Hot off the presses, our Whole Planet Foundation calendar is on sale now at Whole Foods Market stores throughout the US and Canada! At just $3 each, these calendars are perfect for home, office, stocking stuffers, gifts and more. Thanks to funding from our vendor partners, 100% of calendar sales goes to provide microlending support to our global communities. In addition to feeling good about helping, you’ll also receive more than $16 (Canada) and more than $20 (US) in coupons from the Whole Foods Market’s supplier community! You’ll save on your favorite items from companies like Nature’s Path, Earth’s Best, Amy’s Kitchen and Seventh Generation.  Visit our calendar page to see the full list of coupons.

This is our fifth year to create a calendar, and each year gets better. More value for you through coupons and more funds raised to help our microcredit clients. Last year, shoppers purchased more than $70,000 in calendars, which funded 312 microloans that empowered nearly 2,000 poor women and their family members to create or expand a home-based business and create prosperity. Each year these loans are repaid and re-loaned again and again, and with your help this year, Whole Planet Foundation can empower 2,000 more women with an opportunity to lift themselves out of poverty through entrepreneurship.

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Since 1986, Gaia Herbs has been committed to growing certified organic herbs.  Located in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina, the Gaia Herb Farm is one of the largest medicinal herb farms in the United States, with some 50 crops growing on 250 acres of certified organic river bottom soil.

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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Heidi is a country girl at heart with a self-professed obsession to feed her daughter, Ute, the best food possible. She believes her urban farm is her biggest contribution to her family, providing food, lessons and time together with Ute in the garden and the kitchen.

Chickens, miniature goats and a vegetable patch share Heidi and Ute’s home in the midst of the Excelsior district in San Francisco. They find much more than basic sustenance in this mini urban farm of theirs and get creative with ways to exercise the goats. Watch their story on this episode of Grow.

What about you? Chickens, goats or both?

In this episode of Grow, Tom and Rachel dream of eating only food grown in their own backyard, and in Vallejo, California their dream just might come true. They chose a home with an extra-large lot and dug right in, facing the challenges and flourishing from the successes within their newfound community.

With full-time day jobs in construction and landscape architecture, Tom and Rachel are well suited to the planning and execution required for managing their backyard farm. Time is another question, but somehow Rachel also fits in a writing gig for Homegrown.org.

What would a feast of locally-grown foods include in your hometown? Share with us in the comments below.

Washington, DC has the largest number of Ethiopians outside Ethiopia and is the site for a lively festival where music and food mingle with historians and dance. Get a taste of this culture in this episode of Fest-A-Nation as host Emma Green makes friends over food at the Ethiopian Heritage Festival.

The self-described “Martha Stewart meets MacGyver of all things food, wine and travel,” Emma Green asks the questions you would ask if you were there and gets the answers with her ever-present smile as she eats, drinks and dances her way through festivals that celebrate and preserve international cultures far from home.

What fun festivals have you enjoyed recently?

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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First constructed and planted in the spring of 2010, the Whole Foods Market Garden Project at Healing Place Women and Children’s Campus (both a homeless shelter and a long-term recovery program) in Louisville, Kentucky, has turned into a self-sustaining food system that provides fresh vegetables for the 200 residents and staff of the facility. With a large-scale vegetable garden, Healing Place is now able to incorporate a “plant-strong” eating approach, where it did not exist before. Also, the residents now enjoy the healing qualities of gardening, which ties in well with the overall mission and vision of the Healing Place.

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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This July, Doug Masiuk will begin his historic journey to become the first Type-1 diabetic to run all the way across the United States. Doug and his non-profit organization, 1Run.org, will fight diabetes by using the run to educate Americans about taking that first step toward healthier living and thwarting this epidemic, which is projected to afflict 1 out 3 people living in the U.S. by 2050.

I’m Doug and I’ve had diabetes since I was three. In less than a month, I’m going to start running from San Francisco and four months later I’ll be putting my feet in the Atlantic on the coast of New York. As the first Type-1 diabetic to run across the U.S., I’m terribly proud that Whole Foods Market is sponsoring me and my organization, 1Run.org.

Twenty-eight million Americans suffer from diabetes. Another 35% of adults over 20 years old in the U.S. are pre-diabetic. And those numbers are growing by the minute. Can you imagine a world where one out of every three of us has diabetes? That will be a reality in 2050 if we continue down this road. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

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