. This is where we encourage all of San Francisco to read the same book at the same time. It's a bi-monthly read. This July and August we've been reading Jacqueline Woodson read at the Bone and I will also put in the chat Jacqueline Woodson was just in our virtual library on Thursday and she has amazing energy so I encourage you to watch that on YouTube and read the book and come to the book club. Chronicles, Mick LaSalle, film critic. He has not had a book out in 10 years. He'll be joining us August 18th and his book is Dream State, California in the Movies. Tuesday, August 17th. We have Meredith Esalat and she is a teacher talking about parenting and students and teaching. Should be good. And some art. And if you're into SF history, we have SF Neon. Jim Van Busker will talk about Neon in the cinema. And then part of our jail and reentry services department. I don't know if many of you know that we have this department so we serve in our jails and we help folks with reentry. But we have the amazing Rodessa Jones talking about her art and personal transformation and the work she does in women's prisons. All right. That's it. I'm going to pass it on to our amazing Shanta who I know you all know her. She's the co-founder of Outer Avenues Foods and I'm going to stop sharing and turn it right over to Celia and Shanta. Hey everyone. My name is Celia Lobono-Gonzalez and I'm helping facilitate the presentation. A little context is I'm a current worker owner at Outer Avenues Grocery Cooperative and you will learn more about it. And I'm also involved in grassroots food system organizing in San Francisco. Today I have the pleasure of introducing a beloved and foundational member of the San Francisco Food Cooperative Movement, Shanta Nimbark-Sakral. So Shanta grew up in a small village of India and came to upstate New York in the mid-60s for education. She was raised as a vegetarian and was disappointed with American food in college and moved to San Francisco in 1973 where she found fresh food and people interested in sharing culinary tradition and engaged in food and justice issues. This food activism led to a new wave of food cooperative movement in San Francisco Bay Area opening a cooperatively run food source. Shanta was active in this movement since the 70s and later became a worker owner of Other Avenues, a food co-op in the Outer Sunset District where she worked for over 35 years. Shanta is the author of Other Avenues Are Possible, The Legacy of the People's Food System, a book that chronicles the rise and fall of food co-ops. Shanta has written and published three books, Flavors of India, The Ethnic Vegetarian Kitchen, Recipes with Guidelines for Nutrition and Cooking Together, and a vegetarian co-op cookbook. Shanta writes recipes and articles about nutrition and food politics. She gets talks about these topics and offers cooking demonstration in various public places such as the service public library, Shanta teaches vegetarian cooking classes, and does video presentations of some of her recipes which will be viewed on YouTube. And in the Summer Stride program for the main library, Shanta was asked to describe various paths that she bore while building food communities in the San Francisco Bay Area. But since Shanta doesn't wear hats, she loves scarves. You will be seeing her changing a lot of colorful scarves. I hope you enjoy. So Shanta, what motivated you to get into food community work and food cooperatives? Can you give us some background? Thank you Celia. Thanks for being here. I also want to thank the San Francisco Public Library to give us the opportunity to speak about this important era. And among other things, I missed San Francisco's library during the pandemic, just like I missed the bookstores. I don't know how I could have raised my children without the help and the presence of the library. So thank you library. So as is the custom for book reading, I'm just going to read a short passage from my book Other Avenues Are Possible to answer the first question that Celia asked me. So I was born in a small agrarian village in west part of India called Gujarat. And I was raised by a vegetarian Hindu family. In my village, we ate what we grew. It was all seasonal, organic, and local by default. We didn't have any other choice. Sometimes the food wasn't enough, but we shared whatever we had. We were also fortunate that my father was a temple keeper. And local farmers gifted him with new crops, as they were supposed to give them good luck. And my father was allowed to bring this prasad or God's leftover home. But this food also came with a lot of responsibilities. My mother had to cook extra food in no notice at all. And there was a person or person scratching at the temple because of a village had no hotel. She was a phenomenal cook. She tried to teach me how to cook when I was little, but I shied away. I didn't want to learn how to cook. I was some of a tomboy, as you can see in this photo, that I have my brother, my sister, and I am wearing boys' clothes. So I told my mom, I don't want to learn how to cook because I will never get married, so I don't have to learn how to cook. But little did I know that a decade later, I will come to live in a land of plenty where there wouldn't be enough food for vegetarians. So when I came to college, I moved to a dorm to live with a family, and my host family had a vegetable garden. And that is where I met with some other gardener ladies, and we built a small community to cook the vegetables together and better. So what motivated me or us was our need and desire to cook better and share the food. This was my first attempt in participating in how to build community around food sharing. So Dr. Wedding, why did you come to the United States and how did you sustain your vegetarian diet and influence other people to go meatless? I came to the U.S. in mid-60s with my brother. My brother was my mentor. He came to visit us often, and one time when he came, he said, would you like to come to the U.S. with me? I was only 17. I was so excited, and I said, of course, yes. So I moved to New York when I was 17, but I had trouble difficulty adjusting. First of all, I didn't speak enough English, so it was hard to communicate with people. And then there was not enough good vegetarian food. So I moved out of the dorm and lived with the family, and this was a blessing. I not only got to learn how to cook, but also a little bit about vegetarian gardening. And then I met a wonderful vegetarian Indian family that lived near my family, and they also taught me how to cook more vegetarian food. After college, I traveled to Europe and Middle East and India all over, and there I learned different vegetarian food for different land, even like South India was so foreign to me because they cook food differently than us, the North Indians. So where I got into food movement, into vegetarian cooking was actually after coming here. Here, meaning in San Francisco, when I settled here after my travel through half of the world, I thought California would be wonderful because food is always fresh. But what I discovered here also is that people were so passionate about this so-called vegetarian movement. Back home, we didn't know we were vegetarian because we all didn't eat meat, so we didn't call each other anything. But here, people had a reason. People had a reason to be vegetarian, an ethical reason, health reason, and environmental reason. I loved it. I thought this movement was worth joining and worth studying. So I joined this movement with a passion. We also had a great leadership at the time with authors such as Rachel Carson, who wrote Silent Spring, and we had Francis Moore Lape, who wrote That First Small Planet. That was our Bible to learn everything about why to be vegetarian and how world hunger was a myth and not a reality because all we had to do is grow the food properly and share the food properly. Then we had a practical guide of how to cook vegetables and grains from Laurel Robertson, Laurel's kitchen. These books are still my Bibles. Then also the same time when I was the first vote here, I met a local author who was also vegetarian. She encouraged me to compile my recipe and expand upon them to write a book. First, I was a little bit intimidated, but then I started to write and there was no limit to how many recipes you can create. As a result, my first cookbook, Flavors of India, you see, was born. After I published that book, I started to teach cooking classes. I started to speak about vegetarianism and to answer your question, even how I influence people to go meatless. In my cooking classes as well as in my book, I don't really try to convert people to vegetarianism. I simply give people tools and I think that the best way to alter people's behavior is by providing them tools to work with, not by lecturing. Oh, that would be much later in the 70s. I shopped at Mom and Pop's store when I first came to San Francisco and then of course went to the Almeni Farmers Market because that was the place to get fresh vegetables. But then I met an amazing group of people. They belonged to a club called Food Conspiracy. Just the name, conspiracy, was so exciting. So I joined them and many, many food conspiracy buying clubs were all over San Francisco Bay Area and I was in the hate which was the hub for many food conspiracy neighborhood. In fact, we had a saying that when you go to join a club and if you can't walk, then you should start another chapter of food conspiracy. So the idea was very simple. A group of people got together to buy food in bulk to make it more affordable. And then once a week we put the food and then we divided in somebody's garage or churches or whatnot. But getting together when we came to order the food was a big event. Not only we cooked and shared the food, but we shared a lot of ideas. People spontaneously talk about a rally or they will talk about starting a women's group or a child care center. So it was like homeschooling for adults. And it was really great that we saved on money but was also about saving on packaging because we believe in bulk food. There was too much excessive packaging. Sharing food and learning about food from each other was another aspect of the food conspiracy that I really enjoyed because there were a lot of things that people knew since we all came from different parts of the country and from part of the world. So like how to make yogurt, how to make baby food that doesn't have sugar. How to make tofu. I know we take all of this for gratis cilia for you now. There's so many variety of all of these healthy choices but at the time even yogurt without fillers or without starch or sugar was not easy to find. So it was great to learn from each other how to stock your pantry, how to save food and so on. Another very important aspect of food conspiracy was how we treat each other and how we govern ourselves because we wanted everybody to participate in this food sharing experience but we also want to hear everybody's voice. So it was a total democracy. So Celia Celia we can't hear your questions very well. Okay I'll speak up. So how did the food conspiracy or start to open storefronts in the Bay Area and what was your involvement in this movement? Okay the food conspiracy started to open up stores and they were really many different places and they were food stores like these guys. This is question four. Question three. When did you? Okay so when did I start getting involved? Yeah okay so that was during the time when I had started to do a lot of work and I started to do a lot of organizing and we started to open stores and that was something that happened later part of the 70s and we also had a lot of people organizing various stores and we had a lot of stores that were trying to open but we had trouble raising money. So we had very creative solutions about food sharing, food making, food selling, having parties and making food. Okay question four. In the people's food system? Oh yes so in the people's food system I think what was really important in the people's food system is we totally rely on ourselves because we had a lot of experience from the food conspiracy how to do that. So we had like two stores open from Nicola and Dime. One was in Novy Valley, other was in The Hate and from there we funded other stores and how we did it is that people the store that had opened came and helped the new stores not only in training but sometimes in funding with money, sometimes even showing how to cash register and so on. So we were still in a basic mode of the food conspiracy where we put as many people to work as possible including people who shopped there so it wasn't really that unusual sometimes a cashier at the hate food store that I worked and volunteered we would say hey a delivery truck is here so can few people from the line get out of the delivery and just help unload the food and sure enough people stop waiting for the cashier to cash them out and they help the delivery truck to unload. So those were the times where there was a little distinction between the shopper and the worker and of course we all worked on a volunteer basis and that kept the prices of the food down as well as it helped the community because the food conspiracy were kind of a self-help organization we just helped ourselves not so much the other people so not of us again to think that to serve other people as well as to serve ourselves more efficiently it would be good to open the stores and this kind of movement was going around other part of the country the San Francisco Bay Area was a good example because we had a lot of food conspiracy that opened over a dozen stores very fast but there were stores like this all over the US and they were all forming little storefront the difference between these kind of storefronts or the cooperative was that and we call ourselves New Wave the difference between the New Wave and the other consumer cooperatives of the previous time is that we thought that we should select the food that would be environmentally friendly we should sell it in bulk and we should keep the cost of the food down to help the uncertain community as well as help ourselves to do this and this was possible until the mid 70s because the rents were cheap here for people as well as for the store so we were able to work part time like I volunteered twice a week doing sparking doing training doing cleaning we all did everything we took turns right and that way we were able to keep the cost down but this was more than just this where we had other involvement with the community as well because the stores were actually more efficient and we had more free time to open other kind of co-ops such as at the hate for the store we open or we help to open a cooperative run a bookstore we also help collectively run a commercial free radio station and we helped a free clinic on Hey Street which is still going on by the way similarly the store like Rainbow and Noe Valley store help other venues and causes of their community that had to do with Latino people and gay people and so on but again the idea of the food conspiracy was translated into the food store that we should keep the governance of the store in our hand and not have a boss so that was the big difference between the old style food co-op and the new wave so these food store things combusted in like very short time like five years we had over a dozen storefronts and about a dozen venues that supplied us with food and some of them were services that didn't have to do with food like childcare center and we had a newsletter collective that wrote political article about food and recipes and so on now unfortunately the food system where we call it people's food system flamed out even faster than it took to build five years which was pretty fast time without not enough funds or planning we had made all this happen and it just flamed out very fast that you have created and or participated in while working with the people's food system oh definitely it's time to change my scarf oh i would need a lot of scarves and i don't know there are enough scarves here so yeah what i did and i'm going to use the word week because it was all in collaboration with other people so what i want to emphasize here that this wasn't just about getting cheap food although the idea was in the food conspiracy to save money so we can get healthy food affordable prices and the same was true with the food store that we can sell healthy food at affordable prices it wasn't just about cheap food it was about other actions to a lot of them were political rallies some of them were community work like you can see in this photo that we are holding a rally this was a way back when when we first figured out that we should have more farms not labs to do genetical engineering similarly we were demanding certain food labeling that we are still demanding and all of those things we joined rallies and events to support these things in in about mid 80s i took a little break to write my second book as well as to go finish grad school but even during that time i along with other people continued to support all the food co-ops and i shopped there of course bravosa told my graduate students friends about the food co-ops about the food co-op moment and what it meant and some of them started to shop the nearest food co-ops and let's see now i'm going to go a little bit in the jump into the chronology so you might want to switch the photo that in 2005 this is when i had already joined other avenues and first i was a volunteer and then i became a one of the worker owner and i noticed that a lot of the people still wanted to volunteer because they didn't want the full-time responsibility of working in a food co-op they were either tired or going to school or they hear other jobs so i thought that it'd be a good idea for now to organize the volunteer program just like you would organize a paid staff so like be organized to first uh interview them and place them in the area of their interest and my interest was in the food wrapping and we had a food wrap license so i taught people how to make sandwiches how to make salsa and i did that for years and years and i must trained a few dozen people how to make salsa so that was one of my pleasure to do that and unfortunately that program stopped in 2007 like a lot of the other co-ops had to stop the volunteer program but we connected the community so well by then that 2005 other avenue won the best co-op award by the San Francisco Bay Guardians leadership which was very large at the time so that had to put us on the map so then going forward we also made it happen in collaborator with the community other things such as in 2008 2008 the building at other avenues was up for sale and our landlord was really very nice man said that he would give us a deal but as you know everything was expensive in san francisco by 2008 particularly commercial building and we didn't have a million dollars in the bank then so this was a monumental project that we decided to do is buy the building with the help of the community and this was really fantastic because we only had three months to come up with a business plan find people big and small loans so it was kind of like a quilt to make this patchwork and we were all very busy not just contacting people but spreading out so that we can pay them back in increment so we had a lot of community support members shoppers even former volunteers and other cooperatives that help us buy the building we made it happen in the deadline that we had to do and we paid everybody back some of them even didn't want it back so we paid our dues back to people before they were due so that was really a success story for a collaborative monumental task then in 2015 next photo shows that we made solar roof on our building now that we own our building this was the time we met a wonderful group of revolve that helped us figure out how to make this happen and it was the environmental community not just the neighbor and there were some neighbors and local people shoppers who helped us but there was a huge environmental community from all over the u.s. and from other countries that helped us make this happen so after doing the solar roof we also did some other changes so we were then certified green business then moving forward next photo shows that we celebrated the publication of my book other avenues are possible and this was again something that we did with the community's help because I interviewed over two dozen people to write the book who helped me not just with their opinion but with photographs and with some material to look into in the history of this moment so again we were the ones who made this happen in collaboration of other cooperative members so because after the volunteer program we still wanted to continue the contact with the community I also decided that one way we can do it is create community events so I would have like at least two events every month sometimes even three and we would invite people from the community as well as the workers who gave workshops we gave workshops on cooking classes and how to raise chicken even in the backyard and how to compost and all those things community events kept us together as the next slide will show you that we also partner with San Francisco Vegetarian Society to celebrate the World Vegetarian Festival this happened every year and we had a big presence and we had a colorful booth decorated with scarves and saris and I did looking demo there are hundreds of people enjoyed participating oh well isolation has been really tough on everybody because we have to keep meeting but soon after the retirement we partied a lot okay so that was not isolation time as yet thank goddess we partied with a big dinner and dancing and another party at the co-op that was more intimate they'd be invited some former volunteers and then we were even invited by the city hall to party with the local politician because that year they decided that we were other avenue was one of the best local business so some sort of a legacy award that we won that year so it was a time for partying but after that you know what happened is during the pandemic though I was going to a lot of public places such as library such as bookstore such as other co-ops and food stores and even college campuses to do lectures to talk to people about my books and talk to people about the sustainable food systems and so on this all caused because the pandemic I'd say about 10 of my events with the library as well as bookstores were cancelled and so were other things so it was very um testing time for us but I decided to continue to write write my recipe and contribute there with local websites such as the San Francisco Beacons website I contribute recipes once a month such as the website of other avenue such as the website of another co-op that is not open yet but they have a wonderful website that's the co-op in Benicia and I also contribute with another group called QSA that you may be familiar with and they do a lot of urban education and sustainable agriculture okay and going forward the one thing that I want to mention that I did do that's my last demo that you see the summer stride in 2019 but in addition to that I um for one year I made work at lunch for my favorite group of people and this other avenues worker and I wanted to appreciate how wonderful they were during the pandemic so this was my way of showing my appreciation for their hard work and also keeping my connection with other avenues here um can you talk about a book your book and where we can find them oh that's my favorite scarf well after all this is a library where people love libraries people love books okay so I want to show you my first book that you already saw doesn't look like this anymore so my first book flavors of India looks like this now so that's the one you see there the old one that I showed you previously had nice orange pages but it's the same book it's going really strong after being almost 50 years old in fact it has been used as a college curriculum for classes such as culture and cuisine and it's gone through several publishers and with lots of different editions that book was kind of my own came out of my personal need kind of like comfort food I was missing food from back home and I wanted to feel healthy but also comfortable and people enjoyed it that's when Indian food was getting popular so the timing was right even though I had trouble publishing the book because it was vegetarian can you imagine being in San Francisco and having difficulty finding a publisher for vegetarian cookbook but yeah that was still difficult so that is my first book and you can get all of these books from the San Francisco Public Library but also in the next slide it shows you where you can purchase them so my second book the ethnic vegetarian kitchen now the ethnic vegetarian kitchen came in the 80s it's got recipes with guidelines for nutrition specifically vegetarian nutrition because in the 80s we were obsessed with nutrition particularly vegetarians because we were told to get the protein you have to combine this and that which later became not so important because we found out that if you eat well and properly then chances are that you're getting in a protein in a nourishment so it's not all that important but having that charge and information is still helpful in addition to nutritional guideline it has a lot of recipes that I learned during my travel and it's all home cooking because I learned from people I met during my travel and from immigrants that I met here my third my third book is not a good book is the book that we have been talking about is book about the San Francisco Bear Areas who cooperated okay so after that my school is cooking together and that was supposed to have been part of the other book because I wanted to do half history half recipes but my publisher said man you are trying to crunch two books together so I took the recipes back home one year later I self-published it again you can find this book at other avenues Rainbow and at the library okay hopefully we'll have some time yeah for Q and A yeah what would be your vision and what would you like to see happen in the Bay Area food movement in the next 10 years or so all right this is a good question because I've been thinking about this a lot and in fact two chapters in my book other avenues are possible addresses that very topic like future vision how to sustain co-ops and so on so I want to say first what's going on real briefly because we are running out of time what's going on right now is a lot and we can build on that so right now for instance we have Mandala food co-op in Oakland enjoyed their 10th anniversary in 2019 they were not part of the food system they started in 2009 and they're going strong and in fact they are also going to open another store or helping to open another store and they're going to expand so that is a good story for a newbie and in a community that you skip for desert and we have another food co-op near Richmond area that's going to pop up in a year or so and that is called it's in Benicia it will be in Benicia and that is called there is called community something a cultivate community food co-op okay so the cultivate community food co-op has a lot of membership and they hope to open in a year then we of course have success story of rainbow to learn from their 250 worker owners and they still managed to run in a very non hierarchical and with our boss and that's a success story and then we of course have other avenue a smaller but as important store by the mighty ocean where we are trying to keep our mission strong as always and so we know that these stores could do it and survive and the book tells you how they managed to survive there's no reason we couldn't have 10 more stores in next 10 years but in order for us to have this happen it's really important for parallel movement to happen so that is part of my vision that while we can learn a lot from these stores that managed to sustain and the stores that are trying to open we should also focus to do other things such as affordable housing how can we have cooperative housing that can be also affordable we have some cooperative housing that actually started by the labor movement and there's a few of them in san francisco we need more perhaps smaller moment where we can make it possible for people to not just co-live to make it affordable but co-own to make it housing should be a citizen's right not something that we consider fancy and for the rich just like good and healthy organic food should be citizen's right similarly I think another attention that we should focus on is on farmers and farm workers because without them we will not have good food we will not have good organic food so specifically small organic farmers need to be supported they need to be supported by the government because the big agribusiness is being supported by the government so we the citizen should demand from our local and federal government to support organic farmers and also have some of the organic farmers to become farmer cooperative that way not only they can market their food together but they can share the labor they can share their resources and they'll be more sustainable similarly the farm workers will become farm owners and make the whole system more sustainable so I think the housing and farming both becoming more cooperative will automatically give doors to more food and who knows in 10 years Celia will write a book other avenues are here thank you yeah let's take some questions you can put those in the chat box if you want that would be great and are you two friends if you have questions too I love how you brought it like just such a holistic approach yeah yeah sorry couple of the questions got a little bit mixed up but I think we we were able to present everything we wanted to present some of the questions could be asked Celia as well yes and there's so much love already in the the chat lots of people who've taken classes from you a librarian out there who said they had a great class with you at their ocean of view branch and miss you but questions friends any questions Shanta you have not slowed down which I think retirement well I don't know if that's really true retirement but it's an awesome retirement I really love how you you know bringing the housing involved and like just how we could have like a such a healthy future with housing and food and how and all is such interconnected yeah I want to add that this is happening actually it's not like it is not happening right now but it's happening in a very small scale there are some farm cooperatives that are happening all over the US as well as some in Southern California there are new food clubs that are trying to open again more in Southern California and similarly there are farmers farm workers we're becoming farmers I love it I love it all right friends do you have any questions for Shanta I know you do we'll give it to give it a few few moments and we can allow some unmuting I've noticed just you know on Instagram I follow a lot of farms and a lot of there's a great black farm movement happening in Oakland and I think that is pretty amazing too yes let's see cultivate community food co-op is out here talking about that they've had you as an instructor Dennis did you want to say something oh I just wanted to thank Shanta for the excellent talk I enjoyed listening to her again and I noticed you didn't mention your many youtube videos if people want to yeah so I have been doing a lot of youtube videos since the isolation this is my daughter's idea she's a videographer and we go to my backyard and she's wonderful we cook there and she films there she filmed from distance wearing a mask and this was great because not only it shows that you can connect with the community from distance like we're what we're doing right now but in addition you can show the public that you don't really need a fancy kitchen or a lot of gadgets to make gourmet food you can cook it shows you how to even outdoor with a few tools so we do have a question in your what are your plans for your future oh what are my plans for the future keep doing what I'm doing I'm creating a lot of recipes and putting and sharing you know I like the online thing because it just doesn't require any paper and people can read and use and they can print it out if they wanted to so I'm really enjoying doing the same thing um also retirement means that you don't really have to do anything unless and when you want to do it so I'm enjoying that too my husband and I start with a cup of tea and a cup of coffee and the contest is whoever finishes last wins that's fun um so here's a question about food uh the the speaker associates tofu with east asian cuisine but is it also used equally as much in south asian cuisine huh you know that's really interesting because when I go back to India often and I would say just like 10 years ago we didn't find tofu in India and now in a small town you can find tofu very easily so I think that in India it's getting more and more available than of course it is used in you know Burmese cooking a lot is used in Sri lankan cooking now before it wasn't so it's beginning to take its place because people know that people are dairy intolerant for some people just want to reduce dairy from their diet thank you what are you having for dinner tonight oh it's a good question I don't know who's cooking my husband or I we'll figure it out we always have something in the refrigerator I love farmers market there's something I forgot to say is that one of the great women that is going on right now also to build upon for farmers and for consumers is farmers market there's so many of them we only had how many farmers market right now there's like a few dozen between here and Berkeley and Oakland and you can just smell the fresh produce there you can talk to the farmer I am right now working on a piece uh with a farmer that he explained to me how cumbersome it is to get a certification for organic farming even though their farm had been organic before so things like that you hear and you learn from farmers like how do they go food and so on yes thank you for shouting out our farmers market we are beyond blessed in the Bay Area to have the food that we have for sure and a big shout out to heart of the city farmers market our neighbors at the main library who are Wednesdays and Sundays go shop there um one last question I think um well why why do you think that food co-ops are not as you know popular or as you know commonplace I think that what happened in the 80s and you know somebody had asked me that question last time is like how did the system flame out and it didn't really flame out as fast as some people thought even though like a lot of the venues closed down in a couple of years some store tried to hang in there for a number of years and one was the Novi Valley there was an inner sunset but the reason why they flamed out in you know a few years and the reason why it's difficult to have more food cooperatives one is the real estate it's really difficult but the second is you can find a lot of this organic food in other places in Mucosco Walmart now it's organic people don't know the difference between a what it means for them to distribute food in huge numbers like that be how they treat their workers and they people you know like to get food that's convenient and cheaper so I understand that because we all have concern and constraints about how much money to spend in organic food but two big reason is that what we started got co-opted by big organization including Amazon and Whole Foods and Trader Joe and secondly the real estate is just impossible for food to have places and for food workers to live you know we have a lot of turnover because people can't afford to live here you know that yes we know that for sure and you know speaking of those big big companies we won't name make sure you buy your books from Green Apple or from a local from rainbow from your library don't go to revenues yeah get all those books from there we have we are still very lucky in our bay area we have 19 bookstores so please shop at them and and watch out for the community in Penicia if you live near there if you live near Richmond of Alejo they're going to be awesome food co-op coming up cultivate community food co-op I'm going to yeah and they have a website where I post and put my recipes and share my recipes with them but they also have other articles about food and agriculture and so on yes Paula has shared a chat link with us from one of your recipes so that's yeah I'm going to shout out another co-op that's starting up in East Bay um the deep in East Oakland what's it called the deep the deep the deep yeah there's still you know in the works and finding a place and things but they're doing what they can I think they're working on like operating out of a shipping container and trying to meet their community needs so there are you know projects in the bay area you know moving forward and yeah yeah I also forgot to mention there was so much to talk today is about the Aries Mandi and their contribution to the food co-operatives in San Francisco Bay area there's six of them they're very successful and now they feel like there's no need to open up more bakeries and tipsyria so they opened up a construction co-op that's doing really well in a landscaping co-op so who knows Debbie wow yeah I love that yeah I also love um you know rainbow groceries idea of no bosses what a revolutionary idea it's true yeah it kind of makes unions obsolete right you have to negotiate you just have to work it out yeah yeah that could be very interesting and again just how it's so all interconnected to like just how we live you know food and housing and living and one thing that pandemic has has created is just a view of community taking care of community and how that could look all right friends Shanta Cecilia thank you for being here Cecilia Cecilia Cecilia I appreciate you both for being here today yes thanks for attending and also the library will send you the trivia test that I made up for you and there is an email address in there that you can send it back to me and if you win that trivia test then I will send you my third or the fourth book for free to you okay but no cheating you can't google anything this is all on our system no calling other avenues no calling Celia no calling rainbow okay excellent so I will be sending a follow-up email then for everybody and it's a fun test only 10 or 11 questions all right we're gonna have to get you back Shanta we have started to look into our future of booking okay booking in people in person again so hopefully soon we thank you all for being here we thank the two of you for joining us today Alan we thank you big time for being in our background and library community we miss you and we love you have a wonderful day come back at two o'clock