East Sacramento’s month-old Juno’s Kitchen & Delicatessen focuses on serving sustainable food out of a small space with a name inspired by a unique dog. “Juno is a very unusual dog,” owner Mark Helms said of the pit bull/bull terrier mix. “She likes to swim underwater; she likes to carry around sticks that are like twice her weight. She’s an extreme athlete.” Helms and his wife, Susan Vasques, opened Juno’s, located at 3617 J St., at the end of October, mere months after selling their restaurant in The Pocket, Ravenous Cafe. They sold the upscale American-style restaurant to be closer to home, Helms said. “I always wanted to have a place where bread was kind of the focus,” Helms said,

Mark Winne, author of Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty, opened Thursday morning’s Sacramento Region Food Collaborative (RFC) conference with a powerful message of hope. “The loss of land, hunger, insecurity, obesity are real…but so is the opportunity for change," he said. The guest list for the four-hour brainstorm session, coordinated by Valley Vision, included more than 70 movers and shakers in the food and urban agriculture industry plus representatives from congress and environmental agencies. Held in TV station KVIE’s community room, Winne began the collaborative by asking the audience for general feedback, both positive and negative, on the state of