Brahm’s Blog

The following is an excerpt from a letter written by Rene La Chaux, who is an adviser and business partner to People’s Grocery. In this excerpt Mr. La Chaux tells the story of what West Oakland used to be like when he was a youth. You’ll note that the community was quite different from what it is today. People’s Grocery is working with Mr. La Chaux to publish a book about his life and stories of West Oakland.

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I am a long time resident of the community of West Oakland. I grew up in West Oakland, attended public schools in West Oakland and began my career in West Oakland. During my childhood and teenage years, West Oakland was bursting with small businesses and industry. Large food processing companies, including Nabisco, Carnation Milk, Coke, Svenharts Bakery and Perky Pie Company, had plants in West Oakland and employed hundreds of people from the area.

When I was young grocery stores were located on what seemed like every other block. These stores all offered fresh produce and, with the exception of one or two stores, the owners were residents of West Oakland. Most residents of West Oakland at that time also had fruit trees in their yards and grew vegetables. There were three large food markets in West Oakland at that time: Safeway, Ponds Market and Liberty Market.

Liberty Market was the location of my first job. Every Tuesday my friends and I would ride in the back of a flatbed truck and deliver the weekly sales flyers to West Oakland residents. My other job, although unpaid, was assisting my father, who was employed by Southern Pacific. I would help to load food and supplies onto the Southern Pacific Passenger train at 5 o’clock in the morning on the day he would go to work. Many employees including my father would bring the unused portions of food home to share with family and friends. My grandfather was a Baptist Pastor who lived in New Orleans and also owned a grocery store in his neighborhood.

Fresh produce was abundant in West Oakland during the 1960s and before. My friends and I would walk into Fruit Town, which was the area were the produce wholesalers had their businesses. We frequented the area on such a regular basis we were familiar to them. Most of the residents of West Oakland were from Texas, Mississippi or Louisiana and stores provided the ethnic foods we desired. But in the early 1980s the ownership of the majority of the Grocery stores in West Oakland had changed and instead of focusing on supplying food, the new owners focused on selling alcohol and non-food related items. Safeway and Liberty Market relocated outside of the community. No longer could you go to the store and purchase fresh produce or food products.

Each year of my adult life I would spend a week in New Orleans visiting family. Friends would always ask me to bring Louisiana and Texas ethnic food products back. Each year I would bring food back to California and I always had to purchase additional luggage or use my sister’s luggage to accommodate the demand. After 2 or 3 years of bringing food from New Orleans to Oakland I realized there is a strong demand for ethnic food in Oakland, the same food that normally had been provided by local stores, but no longer.

In November 1987 I decided to establish Louisiana Distributors and provide food to the Oakland community at large. I continued over the next 5 years to service a niche market in the Bay Area for Southern Foods, Spices and Seasonings. I visited New Orleans many times during this period and established Broker and Distributor relationships with the major food processors of Louisiana: Zatarain, Community Coffee, Deep South Blenders, Cajun Fry, just to name a few. My goal was to be able to service the Oakland community with the food they enjoyed. No just Top Ramen and potato chips.

I rented an office in downtown Oakland in 1992 that had office space and a kitchen. I began processing New Orleans-style foods, snacks and spices and selling them at the local Flea Market on the weekends. Soon I was a familiar fixture at many local and regional festivals and events. I began looking for a place to expand my business and leased a two-story building with a warehouse. I serviced a number of restaurants in Oakland and soon I was in demand to provide my products at many restaurants. I had a staff of 4 people, which included 2 salespeople, 1 administrative person, and 1 warehouse/general labor person. I was very successful and I eventually became president of the African American Merchants Association. To this day my company, Louisiana Distributors, brokers and wholesales a variety of specialty foods.

One day, while driving in West Oakland, I saw a small van with People’s Grocery on the side. I stopped, introduced myself to the driver and he explained that they provided healthy food to West Oakland residents. I got the contact information for People’s Grocery and have been working with them ever since to bring healthy and ethnic food products to West Oakland. The service that People’s Grocery provides is a service that I had dreamt of providing to the community one day. It was indeed a pleasure to see someone who cared about the needs of a community whose food needs were not a priority for the grocery turned liquor stores in the community.

Rene La Chaux
June 2008

On July 23 there was an article in the New York Times written by Kim Severson entitled Slow Food Savors Its Big Moment. The article discusses the hopes and dreams that Slow Food USA has for its upcoming Slow Food Nation Conference to be held in San Francisco at the end of August 2008. Among others, one such hope is that the conference will signify the beginning of a makeover of Slow Food’s base and leadership to become a more diverse and inclusive cause and to address the perception that Slow Food is elitist and inaccessible to many people. I’m quoted in the article from a blog debate I had with a Slow Food leader several months ago over this issue.

While I think that Slow Food’s hope and desire to become more diverse and inclusive of people of color and people of lower socio-economic status is admirable, I’m not sure that trying to make Slow Food more diverse is the best strategy for supporting food justice movements and communities of color. There have been many similar efforts to bring diversity to groups that were previously led and composed by white people and very few of them have ever been successful. These past efforts have failed for a variety of reasons, the main one being a lack of understanding that such change is, in fact, not about “diversity” at all, but rather about something much more important: power.

Too many white led groups address their lack of diversity by pursuing the narrow approach of trying to bring people of color into the fold, usually through a token board or staff position, without changing the structural power relations and leadership constructs that are in place – which ultimately undermine the ability to sustain diversity. This is because the problem of “diversity” is usually defined as one of race instead one of power and that, while some diverse people may be brought into an organizational setting, the brokers, sources and constructs of power remain unchanged.

Peter Senge, a renowned organizational change practitioner, talks about how people tend to put old frameworks on new realities and that, by doing this, nothing really changes at all. A metaphor for this is: “If you wrap an orange peel around a lemon it might look like a orange, but it’s still an lemon.” Slow Food Nation is in danger of applying an old framework – the “let’s diversify” framework – to a new reality – that power constructs are shifting dramatically as people of color become a major political and economic force. Slow Food is assuming that it is needed by people of color, which serves to perpetuate its sense of importance. But, if fact, the new reality is that Slow Food needs people of color a lot more than people of color need Slow Food.

Slow Food should delve to a deeper level beyond just skin color to address the profound power relations that exist within the organization and its base. Part of this process would entail Slow Food stepping out of the center of its self-described movement to join a broader movement and form coalitions in which Slow Food acts as an ally to people of color led organizations. In this context Slow Food could maintain its current configuration and popular base and, rather than putting its attention and energy to trying diversify itself, focus on leveraging its political and social influence to open doors and generate resources that other groups do not have access to.

The article in the New York Times affirms that Slow Food is currently distracted by its own self-important belief that it should be a big tent for lots of people, rather than simply being an equal member of a much bigger movement or coalition in which the movement itself is the big tent. Unless Slow Food shifts its thinking and stops applying its old framework onto a new reality its efforts to broaden and diversify aren’t likely to be successful. The Slow Food Nation Conference may, as the article proposes, signify a makeover of the organization. Or it may signify that Slow Food is out of touch with reality. We’ll soon see.

On June 28th, 2008 I did an interview on KPFA’s “Morning Talks” with Kris Welch. I was joined by Parin Shah, Local Policy Director of Green for All.

The conversation was framed in the context of national efforts to realize a vision of social equity in both the emerging green economy and local food systems. The intersection of People’s Grocery’s message for “Food Justice” and Green for All’s message for “Eco-Equity” made for an interesting conversation of how our efforts share many principles and synergies for a wider social justice agenda. What partially emerged in this conversation is the idea that the energy economy and the food economy can be linked together at both national and local levels to create benefits and opportunities for low-income peoples.

Click here to listen to the interview.

Note: The interview begins at 36 minutes and 50 seconds of the audio file.