Reclaiming the Food Desert

On a recent Saturday at the Heart Street homeless shelter in Kingston, Sharon Mary “Chiz” Chisholm becomes excited as she and her volunteers unpack fresh onions, eggplant, peppers, and zucchini, and began preparing ratatouille. “We used to make all our meals with canned goods,” she says. “We don’t do that anymore.” For 10 years, Chisholm says, she made three meals a day with almost no vegetables. Then she heard about the Hunger Project.

The Hudson Valley is an exceptionally bountiful region, with over 500 farms on more than 18,000 acres. Yet the region is also considered highly food-insecure, meaning in some areas there are more people going hungry than the national average. Food pantries and soup kitchens have traditionally been limited in what they can offer people. In addition, many people live in “food deserts,” which are communities, often low-income, with limited access to supermarkets. The result is a wide divide in the quantity and quality of food, based on income. Over the last several years, hundreds of people across the region have collaborated through programs like the Hunger Project to get local food to people who need it most.

Farmers have traditionally had strong connections to their communities, but donating excess crops requires lots of time and resources. Beth McClindon, the program director of volunteer services at Family of Woodstock and the director of Ulster Corps, says the movement to bridge the gap gained momentum at a 2009 conference called Hunger in the Hudson Valley where representatives from several agencies, including Ulster Corps, Family of Woodstock, and the Rondout Valley Growers Association, discovered they had a common concern: to reclaim food that would otherwise go to waste. Their collaboration turned into a coalition of workers and volunteers from farms and community gardens, gleaners (or harvesters), food processors, storage facilities, food pantries, and soup kitchens.

Despite this herculean effort, the region’s food insecurity has continued to grow. As federal and state-funding for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as food stamps) and similar resources have decreased, residents have expanded their efforts to alleviate the hunger experienced by so many of their neighbors. In 2014, the Local Economies Project awarded a three-year grant to the Community Foundations of the Hudson Valley. With the help of the grant and an anonymous donor, Foundations established the Hudson Valley Farm Fresh Initiative, which has funded major components of this effort and brought them together to focus on long-term goals.

In Ulster County, the Rondout Valley Growers Association collects donated food from farms, then sorts, weighs, divides, and distributes it to pantries, soup kitchens, shelters, and other emergency programs. Executive director Deborah DeWan, says much of the produce they glean isn’t accepted at markets because “it might look a little different, but it’s still great food.” Some of that food goes to the Food Bank Farm Stand program, a partnership between the Community Foundations and the Food Bank of the Hudson Valley that was initiated in 2014. Free farm stands were established in three locations: In the parking lot of People’s Place in Kingston; at Kingston’s Ulster County Community Action Center; and at the Newburgh Armory Unity Center, which is operated by Cornerstone Family Healthcare.

People’s Place executive director, Christine Hein, says they used to be almost exclusively stocked with canned goods, and any produce that came in was donated because it was unmarketable. Freshly harvested fruits and vegetables are now free every Tuesday morning and feed an average of 300 families each week.

Mobile markets are another successful aspect of the grant initiative. The Poughkeepsie Plenty Mobile Market parks in convenient locations within the city of Poughkeepsie between June and October and tries to fill the food gap in a city where 32,000 people share two supermarkets.

Most recently, People’s Place has led the enterprise of five cold-storage food hubs in Ulster County that safely store and distribute food on its way to pantries. DeWan says it also makes distribution easier. “Instead of us driving to 50 food pantries, we e-mail the pantries what we have and they pick it up,” she explains. “This keeps the food fresh and reduces waste.” Volunteers also use the hubs to store and process food for use during winter months. For example, when they recently received a deluge of tomatoes, volunteers made tomato sauce. Reverend Darlene Kelley, Executive Director of Caring Hands Soup Kitchen in Kingston, said the farm hub is key to their improved operations. “In the past, it was hit or miss. This way, the quality is consistently better.”

The Poughkeepsie Farm Project is one of the many farms that have offered to help. As a community shared agriculture (CSA) farm, the Farm Project offers subsidized shares to 35 families through its Food Share program. The program donates produce to soup kitchens, food pantries, and shelters twice a week, and contributes to the Poughkeepsie schools’ dinner and summer feeding programs, as well as to the Poughkeepsie Farmers Market. The program’s executive director, Lee Anne Albritton, says the farm’s mission is to donate 20 percent of its yield, which was 35,000 pounds last year. It also offers educational programs through the city schools. “Especially in food deserts like Poughkeepsie, grocery stores don’t have a large variety of produce, so many people are not familiar with the vegetables we bring in,” Albritton says. However, the desire to use fresh produce is not linked to income. “They are very excited about this.”

The New York-based program, Rescuing Left Over Cuisine, is also setting up shop in Poughkeepsie. Rich Schiafo, the deputy director of the program’s Hudson Valley Regional Council, says he is partnering with the organization to coordinate restaurants, cafes, butchers, and bakeries to bring good food that goes unsold, is approaching its best used by date, or is considered unmarketable to soup kitchens.

Common Ground Farm in Beacon started as a CSA, but in 2013 became fully dedicated to food justice and education. It grows crops on nine acres and sends weekly donations to the emergency food programs in their immediate area. The farm also helps run Common Greens Mobile Farmers Market, which operates out of a green bus and travels to different locations throughout the summer.

Stiles Najac, the food security coordinator at Cornell Cooperative Extension Orange County, says between 25 and 50 farmers contribute to its gleaning program each year. Farmers are generous, she says, but need better compensation. In 2015, Congress passed a bill that enhances the tax deduction for food donations, and the state is working on a similar bill.

“A better tax incentive would increase motivation to donate and compensate for a product they deserve compensation for,” Najac says. “That will hopefully change the amount of product donated and will encourage farmers to donate earlier in the life of the product.”

The New York State Department of Agriculture, New York State Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance, and the Farmers Market Federation of New York have three programs in place that aim to connect farms to people in need. SNAP provides all farmers’ markets with the option to accept benefit cards by offering a free wireless POS system and promotional materials. This, in turn, provides a larger market for small and mid-size farms. To supplement that program, the WIC (Women, Infants, and Children) and Senior Farmers’ Market Nutrition programs provides a limited number of checks specifically redeemable at farmers’ markets and farm stands.

In addition, beginning in 2015, some SNAP sites began providing Fresh Connect Checks to use at participating farmers’ markets. The checks provide a $2 incentive for every $5 of SNAP benefits, increasing the purchasing power of SNAP consumers by 40 percent.

According to the Farmers’ Market Federation of New York, out of the nine reporting Ulster County farmers’ markets listed on its website (Nyfarmersmarket.com), five accept SNAP. Five out of eight markets in Dutchess County accept the benefits, half of a dozen markets in Orange County, and one out of two reporting markets in Putnman accepts SNAP.

While some agencies say their goal is to “alleviate and eradicate” hunger in the Hudson Valley, eradication won’t happen until the deep underlying issues of economic injustice are addressed. Tracy Lerman, the communications manager for the Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Working Group, says, “Food justice is connected to social, racial and economic injustice. People with less money have limited access to healthy, organic food. True food justice programs are not just about to bringing food to people, but changing structures that bring inequality in the first place.”

Cristin McPeake, driector of programs at the Community Foundations of the Hudson Valley says the organization tries to address needed change through collaboration. “Food brings people into a place like Family of Woodstock or People’s Place, and they can then be connected to other services,” she says. “Our collaborations will strengthen that.” The grant providing the Farm Fresh Fund ends this year, and the group is fundraising to continue these programs.

For Chisholm, significant change is taking place at the shelter. One of the first dishes she made with local produce was green beans with almonds.

“When dinner was served, I saw all the green beans in the trash,” she says. “I asked them why, and they said they didn’t know what they were. I continued to serve the vegetables, and they slowly started to eat them. Then they began to eat salad once a week. They have salad every day now, and they ask for their favorite vegetables. They ask for kale chips.”

As she prepares the ratatouille for Saturday’s dinner, Chisholm makes sure there will be enough to deliver to people on the streets of Kingston who did not make it to the shelter.

“We’d never be able to do this without the gleaning program,” she says. “When people here see volunteers bringing food off the truck, they see that it is another human being giving it to them. It brings tears to my eyes. It changes the heart of the people.”

A listing of resources related to food insecurity—free farmers’ markets, where to volunteer, etc.—accompanies the online version of the article on Chronogram.com.

This article appears in August 2016.