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PotLuck could be a regular culinary arts performance, educational event, and dinner party. The event will utilize surplus produce from the farmers markets, donations from local businesses, culinary talent from the Bay Area, members of the local community, and underutilized commercial kitchen space to produce gourmet meals. This can be the first part of a plan to utilize all fresh produce that comes into the City each day by ensuring that it is either eaten or turned into biomass (Phase 2 will be to replace processed foods with fresh, unsprayed, heirloom-and-organic-when-possible, non-GMO, hormone, or antibiotic containing foods in schools and other institutions). The "performance" will be to show that gourmet quality meals can be produced cheaply and easily from raw materials that the volunteer chef is seeing for the first time. Mini-events using food trucks could pop-up in outlying neighborhoods, where marginalized individuals and families are invisible and all but forgotten. There might also be some way to help promote the resolution adopted by the Board of Supervisors last December, declaring Sundays "Eat Local, Buy California Grown Day."
These events will also be an opportunity to demonstrate that what is plentiful and in season tastes best, is at the peak of nutrition, and is usually the least expensive. There can be cooking demonstrations, food safety instruction, nutritional counseling, food supplement giveaways, and free educational materials like DVD's available at each meal. Speakers like Kami McBride from UCSF could talk about the role and benefit of herbs in our diet. There could be readings by authors from Omnivore Books. Music for certain, perhaps some dinner theatre or a dance performance, depending on the venue (no poetry, though). Nutritionists, healthcare professionals, City employees and officials; all will be invited to mix and mingle.