A Food Oasis in Los Angeles, and not where you'd expect

Here at Food Forward, we are often asked if community members can access the produce we harvest at our North Hollywood office. And while we have gleaned over 30,000,000 lbs of produce to date, we donate 100% of this food directly to local food banks, food pantries, and other hunger relief agencies. This means that we don’t distribute food directly, or store any produce on-site.

While you can check-out a list of organizations that receive Food Forward’s gleaned produce here, Food Oasis Los Angeles (FOLA) provides an interactive map illustrating all of the places that you can get fresh food throughout LA County.

A self-proclaimed resource for food-seekers, policy makers, and volunteers alike, FOLA is “creating a web/mobile platform to visualize the complex landscape of these often disparate solutions on one map.” 

Separated by category of where to find Free Food (Food Pantries), Grow Food (Community Gardens), and find Food for Sale (Farmer’s Markets), FOLA users can search for food by Zip Code, neighborhood, or simply by sharing one’s current location. Each food dispensary appears as a different color pin on the map (yellow for Food Pantries, green for Community Gardens, and red for Farmers Markets).

In accordance with the LA City pLAn to “Ensure all low-income Angelenos live within a half mile of fresh food by 2035,” FOLA’s interactive maps are helping to illuminate the disparities of food access throughout LA by visually contrasting food oases (“an area where healthy food options are plentiful and readily available for all”) with food deserts (“A low-income, low-access area with people living more than 1 mile [10 miles in rural areas] from the nearest supermarket”).

Check-out FOLA’s map to learn more about the landscape of food access throughout LA County, and continue volunteering with Food Forward to make sure that these food pantries are stocked with fresh, local produce!