The Berkeley Student Food Collective’s 3rd Annual Harvest Gala (aka The Healthiest Meal I Have Ever Consumed)

Nov. 18, 2011: This past Friday night was the Berkeley Student Food Collective’s 3rd Annual Harvest Gala. The store, located down on Bancroft a few stores past Wells Fargo, just celebrated its one year of being an up and running Berkeley business. This annual gala is the store’s biggest event, intended to raise much needed funds for the student-run grocery hub. In addition to yummy and guilt-free food, the collective also places great emphasis on advocating for food justice. Educational programs like cooking workshops, guest speakers, film screenings, and field trips are regularly planned and open to the community.

Now that you know a bit about the Collective, allow me to transport you back to yester-yester-night, when the rain had just come swooping in from the west and I was still a gala celibate. Walking down Bancroft arm-in-arm with my date for the evening, we were excited to be dressed up in our freshly laundered pea coats and prepared to devour everything in sight. Minus kale chips, if they happened to make an appearance (which of course they did, vegetarians).

We finally arrived at the David Brower Center in Downtown Berkeley, where the event was already in full swing. We checked in our coats, and wide-eyed, wandered amongst the health-conscious. Before dinner, there were many tables set up and decorated with fairy lights. Live piano and guitar music took turns filling the room with lively tunes. Food Justice Trivia offered Fair Trade Dark Chocolate with Almonds and Cherries as a prize to the wise, more chocolate was promised at the Pin the Tail on the Hormone-Free Cow booth, and an enormous chocolate basket was enticing viewers to buy raffle tickets. Are you seeing a pattern? Essentially, the gala was my kind of event. There was also a silent auction and lots of information about locally grown, organic, and humane products.

Swanky, right?

After filling ourselves with tofu-stuffed mushrooms, sun-dried tomato covered cucumbers, and eggplant-topped slices of bread, we made our way upstairs to the main dining room. There, a lovely four course meal was waiting to impress our taste buds. First: a butternut squash soup. Second: arugula salad with caramelized onions and an orange and white wine vinaigrette. Third: quinoa with fresh, colorful vegetables. And for dessert: pumpkin and chocolate chip cupcakes with pomegranate frosting (and they were vegan!). The most impressive part? The entire meal was prepared by the student members of the Food Collective.

During dinner, there was no shortage of entertainment. Several guest speakers taught us about food justice and farming around the world, members of the collective shared their personal experiences and wrote clever poems, and at the very end, the Board Members of the Food Collective performed a musical number asking for donations. While hilarious and definitely the biggest crowd-pleaser of the evening, I am still singing that catchy tune on mental repeat.

Our hostesses for the evening (sorry for the blur)

All in all, it was a pleasant evening and a welcome escape from the Berkeley grind.

♫ We’re a foody foody food coop, we’re a foody foody food coop ♫

Food justice!