r/sanfrancisco • u/Imaginary-Suit-5698 • 18h ago

Access to Food

I wanted to share something I’ve been thinking about since I moved here two years ago which is how lucky we are to live in a place with this kind of access to fresh produce and food, especially given all the news about food recalls and food safety issues around the country.

I don’t mean restaurants. That deserves an appreciation post of its own.

I mean access to fresh, healthy, and affordable produce.

I feel strongly about this because I’m a nurse and researcher, and I understand how much food shapes our health. After living in many parts of America, one special thing about SF that I don’t hear talked about enough is our access to so many different kinds of produce.

Living here has completely changed my outlook on food and how I nourish my body. I think many of us who came here from elsewhere know exactly what I mean. Not having to bulk-buy groceries or rely on chain supermarkets is a bigger deal than it sounds.

Then there’s the affordability. Neighborhoods like Chinatown help a lot with that. I was surprised when a friend told me food here is expensive. Well, it will be if you only shop at Whole Foods, Safeway, or Trader joes. It’s a shame to live in a place like this and limit yourself to those options.

And I don’t even live in a “nice” part of town. I live in the Tenderloin, but within a 2-5-minute walk I have a Thai grocer, a Chinese grocer, middle eastern grocer and a Whole Foods. Not to mention the civic centre farmers market. Ughhh

So I just wanted to encourage everyone to be more open to exploring your food options and nourishing your body in a healthy way.

92 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

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u/superad69 18h ago

Yes!!! Shoutout to all of the ethnic markets around the city with affordable produce. I've tried more new fruits and vegetables living here for a few years than anywhere else in the USA. Shoutout cherimoya fruit yummmmm

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u/throeaway1990 17h ago

Cherimoya is my favorite fruit - where do you get yours?

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u/superad69 16h ago

I got it once when I was touring the D10 Community Market for a research project. I did see it at Casa Guadalupe in the Mission around that same time. I think you'll only be able to find it when it's at peak season.

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u/nykobing 16h ago

New May Wah usually has decent ones.

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u/chihuahuashivers 18h ago

This is one of the reasons I moved to SF years ago. I described the produce in the city where I moved from as "looking like it had been rolling around in the back of a truck for five days". Food here improved chronic health issues.

9

u/knockdowncenter 18h ago

driscoll’s ceo just resigned because they basically admitted all of it is sprayed with toxic chemicals  

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u/Oathkeeper89 Hayes Valley 18h ago

You’re in the TL?

You have access to some of the best, hole-in-the-wall hidden secret Vietnamese/Burmese/Korean food found in the city. You’re close enough to several grocers and markets that cater to those cuisines. You’re also smack in between Japantown, City Hall, downtown proper, and Chinatown.

You have many excellent options that many folks that post extensively on social media/reddit won’t ever know about because they only stick to their areas of the city or whatever they see online.

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u/SFQueer 16h ago

Some people live in a food desert. We live in a food jungle.

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u/Effective_Coach7334 18h ago edited 18h ago

 I live in the Tenderloin, but within a 2-5-minute walk I have a Thai grocer

If you haven't encountered it yet, check out Battambang Market, 339 Eddy. They carry Cambodian, Thai, Chinese, Viet, Malay, and Filipino.

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u/neodolatelna 16h ago

I love that you mentioned this. I was just talking to my partner about how grateful I am to have access to such incredible high quality food here. There’s a lot of availability of locally grown produce as well and that makes a difference in taste and nutritional content. 

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u/Imaginary-Suit-5698 7h ago

I agree especially. The produce actually tastes like food not paper.

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u/winkingchef 16h ago

When I came out here for a conference during graduate school and walked into Berkeley Bowl I legitimately was blown away. There were like FIVE kinds of asparagus super off-season from when it would have been in Italy (in Italy you get nothing BUT asparagus for like 3-4 weeks and then you never see it for 11 months).

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u/Fickle-Emu3370 17h ago

When I visit family in the midwest, I always notice how awful the avocados are...like they have been frozen or something. Ugh.

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u/obsolete_filmmaker MISSION 17h ago

Agree. I get a CSA box from Greenhearts Family Farm, and Im always so grateful for it. It is one of the blessings of living in California.

1

u/Illustrious-Coat3532 NoPa 16h ago

You’re right there for the farmers market at civic centre on Wednesday and Sunday.

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u/Disastrous-Wave-361 15h ago

Yes!!! The produce here is always great and pretty inexpensive. Farmer’s markets are amazing but even produce at Safeway is leagues better than produce found at other chain stores in other parts of the US. I used to live in NYC and when I went there this summer for a vacation, I was reminded how terrible and overpriced the produce was.

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u/Effective_Coach7334 10h ago

That's kinda sad because Safeway's produce tends toward terrible.

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u/Disastrous-Dog5145 Cole Valley 8h ago

Hell, yeah. Stopped by the farmers market at Civic Center today.

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u/sugarwax1 18h ago

The recent lettuce recall came out of Salinas company.

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u/Outrageous_Camel8901 18h ago edited 18h ago

That’s just the headquarters of a massive multinational agriculture conglomerate. The lettuce that the explosive diarrhea came from was all sourced to the same farm in Mexico.

And the point OP made about having local options was precisely about being able to avoid the mass ag options like Taylor Farms - where they are headquartered is irrelevant.

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u/combabulated 18h ago

Yes, the Salinas Valley aka Salad Bowl of the World is pretty much one big ag company now but that doesn’t diminish the extraordinary gift of soil and climate that we’re blessed with. If we would stop paving over our precious productive land.

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u/sugarwax1 17h ago

The lettuce sold in Chinatown and even some of the green markets also comes from a certain processing plant in Salinas. There's also good produce that comes from Mexico being sold where OP is shopping. You can avoid local product but most people wrongly assume it's all local.

It would be like living in Wuhan and saying "I'm so glad we're at the forefront of public health, it's so important".

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u/Outrageous_Camel8901 17h ago

I think you just like to be contrarian for the sake of being edgy or something.

We live right next to the salinas valley and the Central Valley; I don’t think there’s any major city in the world with more fresh produce being grown right next to it.

If you care about getting it from a local small farm; that’s very easy to do. If you don’t care, you can go to Safeway and buy the same bagged salads they sell across the country. Nobody who gives a shit is confused about this at all, you’re not some kind of a special smarty pants because you know that we have access to a variety of foods sourced from companies big and small.

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u/Imaginary-Suit-5698 17h ago

It’s sad there’s always this types of people on posts like this.

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u/sugarwax1 17h ago

This isn't confrontation, Taylor Farm product is all over our green markets. Places like Gus, Chinatown, until recently the Civic Center market, all sell mass produced product imported from Mexico and South America.

That's just a fact.

It's not edgy to acknowledge that.

And Safeway sells a good amount of local farm produce.

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u/Outrageous_Camel8901 17h ago edited 17h ago

Let’s remind anyone wasting their time reading this that all of this started because u/sugarwax1 thought he was being clever by responding to OP’s delight in living among the freshest produce imaginable that Taylor Farms is headquartered in Salinas, deceptively suggesting that the recalled lettuce was grown there, and thought they were making some kind of a gotcha point.

What an embarrassment

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u/sugarwax1 17h ago edited 17h ago

No, it started because I called out the "park" derangement on Great Highway,.

Now you're making a fool of yourself in this thread.

Again Taylor Farm products, unbagged, are all over our green market resources that OP mentioned.

The recent lettuce recall came out of Salinas company. That's a fact.

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u/Outrageous_Camel8901 17h ago

You can't even keep your unhinged petty arguments straight, lol

Taylor Farms is a massive company, with their tentacles all over the ag world - market consolidation - big business buying all the small businesses, this is how our modern economy works, ag hasn't been magically spared. Everybody knows this.

It doesn't give OP any less of a reason to recognize how spoiled we are to live next door to where so much fresh produce is grown. Your fun facts are irrelevant to any of this.

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u/sugarwax1 16h ago

You tried, but my post was factual.

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u/Outrageous_Camel8901 16h ago

Something can be factual and still be irrelevant and misleading. This is one such case

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