Foodies Project empowers Sonoma County cooks

As a UC Berkeley student in 2007, Angela Wooton found herself in the center of the local food movement. She heard Michael Pollan discuss his book, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” and activist Raj Patel gave lectures in her Anthropology of Food class. She also was a single parent on public food assistance.

“I would go down to the local farmers market with my food stamp cards and feel like I didn’t belong there,” said Wooton, a Vallejo native. “I felt discriminated against by a lot of the vendors. It was a real disconnect for me from being at UC Berkeley and studying food at a higher level.”

Wooton earned a bachelor’s degree in American Studies in 2010, with an emphasis on Food in the U.S., but the feeling of exclusion had followed her to Sebastopol, where she moved with her husband Jesse . There she discovered plenty of farmers, restaurants and organizations involved in food access, but none was highly accessible for people living on a small income.

“When you’re on assistance, people don’t really tell you what’s going on,” said Wooton, 35. “I knew a lot about food and cooking. I just wanted to know where and how I could get dignified food that wasn’t donated and old, that I wasn’t relegated to shopping at FoodMaxx, that I could go to Whole Foods like everybody else with a different strategy so it was affordable.”

After teaching five well-received workshops for the Santa Rosa Junior College CalWORKS program, Wooton created the Foodies Project with the goal of helping people on tight budgets find access to local food. In July, she also started a Meetup group and began planning regular events that include tours of affordable farmers market and grocery stores, cooking demos and meal swaps. The group now has 178 members.

“It’s really about empowering people with information so that they know they aren’t getting slighted on assistance,” she said. “Information is empowerment.”

Her affordable farmers market tours encourage people on food assistance not to limit themselves to shopping in grocery stores.

“You’re immediately distinguishable from everybody (at farmers markets) because you have little wooden tokens. That can be a really stigmatizing experience for some people,” she said. Group tours also help farmers recognize a large low-income customer base.

“There’s $5 million a month that goes out to food stamps, every single month in Sonoma County, and $4,000 are used at our local farmers markets,” Wooton said. “There’s a huge potential. That’s where the change is going to happen, when people start making those different purchasing decisions.

“If you have $5 in your bank account and your children are starving, drive-through it is. You have to do what you have to do to survive. But these are just more tools for empowerment for people should they choose to want to do things a different way.”

The meal swaps are a way to encourage community while also carving out the time to prepare healthy food for the week. Wooton experienced the power of cooking together while still enrolled at Berkeley. She hadn’t cooked regularly before she met other student parents who came together over meals.

“Even if you like to cook, if you’re busy and low-income, cooking is just one more thing you have to do,” she said. “It’s up there with laundry and dishes, you know? So the point of it was to get people together.”

On Jan. 14, Wooton and seven families gathered at the Sebastopol Grange to cook and swap meals. With about $800 worth of ingredients from Laguna Farm, Whole Foods and Santa Rosa Community Farmers Market - none of it donated - participants created more than 200 meals, enough for each family to take home dinners for a week.

Their dishes included meatballs, ratatouille, Louisiana red beans and rice, chicken burritos, pad thai and honey soy chicken.

“A lot of people did a really great job of doing recipes that (freeze) really well,” Wooton said. “At the end of the day, it was like $4 a meal. Every single dish turned out so beautifully.

“Even though they invested two hours of their time to cook, they’ve made new friends, they’ve made new connections, they had a really good time, and now they don’t have to cook for the rest of the week.”

Wooton hopes eventually to publish a cookbook with affordable recipes and hold a leadership summit, teaching people from throughout the state how to start Foodies Projects in their own communities.

“The point of Foodies Project is creating relationships around food, creating relationships with farmers, creating relationships with each other in the community,” she said. “When you eat from a CSA or a farmers market, you start to feel healthier because your body needs those nutrients. You’re getting optimum nutrition from whatever you’re buying that’s in season.”

Upcoming events include a food hike Feb. 7 at Pepperwood Preserve and a Feb. 14 farmers market tour, with cooking demo of affordable romantic meals. Contact the Foodies Project at 704-1853 or foodiesproject.com.