NYC Food Pantries Going Green

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, New York farm occurred courtesy of a unique nine-year-old food justice program called Local Produce Link. The program supplies 44 food pantries 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 quasi-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.

Twenty percent of the Food Bank’s fruits and vegetables come from upstate farms similar to Glebocki's. But 50 percent of it comes from Feeding America, the Chicago-based domestic hunger relief charity which gets food from farms across the country. The Food Bank also receives 30 percent of its produce from local donors.

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 more fresh local food. They also wanted to instill in their patrons knowledge about healthy eating choices that they could apply to 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.