All You Can Eat

Every Sunday, under a white tent set up in a small Mission park, foragers, home gardeners, and urban permaculture farmers give away a bumpercrop of organic herbs, vegetables, fruit, and Acme bread. Eager crowds gather to fill up their canvas totes with lemons from a neighbor’s yard, beets that didn’t sell at yesterday’s farmers market at the Ferry Building, and dark greens grown in a community plot just a few yards away. The No Penny Opera volunteers that collect the food and run the free farm stand offer cooking suggestions, gardening tips, and seedlings. They also encourage everyone to take as much as they can as long as the food won’t go to waste. There’s plenty to go around. And that’s the whole point, says Tree Rubenstein, director of The No Penny Opera. The free farm stand is a demonstration in abundance—the idea that there is an infinite amount of good and prosperity in the world.

A little hoakey? Maybe. But since they set up shop at 23rd Street and Treat Avenue in 2009, The Free Farm Stand has given away more than 11,000 pounds of food. The group spends a lot of time driving around and collecting donated food from Saturday farmers market vendors, community gardens, and a few home growers. Each week, about a hundred Mission neighbors (families, skinny jeans, dreadlocks, and all) show up for the goods, but at the end of most Sundays, the stand is left with a huge surplus of food that Rubenstein was not able to give away. When I suggested they make a donation to a food bank, a volunteer told me that San Francisco food banks don’t accept unpackaged foods. And so, the group freezes what they can and composts whatever they can’t. That compost then goes on to feed the community gardens Rubenstein oversees.

We have an overgrown (and very aromatic) rosemary bush in our backyard, so I like to take a shoebox full of clippings to the stand and then fill by bag with sweet baguettes that Acme couldn’t sell at yesterday’s markets. They go straight into the freezer until I’m in the mood for warm bread. I rub a little olive oil, fresh rosemary and lavender, and Kosher salt over the frozen baguette and then toast it in the oven at 325 for 15 minutes. The air is sweet and smells of (mostly) freshly baked bread.

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