F
rom behind a simple plastic
folding
table,
the
Fresher
Sacramento team fulfills its
mission of offering nutritious and
locally-sourced food to people in Oak
Park and South Sacramento, while
offering career training to at-risk
high school students.
“The Fresher [Sacramento] appren-
tices are pioneers,” says Rabbi David
Azen, who founded the nonprofit. “We
are providing scaffolding to support
them and ideally this is
their business and they
can take it as far as they
possibly can.”
Fresher Sacramento
currently employs nine
students from Hiram W.
Johnson High School and
American Legion High
School who work, on av-
erage, six hours a week,
and receive a stipend of
$100. Rebecca Bakken, di-
rector of operations, has
schooled the apprentices on nutrition,
marketing, branding, merchandising,
community outreach, financial plan-
ning and salesmanship, and provided
them with real world applications.
Rakeem Murdock is one such ap-
prentice. In 2016, when Murdock was
a senior in high school, his principal
recommended that he work for Fresher
Sacramento. Now a freshman at Sac-
ramento City College with a major in
marketing, Murdock says that the mar-
keting training he’s received at Fresher
Sacramento has helped him succeed in
his classes.
Each meal comes in a reusable con-
tainer branded by Fresher Sacramento’s
apprentices and sells for $5 — cash,
credit card or EBT food stamps. Menu
items include vegetarian chilaquile
casserole, chicken tortilla soup, chick-
en fajitas, red beans and rice and tri-tip.
The meals are available every Tuesday
in South Sacramento and Thursdays,
outside the Oak Park Community
Center.
“The meals are delicious, affordable
and nutritious, and I like to tell people
that intentionally, in that order,” Bak-
and McDonald’s,” Ramirez says. “But, at
the same time, they want to have nutri-
tion in their meals.”
Fresher Sacramento has also
provided opportunities to its appren-
tices beyond the kitchen. Murdock is
an aspiring actor and starred in Fresher
Sacramento’s first commercial, which
aired on KCRA. “It is my first acting po-
sition and just to get my first acting gig
on a commercial — it was mind-blow-
ing,” Murdock says.
In the future, Fresher Sac-
ramento hopes to expand its
operations into more neighbor-
hoods. “I don’t think that we are
going to donate our way to the
end of hunger,” says founder
Azen, adding that community
support for and understanding
of the food system is crucial.
“We can have certain meals
that sell for a higher price, and
in a humbler ZIP code, they
might sell for not as much. But,
folks can know that they are
creating value through their purchases
and subsidizing our work in another lo-
cation.” n
“Our main focus is to serve
whole grains, lean proteins,
vegetables and complex carbs.”
— Rebecca Bakken, director of operations,
Fresher Sacramento
ken says. “Our main focus is to serve
whole grains, lean proteins, vegetables
and complex carbs.”
Luiz Ramirez, Fresher Sacramento’s
executive chef, says his culinary mis-
sion is to wed health and comfort foods
by substituting leaner, more nutritious
ingredients. After growing up in the
Salinas Valley, where his parents were
farm workers, Ramirez understands
the challenges of eating healthy while
struggling to put food on the table.
“The thing that I have noticed from
going to the distribution sites and inter-
acting with our customers is that they
want to eat what they have always been
eating — the unhealthy stuff — Popeyes
Corey Rodda is a freelance writer based
in Sacramento. Her work has appeared
in Comstock’s and Sacramento News &
Review.
January 2018 | comstocksmag.com
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