Talkin’ with Talkin

With the bounty of food for the holidays, thoughts also turn to those who go hungry every day. This prompted an interview with Erik Talkin, executive director of our county’s Foodbank, headquartered in Goleta Valley.

Please tell me a bit about your background and what you do at Foodbank.

I’ve been doing this job for a year and a half. For six years before that I was executive director of Community Kitchen at Casa Esperanza, one of the 220 agencies Foodbank provides food to. This was an opportunity to move from helping just one group of people to helping people countywide and to get involved in nutrition in a wider, more preventative-medicine type sense.