Picture your local convenience store. It might be the 7-Eleven around the block or that one bodega with the best drip coffee. The image that comes to mind is likely filled with shimmery, plastic-wrapped candy bars, brightly colored lotto tickets and, well, unhealthy food.
While bodegas and corner stores often aren’t known for healthy snack options, they are known to foster community. Bodegas, most commonly found in New York City, have a deep history. Puerto Rican and Dominican business owners coined the term in the 1960s, and over the decades they’ve become places to share stories, celebrate cultural identities and strengthen neighborhood ties.
Since they’ve become centerpieces in their communities, bodegas often become a point of outreach and information sharing for nonprofits and other organizations. For bodegas located in low-income neighborhoods, where knowledge about nutrition is lacking and healthy food is expensive and often inaccessible, messages around healthy eating become even more important.t
That’s why LaRayia Gaston decided to fuse the low costs of bodegas with the health of Whole Foods. She launched LaRayia’s Bodega, a healthy take on the traditional convenience store.
Step inside and you won’t find Twix Bars or cans of Pringles, but crystals and candles in the entryway and a counter teeming with healthy granola bars, jars of organic pasta sauce and natural juice boxes.
And while most of the products have “all-natural” or “organic” written before its name, every item in the Westlake, California, store costs $5 or less.
“The price point is the activism, the price point is the focus,” Gaston, the bodega’s founder, told The New York Times.
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Beyond packaged food, the convenience store, which opened in August, also has a café offering homemade meals. Everything, from the salad to soups, is vegan. It’s all priced under $5, with options ranging from Caribbean-style potato coconut soup to jackfruit tacos.
“This is about giving people a chance to have fresh foods,” Gaston said. “There are people who want salads that don’t have the means. I have war vets that are 60 years old that are like, ‘Give me arugula today, baby.’”
The store is part of Love Without Reason, a nonprofit started by Gaston about four years ago. Outside of the bodega, the nonprofit also provides vegan meals to people experiencing homelessness on Skid Row, a 50-block area with over 4,750 homeless individuals. Gaston and volunteers gather food from grocery stores and restaurants that would have otherwise been thrown away and turn it into meals. The nonprofit delivers about 10,000 meals each month to people in need.
Similar to the meal program, the bodega receives misshapen fruit for free and many of its packaged snacks are donated, offsetting some of the café’s costs.
Eventually, the bodega aims to also support veterans, at-risk youth and people experiencing homelessness with jobs and job training.
“We want to address everything — food injustice, food waste, homelessness, giving people a second chance. I wanted to kill multiple birds with one stone,” Gaston told L.A. Times.
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Besides the goal of offering affordable, healthy meals, Gaston aims to make the bodega a space to celebrate neighbors and strengthen community. Whether it’s a weekend birthday party or an open mic night, Gaston wants to foster relationships inside the little store.
That’s why she settled on the term bodega. In Los Angeles, the term “bodega” isn’t often used — “tienditas” is much more common — but Gaston grew up in New York and was raised by Puerto Rican Caribbean parents. Calling her store a bodega is a way of reflecting her roots.
“A bodega is personal,” Gaston told L.A. Taco. “It’s knowing people on your block.”
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Tag: vegan
Would You Eat Cheese Created in a Lab?
No animals will be harmed in the making of this cheese.
Seriously.
A team of “biohackers” in Oakland, Calif. are trying to develop an ethical cheese that doesn’t require any milk. Their product — called Real Vegan Cheese — will use genetically-altered yeast to create a vegan cheese protein, Modern Farmer reports.
You might be asking, what’s the problem with real cheese? A cursory Internet search will show you how many cows are treated by Big Dairy. (There are some pretty horrific results.) In short, these cows are fed antibiotics and growth hormones, live in confined spaces, use up a lot of resources and create greenhouse gases.
And even though there are already soy- and nut-based cheese alternatives, many say that cashew and almond varieties don’t hold a candle to the real milky deal.
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That’s why these Bay Area researchers have answered the (cattle) call. “The really awesome thing about doing cheese this way is it’s a renewable source of cheese,” team member and molecular biologist Craig Rouskey told East Bay Express. “We’re not going out to harvest nuts to do this. We’re not using cows that are totally polluting the environment. We are actually using a closed system.”
So how is this cheese made? According to the group’s successfully-funded Indiegogo campaign, “It all begins with regular old baker’s yeast. Through synthetic biology, we engineer our yeast to become milk-protein factories, churning out real milk proteins (known as caseins). These milk proteins are then combined with water, vegan sugar and oil to make a kind of milk which is ultimately converted into Real Vegan Cheese using the age-old cheese-making process.”
The team also points out it’s not technically a GMO product since you won’t be eating this obviously modified yeast, but the proteins it creates.
After securing funding ($17,000 and counting), the team is now working to create something that’s actually edible by this fall. Pending FDA approval, of course.
Can’t be any different than lab-grown meat, right?
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A Titanic Shift: James Cameron’s School is the First in the Nation To Go 100% Vegan
If you were to dangle a carrot and a chicken nugget in front of a kid during school lunch, there’s no doubt as to which option will end up on the tray.
But what if Junior didn’t even have chicken as an option on the table?
As NPR reports, the MUSE School in Malibu, which was co-founded by director James Cameron’s wife, Suzy Amis Cameron, is going full-fledged vegan.
“We are gradually moving towards a plant-based menu because we do call ourselves an environmental school,” Amis Cameron told NPR. “Within the next year and a half we will be plant-based.”
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While school lunch menus around the country are offering much healthier fare (there’s even an all-vegetarian school in Queens, New York), the MUSE school is the first in the nation to forgo any type of animal-based product, such as eggs or dairy.
The Camerons are also vegan, with the Avatar director saying last month in a Reddit Ask Me Anything that he’s been on a diet devoid of “a single molecule of anything that came from an animal” for two years.
It’s all part of the school’s effort to keep their students healthy while reducing their carbon footprint. As Amis Cameron tells NPR, she was appalled to find out all the water and grain it takes to produce meat and dairy, plus all of the greenhouse gas emissions, waste, and pollution that production generates.
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The school, which has an enrollment of 140 students ages two to 12, is already remarkably environmentally conscious, the Los Angeles Times reports. MUSE is zero-waste, has plans to run completely on renewable energy, and students already grow 20 percent of their cafeteria food via a farm-to-table program.
Unsurprisingly, the push to forgo all meat-based products has been met with some push-back from parents.
“Food is a very sensitive subject for so many people,” Amis Cameron told NPR. “People have their cultural reasons for eating meat, their traditional reasons, their likes and dislikes. But slowly we are offering educational programs through MUSE, for not only the children, mainly for the grownups, because the children, they live and breathe [the environmental way] already.”
What are your thoughts? Would you want your kid to go to this school?
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