Written by Melissa Karen Sances
Photos by Nikki Gardner

Sponsored by Valley Home Improvement

Published in Northampton Living (November 2023)

At 10 a.m. on a cloudless fall day, Ruth von Goeler and Juju Carpenter open the market. A card table – long enough for 4 people to shop comfortably – showcases today’s bounty, which includes peppers, carrots, lettuce, raspberries, eggs, sausage and tofu, all grown and produced on local farms. Ears of corn gleam in their husks, available with or without a recipe card in English or Spanish, for a corn and cherry tomato salad.

Within the next half hour, about 50 patrons will line up behind the Walter Salvo House, a low-income housing development for elderly and disabled Northampton residents. Many are on a first-name basis with the food access assistants from Grow Food Northampton (GFN), who replenish the stock, again and again, from cardboard boxes stacked underneath the table. The nonprofit’s goal is to build a just and sustainable local food system, and this is their mission in action.

Resident Melanie Wright gathers produce so she can make stuffed green peppers, a favorite dish she grew up with. Her rent was raised considerably a few years ago, right after she retired but before she moved to the Salvo House. Because she doesn’t own a car, a round-trip to the grocery store can take an entire day. But now that she can shop in her backyard once a week – a space that includes a GFN-created, 22-plot community garden where residents can also grow their own food – her mood is a little lighter, her joints a little less achy. “I'm loving it more and more,” she says of the pop-up market. “At first I was just not used to coming out, but now the weather’s beautiful, the food is lovely, and the people are kind.”

“We’re really about community,” explains von Goeler, after the produce has been packed for the next site. In 2 days, she and Carpenter will erect 11 free, mobile farmer’s markets that will serve up to 500 households. Next week, they will do it all again. “This isn’t just food distribution. Like people will come and bring things to their neighbors. And they bring things to us. We’ll hand out peppers and tomatoes and then the next week they'll come and bring us a salsa.”

Besides community, dignity and agency are words that encapsulate GFN’s mission, says Executive Director Alisa Klein. According to “The American Journal of Preventive Medicine,” food insecurity may lead to poor mental health through chronic stress, stigmatization and perceived powerlessness. Accordingly, Klein says, the free mobile markets are based on choice. Food access program participants are encouraged to use GFN’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) Match program to double their spending power on local farm foods at their longstanding farmers markets, the Tuesday Market and the Winter Market.

Three years ago, the nonprofit established a Food Access Advisory Committee, overseen by those with lived experience of food insecurity. According to the Greater Boston Food Bank, 1 in 3 households in Massachusetts is going hungry. In Northampton, says Klein, people of color make up a disproportionate number of residents experiencing food insecurity. While the population is only 3% Black and 7% Latinx, of the individuals served with GFN’s food access programming, 13% are Black and 23% are Latinx.

“A central tenet of our organization is shifting power to the people who have been marginalized and harmed by the industrial food system,” she says. “We know that structural racism in our country and city is responsible for the complete inequity in our food system. It was not only built on the backs of people of color, but to this day exploited farm workers are Black and brown people.”

The nonprofit leases land to 10 farms, 4 of which are owned and operated by people of color, including the New Family Cooperative, a collective of 20 Somali-Bantu refugee families. “When we are able to help people seize their own agency,” says Klein, “they are very excited to participate in the local food system.”

At 11 a.m. on the same sunny September day, Grow Food Northampton's organic Community Garden in downtown Florence is so quiet you can hear footsteps crunch on the dry garden paths. Birds sing, crickets chirp and bees hover over wildflowers. Broom corn strains toward the sky and drooping sunflowers are still taller than any gardener.

The 325-plot garden was devastated by the Mill River flooding on July 10, as was the adjoining land of the GFN Community Farm. Most of the plots, including a Giving Garden that donates produce, are not harvestable this year. Community Garden Manager Pat James, who tours the garden with her loyal blue heeler Jack, notes that hundreds of volunteers, including some from the Northampton Community Gardens, have helped to rebuild. There has been grieving for this season, but hope for the next.

That’s another word that encapsulates GFN’s mission: Hope. “I feel proud that we’re providing a long-term solution to food insecurity,” says Klein.

In a corner plot, Tracy Perkins dons a tan sunhat and weeds her garden of possibilities. “I think it’s magical,” she says. “You come here and the flowers and the birds are everywhere. It’s just a heavenly place to be. You feel it, right?”

Learn more at www.growfoodnorthampton.org