Explore the taste of purple sea urchin - aka ‘purple uni’ - and street food by local chefs paired with natural wines and live-mixed eclectic grooves.

In less than a decade California’s once abundant bull kelp forests have been decimated by a spiky culprit: the purple sea urchin. So, help us eat our way out of this ecological crisis!

Buy Tickets - $10/person (kids get in free)

1. Send $10 per attendee via Venmo to @02_Artisans_Aggregate. Each tickets gets you a glass of natural wine.

2. Add names of each attendee to Venmo transaction note.

Details

Food Pop-Ups by: Casa De Kei, Okkon

Date: Sat Oct 14, 2023

Time: 4:00 PM - 8:00 PM

Location: 2311 Magnolia Street, Oakland, CA 94607

Frequently Asked Questions

• Can we actually eat our way out of this crisis?

  Short answer: No, not with a few, fun social gatherings anyway.

  Long answer: One rough count had it at 350 million purple urchins off a single reef in Oregon. It’s a terrifying scourge destroying sensitive habitats, created mostly by the deaths of their natural predators (starfish) to ocean warming and acidification, as well as the overhunting of sea otters to near extinction in centuries past.

  So, what’s the point? Well, most seafood is just unsustainable. We may be out of tuna in 20 years, to name one scary, high-profile example. Urchins are the opposite of that. Overpopulated. If farmed from our backyard, they aren't just guilt-free dining, we think it's kind of righteous.

  We want to raise awareness for the destruction of our kelp forests. Perhaps get some people to join the divers as a hobby, or a cause. If we could somehow turn uni from a rare delicacy into a fad appetizer, or even a staple, and raise awareness for habitat restoration projects along the way, we could definitely make some localized dents, and long term help create some more (sustainable) infrastructure around their harvesting.

  In our minds, some good vibes, and natural wine to toast to the eating of a delicious monster of our own creation is a fun, educational, totally-new-and-additional strategy in the fight to help the kelp forests in our own backyard rebound.

• Why are bull kelp forests so important?

  Healthy Kelp forests are powerful. They sequester carbon from the atmosphere, create oxygen, dampen wave energy, and alter sedimentation flow; all of which have effects that reach far beyond the kelp forest ecosystem and affect coastal communities and landscapes, as well as the global climate.

• What's O2 Artisans Aggregate?

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