Food Justice in a Drought Ridden West Oakland
In a world where extreme drought returned, the price of produce skyrocketed because of low farm yields, causing an increase in popularity for urban farming. Food 4 W.E.S.T. (Working to Establish Stability Together) leverages our community strength and new knowledge of large scale hydroponics to provide all-encompassing educational resource centers and community farms, making us the only organization that teaches urban farming and grows and distributes food exclusively for West Oakland residents.
West Oakland became an underserved and divided community since the construction of the Cypress Freeway in the 50s, which effectively split West Oakland from the rest of downtown. Redlining practices deemed this area “undesirable” forcing many low-income families, who, for the most part, happened to be black Americans, to stay around and caused upper-middle class residents to move more North by Lake Merritt, Rockridge, and Piedmont. This “undesirable” stigma left this area of Oakland desolate and ignored. Several urban renewal programs continued to divide West Oakland even further, especially with the construction of the West Oakland BART Station.
Since residents couldn’t rely on government involvement, locals often turned to each other for support. This sort of community camaraderie and action gave way to several grassroots movements and organizations to bloom, most notoriously the Black Panther Party in the 70s. Into the early 2000s, residents sought a need for healthier food options and thus a handful of community gardens, like City Slicker Farms and People’s Grocery, were established.
In similar fashion, founded in the beginning of 2018 as a response to declining food resources and investments, Food 4 W.E.S.T. is a food justice organization that directly serves West Oakland residents and surrounding neighborhoods. We began our journey when California’s drought returned at full force leaving a majority of California land dry and un-farmable. Soon after, the implementation of several stringent in-state and city-wide regulations on water use left many of us to our own devices. Food 4 W.E.S.T. spent time learning about hydroponic farming, which only requires a stream of water in order to work. Although it sounds counterintuitive to depend on water-based farming in a drought, the advantage of hydroponics was the fact that it only needs a single stream of water that could be recycled over and over again.
By 2027, backyard hydroponic farming has trended and community gardens continues to be popular in West Oakland, nudging the neighborhood towards becoming its own ecosystem, while spurring the emergence of small pockets of local economies. The challenge of food deserts was at the forefront of everyone’s mind and people were actively experimenting with potential solutions.
Back in 2017, I started observing and documenting my commute from my house in West Oakland to school in Upper Rockridge in depth. There were three routes I normally take depending on the time, day, and traffic flow. Instead of analyzing all three, I decided to focus on my side street commute route because it had the most “stuff” to look at. I’ve always been cognizant of how terrible the roads were, but never paid much attention to anything else despite having spent some time at actual restaurants and shops on this commute route. After a few rounds of scrutiny and a couple run throughs of my commute in Google Maps street view, I came to realize three things: the abundant amount of liquor stores in a 3-mile stretch, how frequent graffiti/tagging was in the area, and the concentration of homeless encampments along the route.
My initial subject focus was on MLK Cafe, an Ethiopian/Eritrean restaurant, between W MacArthur and 40th on Martin Luther King Jr. Way. This particular place caught my attention because of the sense of community it engendered. As I dug around, I found out about a new restaurant, which opened up a block away and brought about a different sense of “community.” This restaurant, Arthur Mac’s Tap and Snack, was new, “hip,” family-friendly, and expensive. Arthur Mac’s in contrast with MLK Cafe got me thinking about the disparity of those serving a community and those who actually inhabit it, because I knew that customers going to MLK Cafe probably couldn’t afford anything at Arthur Mac’s.
This juxtaposition within a single block led me to delve into issues of food in West Oakland. I slowly came to realize how much of a food desert* West Oakland was. While I’m blessed to have a car and access to grocery stores, knowing many others in my area did not infuriated me to no end. This, for me, was the beginning of what I would later call Food 4 W.E.S.T. Though the journey was rough, it was rewarding to see what could be done if I engaged my community to instigate change.
*Food deserts according to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), are defined as “parts of the country vapid of fresh fruit vegetables, and other healthful whole foods, usually found in impoverished areas.”
