New York City food pantries linking those in need with local farm-fresh produce
by Lauren Raheja.
The chartered bus pulls up to the 100-acre Hudson Valley farm, after a
two-hour drive from Harlem, and stops alongside a row of crates filled
with red and yellow onions. Outside the bus, sprawling green fields have
come into view. “Oh my God. That’s a barn,” declares a young girl on
the bus, her gaze fixed on the two-story building that has appeared in
the distance. “I’ve never been in a barn.”
The 52 people on the bus
are employees and patrons of seven New York City food pantries. They
have come to J. Glebocki Farms to see where local produce grows. During
their tour, the farmer, John Glebocki, leads them through a prep house
where workers busily scrub dirt off carrots. Later, they ride through
the fields in wagons, past rows of onions, potatoes, and sunflowers,
stopping every so often for a closer look at the soil and the plants.
“Mom, I took this from the dirt!” squeals Brianna Scavellaio-Lapin, the
seven-year-old daughter of one of the trip’s participants and food
pantry patrons, as she raises the dirt-covered carrot she has just
pulled from the ground into the air.
It’s rare for city
residents to spend a weekday at a farm, but the source of the tour
participants’ excitement wasn’t just their agricultural outing. The food
they saw growing wasn’t reserved for the wealthy or the trendy. Despite
the poverty of many of the food pantry patrons, much of this farm’s
food was reserved for them.
The Scavellaio-Lapin family’s trip to the
Goshen, N.Y. farm occurred courtesy of a unique nine-year-old food
justice program called Local Produce Link. The program supplies 44 food
panties throughout all five boroughs of New York City with farm fresh
produce harvested from one of seven nearby farms in New York State and
New Jersey.
In New York City, and indeed in the country, other
programs like it are rare. Most of the city’s 600 food pantries get much
of their food from the government-funded Food Bank for New York City, a
hunger-relief organization that operates a 90,000 square foot warehouse
in Hunts Point, in the Bronx.
Some of the Food Bank’s fruits and
vegetables come from farms similar to Glebocki’s, near Albany and
Syracuse. But much of it comes from large-scale farms—often in
California—via commercial food distributors. The Food Bank also receives
donations from produce distributors, wholesalers, the Hunts Point food
market, and others.
Because the Food Bank’s focus is providing
large quantities of food, quality sometimes suffers. Pantry shelves are
often lined with food visibly close to expiration.
The creators
of Local Produce Link, United Way of New York City, and Just Food,
launched the program because they believed food pantries should offer
fresher food. They also wanted to instill in their patrons knowledge
about healthy eating choices that could carry over into their day-to-day
grocery shopping.
According to the program’s organizers, eating
locally grown food reduces the environmental damage caused by
transporting food long distances, and is healthier. “There’s a real
difference between produce that sits and travels all the way from
California, which is most of what’s in our stores, and [the produce that
is] grown right here in New York state, an hour and a half away, picked
fresh,” says Abby Youngblood, one of the Local Produce Link
coordinators at Just Food. John Schmid, a farmer who participates in the
program, says that the closer you eat something to when it’s picked,
the more nutritious it is. “It might sound a little crazy but a lot of
farmers like to know that their food is getting consumed when it’s
fresh,” he says.“It really makes a difference.”
Local Produce Link
has expanded rapidly throughout the city since it launched at five food
pantries in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. And Just Food
and United Way—administrator of the funding Just Food receives from New
York State—want to expand it further. “Every year we’ve been earmarking
more money for Local Produce Link,” says Stacy McCarthy, a coordinator
at United Way. “The more money we have, the more we can expand.”
Every
Tuesday from June to November, staff members or volunteers from three
Local Produce Link food pantries in the Bronx pick up boxes of fresh
produce—about 200 pounds for each pantry—from farmer John Schmid’s farm
stand in Poe Park. Each of the 41 other Local Produce Link food pantries
also receives about 200 pounds of fresh vegetables every week, grown on
one of six other Local Produce Link farms. Pantries either pick up
their boxes of produce at a designated drop-off site or at a farmers
market.
Each farmer supplies approximately equal portions of leafy
green vegetables, root vegetables, and seasonal vegetables. Local
Produce Link pays all farmers one universal price per pound for all
non-organic produce and one universal, but slightly higher, price per
pound for all organic produce.
Schmid—who owns and runs Muddy
River Farm in New Hampton, N.Y.—sells most of his produce to farmers
markets and restaurants in Manhattan. He says Local Produce Link
provides him a new market for his produce and reasonable compensation.
He is also happy to be introducing farm fresh food to people who may
have never been exposed it. “If people get fresh food at the food
pantry, they’ll probably come here, to the farmers market, and they’ll
probably buy it—once they get accustomed to it,” he says. “Because once
you start tasting fresh, you start wanting it. And you find that couple
of extra dollars to buy it instead of buying a soda or a Big Mac.”
At
Hour Children Food Pantry—a Local Produce Link pantry in Long Island
City in Queens—Hannah Goldwater stands beside a table piled high with
celery, cabbage, and green romaine lettuce recently arrived from The
Farm at Miller’s Crossing in Hudson, N.Y. Goldwater, 23, is a
“veggie educator” at the pantry and says that part of her job is
convincing her clients to take the vegetables home, since much of the
produce that comes in is foreign to them. To help her and the other
veggie educators in the Local Produce Link pantries, Just Food, and
United Way, along with the farms themselves, provide recipes that
correspond to the produce that is offered.
Leslie Aguilar, a
43-year-old mother and one of the 150 people who frequent the pantry in
Long Island City, is one client who needs little convincing the
vegetables are valuable. Diagnosed with diabetes several years ago, she
has since changed her diet significantly, now eating mostly fresh food
like cucumbers, squash, greens, and tomatoes. The offerings at Hour
Children, she says, have been helpful with her transition because they
taste, and are, fresh.
Much of Hour Children’s produce used to
be food that was “rescued” from grocery stores and restaurants when it
was close to expiration. “Compared to this stuff,” says Christy Robb,
the director of the pantry, gesturing toward some Local Produce Link
vegetables spread out on a table, “it didn’t even compare.”
“They’re
fresh,” says Mahassen Elkattan, referring to the vegetables in the bag
of groceries she is about to take home. Elkattan is another one of the
Long Island City pantry’s patrons. A 48-year-old mother of five, she
moved to the United States from Egypt in 1989, and has an aversion to
cooking with canned vegetables. “These ones haven’t been in any
machine,” she affirms. “They’re coming straight from the farmer.”
The
Hour Children pantry, like other Local Produce Link pantries, also
offers cooking demonstrations to teach their patrons how to prepare some
of the produce that comes in from the farm. Recent demonstrations have
included pesto, sautéed kale, pickled cucumbers, carrot soup, raw
vegetable wraps, and egg frittatas with collard greens.
This fall,
United Way and Just Food will discuss expanding Local Produce Link.
They would like to connect several food pantries in East New York with a
local farm, and are discussing the possibility of adding a new farm to
the program.
Youngblood says they’re considering East New York
partly because the New York State Department of Health has flagged it as
a neighborhood with little access to fresh produce and one of the
highest rates of obesity in the city.
Local Produce Link is funded
by the New York State Department of Health through its Hunger
Prevention and Nutrition Assistance Program (HPNAP), which was created
25 years ago to improve the quality of food distributed through
Emergency Food Relief Organizations—food pantries, soup kitchens, and
emergency shelters—throughout the state.
United Way, which
administers the grant from HPNAP, has increased Local Produce Link’s
funding 45 percent since 2008, granting them $304,595 for the current
season. Next season, the grant will increase four percent to $317,000.
If
Local Produce Link’s organizers can find a good match between some of
East New York’s food pantries and a local farm, considering the
logistics of funding, drop-offs, and pick-ups, Local Produce Link will
be able to expand there next year. “This really ties into a whole
movement,” says Youngblood, “to get healthier, fresher, higher quality
food into communities that don’t have access.”
Republished with permission from City Limits, a New York-based civic news
organization. In addition to covering increasing access to healthy
and organic food, City Limits also publishes news about toxic waste clean-up
efforts, public transportation, and the environmental effects of large-scale
industrial projects.
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