For any community, food sovereignty is a consummation devoutly to be wished. It’s what you have when the people in your community — rather than corporations — control the means of food production and distribution.
To achieve food sovereignty, those who produce food locally and those who wish to consume it need to establish contact. You may be fully on board with all the economic, health, and environmental benefits of buying organic, locally-grown produce, but without the requisite knowledge, your desire for best practices dies on the vine.
Founded in 2014, Long Beach Fresh’s raison d’être is to connect local eaters, feeders, and seeders in an ever-growing network to move the Long Beach area toward food sovereignty. With their third annual Foodways Summit, LB Fresh is highlighting a long weekend of events to do just that, with “tours, panels, and parties that celebrate and explore the local food movement in Long Beach, CA. Our objective is to gather and connect the local food movement together and with new partners, storytellers, farmers, gardeners, helpers, leaders, investors, chefs, food brands, educators, food buyers & distributors, health professionals, residents, seniors, youth, organizations, students, newbies, partners and supporters.”
The inspiration for the Foodways Summit came to LB Fresh co-founder Ryan Smolar in 2017 while attending the Placemaking Week conference in Amsterdam. “The conference utilized the city as a learning laboratory,” he recalls. “Instead of sitting in a conference hall watching PowerPoints and listening to panels of experts, we visited community spots, gave real-time advice to improve local situations, and learned new abilities and contexts. At LB Fresh, we thought this model would adapt nicely to showing off and getting more people engaged in improving the local food system.”
The inaugural Foodways Summit took place in 2018, another the following year. Needless to say, the C-word prevented the 2020 and 2021 iterations from happening. But with COVID now at a manageable level, the 2022 Foodways Summit is on — with plenty of new developments in local food production to highlight.
“The LB food scene feels more vibrant than ever,” Smolar says. “We’ve seen multiplied urban ag[riculture] sites develop, including GROW2ZERO Farms, Sowing Seeds of Change Farm, LB Organic’s Crown Victory Garden, and the Santa Fe Community Garden behind Casa Chaskis. We hope to connect folks with these new assets as well as the good food places in their neighborhoods.”
Smolar says this year’s Foodways Summit was slated for March 31 through April 3 to take advantage of the fact that four major local food events — the weekly Bixby Knolls Farmer Market, the annual LB County Fair and Urban Ag Contest, and the monthly North Long Beach Crop Swap and Cambodia Town Night “Marklet” — were happening so close together. In addition to these, LB Fresh is curating a Home Cooks & Home Gardens Tour. “It’s an amazing opportunity for people who are interested in local food, people who want to support local food, to really experience different aspects of our local food system in a short period of time.”
On Thursday, March 31, attendees at the Bixby Knolls Farmers Market will get not only the usual weekly chance to shop for locally-grown produce and more, but you’ll also be treated to DelicaSea, a unique chance to learn about and sample local aquaculture, with chefs offering tastings of dishes prepared from shrimp grown in a Downey warehouse.
“It’s shocking how many kids who live just a few miles from the ocean have no connection with it,” Smolar says. “I think it’s really important to do something ocean-related that’s away from the ocean and get people more connected to local possibilities they didn’t know existed.”
As happens every April, Bixby Knolls First Fridays takes the theme of Long Beach County Fair and provides local farms and growers with the chance to come together in friendly competition to show off their wares. It’s a great way to get plugged into the quality and surprising variety of local produce that is grown within city limits.
On the morning of April 2, one and all are invited to the Firehouse Community Farm for the monthly Long Beach Crop Swap, where local denizens come together to trade and share backyard and garden-grown produce, herbs and plants — pomegranates, oranges, lemons, limes, basil, rosemary, passion fruits, avocados, eggplants, kale, lettuce, tomatoes, ice cream bananas, figs, chilis, sage, and more.
Later that same day is the Home Cooks & Home Gardens Tour, where you’ll be transported to several “secret” gardens across the city for lots of eating and learning about local chefs hoping soon to take advantage of AB 626, a 2019 law that cleared the way for home kitchens to officially open up shop as small restaurant enterprises. (Long Beach has yet to authorize such microenterprises — AB 626 provides the opportunity for cities to opt in if they choose — and LB Fresh hopes the tour will help draw attention to what a good thing doing so would be.)
The final event of the Foodways Summit is the Night “Marklet,” a monthly display of, if not all things Cambodian, lots — including, of course, food, such as a Battambong BBQ pop-up, where Texas meets Phnom Penh.
“The Night ‘Marklet’ is a great opportunity for people who are interested in Cambodia Town but haven’t figured out where the access points are,” Smolar says. “This is a chance to get in direct connection with Cambodian culture.”
In addition to satisfying a hunger many of us have for eating the freshest food possible and keeping our dollars within our community, buying and eating local has a positive impact on our country and the world at large.
“LB Fresh sees local food as touching upon some of the key issues of our time: climate change and economic equity, healthcare access,” Smolar says. “[Unfortunately,] it’s almost secret knowledge. Where are all the gardens in your community? It’s almost like they’re locked away. […] There aren’t a lot of opportunities to go and not only eat local seafood but talk to the fishermen who caught it. With the Foodways Summit, we’re trying to use these events to expand the reach of the stewards of the local food movement — which benefits us all.”