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.