Get your appetite ready because if you’re lucky enough to live in or be visiting Northern California, you’ve got to check out the Eat Real Festival coming to Oakland’s Jack London Square September 23rd through the 25th. This amazing event is totally free to attend and no street food or beverage is over $5. The Bay Area’s finest street food vendors will be cooking up some of the best dishes you’ve ever had: tacos with fascinating ingredients from all over the world, BBQ, flatbread, noodles, curry, falafel, ice cream and more!

Eat it!

Make sure you look for the local vendors we feature in our Northern California stores like Liba Falafel, El Porteno Empanadas, and Scream Sorbet. It’s a great way to meet your favorite chefs face to face and tell them how much you love their food.

We’ll have a special area where you can put your feet up and relax with some tasty treats from our own Taco Truck featuring Creminelli Meat Whip, Grilled Figs with Goat Cheese, Hodo Soy Kung Pao Yuba Salad and Jalapeno Battered Fork in the Road Corn Dog Bites.

You can take a bit of Eat Real home with you, too! The Craft Marketplace will have handmade honeys, jams, pickles, and other deliciousness for sale. There’ll be a complimentary bag check, so you can buy your treats, go enjoy the fest, and then pick up your goods before heading home.

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Harvindar Singh, Whole Foods Market’s Local Forager for the Northern California area, hands me a fresh cup of locally roasted coffee just as I greet him at the center of the Friday morning Oakland, CA farmers market. It’s a good, bold roast and takes the chill out of the air. Before I’ve even taken a sip, we are on the move.

“Come over here, I want you to check this out.”

Harv motions me towards something I’ve never seen at a market before. A man in rubber overalls reaches into what looks like a derelict hot tub on the back of a rusty pickup and pulls out a still flopping rock cod. He throws it in a plastic bag for an elderly Chinese woman and trades it for a wad of cash.

“This is what I love about this market, there’re some really interesting things here. Like all the Asian produce over there,” he motions to a row of Hmong and Chinese farmers. Their tables have familiar crops like carrots and snap peas but are overflowing with peppery greens and fist-sized, wrinkly melons.

We weave in and out of different stalls, examining stone fruit and Purple Cherokee heirloom tomatoes. Most of the farmers don’t know what Harv does for a living, but many recognize him as a regular and present him with samples. No one gives him the hard sell, they just offer foods they’re intensely proud of, knowing a taste is all it takes to make the sale.
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Chad works as a copywriter for our Northern California regional office.

San Francisco’s Pride Parade was electrified by the news of New York’s historic legalization of gay marriage. Between the gorgeous weather and the good news from the East Coast, this was one of the most jubilant parades I can remember.

If you’re unfamiliar, San Francisco’s Pride Celebration & Parade is a truly massive affair. It’s the largest gathering of LGBT people and allies in the nation. Well over a million people come from all over the world just to watch the parade. The only parade that’s bigger in the U.S. is the Rose Bowl Parade.

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