Category: Story

Finding our Home in the Tenderloin

It was time. We had been dreaming, planning, envisioning Love to Table for long enough. We were overflowing with ideas of how we wanted the restaurant to look, what it would feel like, the food we would serve, the tinctures made from our garden bounty that would adorn the curated bookshelves filled with books on […]

Soul Food: The Teens of Juvenile Hall Grow Produce for Local Senior Center

A tenet of Unconditional Freedom is to fill what is empty and empty what is full. Seven months ago, we started a mini-farm at Mendocino County’s Juvenile Hall, carving four, forty-five-foot beds into compacted, dry soil. We mixed in donated compost, added irrigation, and started planting with the kids. We dropped in milkweed and carrot […]

Food as a Love Delivery System

by Caryn Roth At Love to Table, we use food as the means to bring love, to sneak it into the rejected places, the crevices that may not often receive it. We offer our love to anyone who can use it, and we use food as the vehicle to bring it in. Whether a friend, […]

A Chef’s Take on Preserving Your Harvest

by Jay Holecek As a chef who has worked with food from all over the world, I find it very fulfilling to preserve and value add common ingredients that would have otherwise gone to waste. When you consider food preservation, most people think of those mysterious cans of pickles that sit in the back of […]

Blackberry Jam

The following is an excerpt from a book about a mother and daughter’s journey through cooking and learning the earth. Blackberries take me right back to my childhood. They stir up memories of summer adventure in oppressive August heat, and my wonderful friend Nicoll. I can still picture exactly where the best blackberries grew near […]

Edward Espe Brown: Cooking with Passion

At sesshin (meditation intensive) one year, perhaps 1968, Suzuki Roshi lectured about how to practice Zen. “Zen,” he said, “is like feeling your way along in the dark. You might think it would be better to have more light, to know where you are going, and to get there in a hurry; but Zen is […]

John Liu: Seeking and Finding

John Liu is an advisor to UFP on ecological restoration and regeneration. Since the late 1970s I have been a professional observer of transformational change at a very large scale. My career began as a television producer and cameraman with CBS News covering stories like the Rise of China and the Collapse of the Soviet […]

Video: Serving Love

Love to Table delivers love, dignity, and recognition through food by feeding farm-to-table meals to those in need. We just served our 10,000th meal since we started our sit-down restaurant in 2019. With donations from local organizations and the bounty from our gardens, we have been able to fulfill our mission of taking surplus food […]

First Soulmaking Yoga Class

We stacked the Hugger Mugger donated mats so high on our rolling cart, they almost toppled off. Before heading over to the women’s housing unit, we called the tower and the deputy on duty told us the participants were waiting for us with “great anticipation.” We, too, felt excited. Tonight’s yoga class was not only […]