Afternoon Tea Break with Three Stone Hearth Staff & Volunteers

The month of October gave us the opportunity to support Three Stone Hearth, a Community Operated Kitchen based in Berkeley, CA. Three Stone Hearth offers nutrient dense foods to homes and families around the San Francisco Bay Area. Their menu offerings change each week as they prepare global culinary offerings that highlight the nourishing traditions of various regions around the world.

After a few events centered around Food Banks, we wanted to check out an organization where we could be involved in the preparation of food – a subject we are clearly passionate about. Our hostesses at Three Stone Hearth were Catherine Spanger (Worker Owner) and Jessica Prentice (Worker Owner) – two ladies very knowledgeable in food & nutrition, whom we found to be excited about our organization’s name and its purpose.

Boobs4Food SF Team Member Jessica cleaning & peeling nutrition rich red beets at Three Stone Hearth.

We brought familiar faces along with a few new faces this time around as we supported the Co-Op Kitchen with the scrubbing of potatoes and carrots, the squeezing of fresh lemon juice, the chopping of buckets of onions without tears, the pureeing of ginger paste and the preparation of pounds and pounds of vegetables for the week’s menu of Shepherd’s Pie.  All of this hard work wasn’t left unrewarded as we were blessed by an amazing communal tea service and lunch of delicate, delicious frittata with basil oil and yogurt  and a lentil soup prepared by the day’s volunteers. Lunch was topped off by homemade ice cream courtesy of our dear Boobs4Food friend Nat who had churned out flavor after flavor for us to try: mango lassi, shanghai peach, apricot pecan & caramel pear.

All and all, our afternoon at Three Stone Hearth proved eye-opening as we all learned more about the significance of the healing powers of food and how various regional cuisines and traditions have cultivated health lifestyles for centuries.

Many thanks to Nat, Thi, Gino, Lynn & Jon for your time and much appreciated hard work in the kitchen.

A glimpse of our afternoon: Three Stone Hearth &  Boobs4Food SF Photos

To learn more about our friends at Three Stone Hearth, please visit  http://www.threestonehearth.com.

-Team Boobs4Food SF

Boobs4Food keeps the hunger fighting movement alive even while on holiday in Hawaii…

Less than 72 hours before our trip to Oahu – Team Boobs4Food decided to re-contact Hawaii Food Bank to see if they were open to having us lend a helping hand. Since our greater goal here at Boobs4Food is to bring hunger awareness to a global scale – we wanted to see if we could devote some quality time during our holiday to a cause such as the Hawaii Food Bank. Annie C. at Hawaii Food Bank replied back to us quickly and gave us the okay to allow us to drop-in and help them out in their “house” given our recent Boobs4Food activities that we’ve documented. An opportunity to drop-in, which is very rare as the Hawaii Food Bank usually requires volunteers to make 6-month commitments, got us all very excited for our holiday.

We immediately felt the island aloha upon our arrival as we were given a brief tour and introductions to the team. We hit the ground running as we sorted through refrigerated perishables such as orange juice, dairy products, inspected cartons of eggs for cracks, frozen foods and finally we sorting fresh bread & baked goods for freshness and mold.

With our past experience in sorting frozen penne & green beans, and produce, our event at Hawaii Food Bank allowed us to see another angle of how food banks operate. After all the sorting and inspection is done, agencies from around the island come through and shop through the bank at a flat rate of just cents per pound of food.  This opportunity was wonderful to see how it all works halfway across the Pacific.  The Hawaii Food Bank happens to get quite a bit of fresh produce from not only local supermarket chains such as Safeway & Whole Foods but also from local farmers from around the island.

We enjoyed getting to know the other volunteers, how the food bank runs their operations and why these volunteers devote their time and efforts to a cause such as Hawaii Food Bank.  Overall, this experience was a lot of fun and even included jumping in the moldy bread bin to maximize room. We look forward to coming back to help the Hawaii Food Bank out again on our future trips to the island and to share our Aloha Spirit in the form of fighting hunger alongside with them.

Check out and support the Hawaii Food Bank!

Aloha!

- Team Boobs4Food

SEPT 5, 2009