Good Food for the Hungry

J.N. Urbanski: Fresh Food Pantries

Local food pantries in the Catskills, as in many other regions around the United States, saw a sharp rise in the number of families in need of aid last year. The food given to these pantries is often nonperishable, like canned vegetables, pasta, and soups. Donated canned goods have a long shelf life, but are high in sodium, low in nutrients, and often bland and boring. The Food Bank for Westchester, the county directly to the north of New York City, is trying to change that. It has been operating its own food-growing program around the county for over a year, cultivating a mix of vegetables on two-and-a-half acres of land.

Doug DeCandia, a scruffy, sandy-haired, and dirt-smudged young farmer with leafy greens sprouting from the pockets of his cargo pants, oversees the farms on behalf of the food bank. “When people don’t have good food, they don’t have nutrition, which diminishes mental and emotional capacity,” he says. “People who don’t eat well or don’t have access to good food are forced into this weakness, spiritually and physically.”

DeCandia grew up in Katonah in northern Westchester. After leaving for college, he became “really interested in consumption: the choices that we, as Americans and people, make every day and how our purchasing affects other people and the environment. That led me to how we eat. If we’re eating bad food, we are supporting environmentally hazardous practices, but we’re also hurting ourselves.”

DeCandia, who was studying anthropology and community development, began to travel around working on farms. “I needed to go out and do manual work. I thought that was important: something where I’m connected to the earth and have time to think.” It was while working at a farm that he met Dan Brady, who oversaw the launch of the Food Bank for Westchester growing program.

Now DeCandia is passing along his ethos to those helping to stock the food bank’s shelves with fresh produce. The food bank couldn’t run its program without help. Its gardens are situated around the county on five small plots located in schools and correctional facilities, offering students and inmates opportunities for work and education. One half-acre garden is at the Valhalla Department of Corrections, where the inmates work as part of a vocational program, and another at Woodfield Cottage, a juvenile detention facility in Valhalla. There’s a smaller garden of 3,000 square feet in Pleasantville, along with one at the Leake & Watts School in Yonkers (half an acre) and the Westchester Land Trust in Bedford Hills (a quarter of an acre). Something different grows in every garden. Through outreach, DeCandia has found volunteers to help. The gardens have also benefited from the Crop Mob movement.

The food is not certified organic, but DeCandia follows the same standards and rules as organic farmers; no chemicals are used in the gardens. He has taken the Northeast Organic Farming Assocation’s pledge, affirming that farming is not only about “growing organically, but also employing good work and labor practices.” “Organic food is not a fad,” says DeCandia. “It’s the real thing. People need it. Malnourishment is not only something poor people experience. For example, you’ll need to eat three tomatoes from the grocery store to get the same nutrition as a tomato from the farmers market.”

DeCandia is quick to confirm that the Food Bank for Westchester is not a Slow Food organization. It is, however, arguably part of the Slow Food movement, which has about 250,000 supporters in over 150 countries and was started in Italy as a protest against the debilitating effects of fast food. The movement promotes eating local, organic produce; ethical, chemical-free land stewardship; and the promotion of small family farms and CSAs (community-supported agriculture shares). Thus, the Food Bank for Westchester is a sort of Slow Food Bank, serving worthier food to those who have fallen on hard times. The growing program, Dan Brady says, is something you won’t find at any other food bank in the country.

The idea was the brainchild of Andrew J. Spano, the former County Executive of Westchester. He donated one acre of land in the prison at Valhalla and enlisted Christina Rohatynskyj, director of the food bank, to turn it into a farm. “We went in and improved the soil,” says Brady, “brought in some compost and made it look good. Then we got a volunteer to help run it. We’re now on our third volunteer besides Doug. Our motto is that it’s your land, it’s your water; we’ll give you a program, we’ll supervise it, but the food bank gets the food.” The program also teaches nutrition and healthy eating, as well as the concept of organic food. At one of the facilities, they are growing corn and teaching children how to make cornmeal and then to bake cornbread and muffins. At one school they keep some food for the chef to use in the kitchen.

Most participants in the food-growing program are students, but a small number of prisoners have also worked in the gardens. The program is voluntary for the inmates, and they are paid for the work (and can be fired, too). Brady teaches participating inmates how to run a backyard garden so they can cultivate one after their release. “They don’t have to come,” says Brady. He recalls how one proudly volunteered to solve a drainage problem in the garden at Valhalla. “The corner of our garden was lower and it was wet. One of our inmates told Doug what materials to get…and directed us to build a drainage system. The area is still dry even after all the rain we had earlier this year.”

At Leake & Watts School in Yonkers, the benefits of the program are manifold. The school is a nonprofit residential treatment center providing twenty-four-hour care to youths—some in foster care—with emotional, behavioral, and mental health challenges requiring therapeutic and educational support. The half-acre farm is set near the front gates of the picturesque campus. DeCandia has been farming there with the help of students for a little over a year. The soil is very sandy and there isn’t much organic matter, so horse manure is donated from nearby stables. Doug has planted garlic, dry beans, and squash. He uses crop rotation instead of pesticides to keep the soil healthy year after year. There is little machinery to assist the students, so the manure has to be spread by hand at Doug’s direction. He and his students “are hands on and we see what’s happening every day….The planting, weeding, and cultivation is done by hand.”

Some of the students are considered “at risk” and have been transformed by the program in remarkable ways. A few express the desire to be farmers. “The program is part of our independent living skills program,” says Meredith Barber, Director of Institutional Advancement at Leake & Watts. “When the kids leave here, we want them to be fully prepared for adulthood–know how to get a job, keep a job, know what it means to report to work on time, learn a positive work ethic–and this program is helping teach that.

“It’s magic when you see kids pull a turnip out of the ground for the first time because they’ve never seen anything grow before, and then they taste a tomato after they’ve grown it. It’s fascinating. Their faces light up and it’s very gratifying. The kids get confidence from this. Even if they don’t want to farm and they’re into music or something else, we’re still providing a resource for self-empowerment.”

The kids at Leake & Watts earn wages for their work in the garden. “They have to go through an application process,” says Brian Wright, Independent Living Co-Coordinator at Leake & Watts, “so it’s really building independent living skills as well as socialization….We’re actually thinking about creating an internship program where one of our select kids who is doing extremely well would be able to work at close hand with Doug to learn more about farming.”

Diana Gonzalez, Director of Therapeutic Services at the school, says that so far they’ve seen at least three of their youngsters who are very interested in continuing what they’ve done on the farm plot. Work on the garden provides the opportunity to form short- and long-term goals for the students. The kids “were planting, harvesting, and then going to the community service program and delivering the food to the community.” DeCandia adds that the program doesn’t just belong to Leake & Watts, but is integral to the community at large. “They are contributing to the food bank and to all the people the food bank provides, but they are also part of each of the program’s gardens because the gardens need each other.”

The Food Bank for Westchester warehouse, located in a sprawling industrial park in Elmsford, contains enormous palates of Kool-Aid, Hunt’s tomato paste, and other highly processed food. The bank has a kitchen where they prepare the fresh produce to send out to soup kitchens and other facilities providing cooked food for the homeless and needy. Food donated by the food growing program doesn’t linger in the warehouse for long. “There’s a popular misconception that poor people want to eat ramen noodles and don’t really care,” says Nancy Lyons, Resource/Volunteer Coordinator of the Food Bank for Westchester. “It’s quite the opposite.”

Most poor, urban families lack access to decent food and must rely on cheap bodegas or deli-type marts, where the staple foods are Hostess cupcakes and potato chips, for their weekly groceries. Programs like Project Green Thumb and Hunger 101 are trying to end malnutrition in urban areas, teaching adults and school children what it means to be “nutritionally insecure.” Some seniors, for example, only have a few dollars for food after their basic living expenses like rent and medicine have been covered.

Given the nutritional challenges facing such families, the possibilities for expanding DeCandia’s food-growing program are nearly endless. Lyons states that they just can’t get enough of the produce he grows. Dan Brady would like to see the program run on college campuses that often have expansive, idle grounds and curious students. “They’re growing grass. They’re spraying the grass with chemicals and then they’re paying someone to mow the grass. How frustrating is that?”

J.N. Urbanski is a British writer and editor based in the Catskills. When she arrived in New York City twelve years ago, she covered New York arts and culture for European publication Ahead Media. She now covers food, feminism, and the economy.

Photos courtesy of the author.