Lunches at a senior center on the Upper East Side of Manhattan come with organic kale, vine-ripened tomatoes and freshly plucked summer squash — all grown not that far away in the Hudson Valley.
For a suggested donation of US$1.50, regulars at the center operated by the Lenox Hill Neighborhood House can feast on a bounty of vegetables and fruits from the same local farms that supply fancy restaurants such as Gramercy Tavern, Craft and Bouley.
“It’s very satisfying,” said 71-year-old Antonio Perez, who retired as a laundry worker at the Four Seasons Hotel in Midtown and recently tried zucchini for the first time.
Arugula and bok choy are not just for food connoisseurs anymore. There is a growing appetite for fresh, local, high-quality produce in New York City at places such as senior centers, schools and soup kitchens, as the benefits of such foods have been embraced beyond the walls of artisanal restaurants and health food stores.
In recent years, initiatives have aimed to get fresh produce onto more dinner plates, particularly those of poorer residents who cannot afford to shop at, say, Whole Foods.
Now the city is going to get a new US$20 million food hub to support these efforts.
The New York State Greenmarket Regional Food Hub, which was announced last month by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, is to be based in a 6,968m2 warehouse operated by GrowNYC, a nonprofit that also runs the city’s greenmarkets. It will be used to distribute fresh produce from local farmers directly to community institutions and programs, restaurants and other places that are typically too big to buy piecemeal at local farmers markets and too small to purchase in bulk from commercial food suppliers.
Last year, GrowNYC distributed more than 1.14 million kilograms of fresh produce through a wholesale produce delivery service that it started in 2012 in a rented warehouse, up from 227,272kg the first year. It has turned down requests from dozens of community groups because its 465m2 warehouse is packed to capacity.
Marcel Van Ooyen, the president and chief executive of GrowNYC, said the new food hub would allow it to “dramatically increase the number of farmers we support and New Yorkers we help feed.”
The greenmarket food hub is to be built on 121.4 hectares of city-owned land in the Hunts Point neighborhood in the Bronx, which already serves as one of the nation’s largest food distribution centers with existing produce, fish and meat markets.
Maria Torres-Springer, president and chief executive of the city’s Economic Development Corp, said the new hub would expand and strengthen the food distribution system.
In addition, city officials are investing more than US$150 million on other improvements to the Hunts Point food distribution center over the next decade, including modernizing existing markets and improving transportation lines.
The city is feeding more people than ever, and its population of 8.5 million has never been larger. However, while organic broccoli and fresh peaches might be regularly eaten at many dining tables, they remain out of reach for poor New Yorkers.
Advocates have estimated that 1.4 million city residents live in households that cannot afford to buy enough food, let alone premium produce.
“There is a stereotype that low-income people don’t want healthy food, so all we need to do is fill their bellies so they don’t starve,” said Joel Berg, the chief executive of Hunger Free America, a nonprofit that was formerly called the New York City Coalition Against Hunger.
City Harvest, a hunger-relief organization that collects and delivers food to 500 soup kitchens, food pantries and programs, has teamed up with community groups over the past three years to give out fresh produce to residents in poor neighborhoods, including Harlem and the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Crown Heights and East New York.
In total, it expects to distribute a record 25 million kilograms of food in fiscal 2017, up from 13.63 million kilograms five years ago.
More than half of this year’s food donations are to consist of fresh produce.
Barbara Turk, the city’s director of food policy, said city officials were working to increase access to fresh produce by expanding programs like Health Bucks, which provides money to food stamp recipients who shop at farmers markets.
“The single largest barrier to accessing healthy food is economic,” Turk said. “It’s having enough money.”
The kitchen at the Lenox Hill Neighborhood House produces an average of 1,350 meals per day for two senior centers, an early childhood program for low-income families and a shelter for homeless women with a history of mental illness. A blackboard near the entrance of the larger of the two senior centers lists the fresh local produce that is to be served for the week.
Lynn Loflin, a chef who owns an organic vegetable farm in the Catskill Mountains, was hired in 2011 to overhaul a menu that was heavy on meats and processed foods and light on vegetables. She started by replacing frozen broccoli for the fresh kind and preparing locally produced polenta and basmati rice instead of baked potatoes.
Loflin also cut meat servings nearly in half, to about 200g — to the dismay of many.
“It was very unpopular,” she said. “They were very happy with a large meat portion.”
Soon, dishes such as vegetable biryani were replacing standbys such as cheese lasagna — which Loflin described as a “vegetarian dish” with no actual vegetables — and Uncle Ben’s rice. Then there were homemade muffins and granola, and salad dressings such as a beet vinaigrette and ranch made from yogurt. She enlisted GrowNYC to supply local produce and grains at affordable prices.
Loflin said she was able to spend more money on the fresh produce and grains by spending less on meat.
Last year, Lenox Hill Neighborhood House started a training and technical assistance program, called the Teaching Kitchen, with Loflin at the helm, to share the lessons it had learned with other organizations as part of a growing “farm-to-institution” movement in the city.
The healthy meals have won over Jackie Pratt, a former medical assistant who cannot stomach old, overcooked vegetables.
Before Loflin’s arrival, Pratt said she found the “mystery meat” and the salty, canned sides just too unappetizing.
“Let’s say army rations might have been more palatable,” she said.
However, now Pratt comes almost every day. If the food is not to her liking, she does not hesitate to let the kitchen know. After she complained that her salad was drowning in dressing, it was served on the side.
“The food is markedly better,” Pratt said after a recent lunch of whole-wheat spaghetti with meat sauce and local organic broccoli. “It’s the difference between Tiffany’s and Woolworth’s.”
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) trip to China provides a pertinent reminder of why Taiwanese protested so vociferously against attempts to force through the cross-strait service trade agreement in 2014 and why, since Ma’s presidential election win in 2012, they have not voted in another Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate. While the nation narrowly avoided tragedy — the treaty would have put Taiwan on the path toward the demobilization of its democracy, which Courtney Donovan Smith wrote about in the Taipei Times in “With the Sunflower movement Taiwan dodged a bullet” — Ma’s political swansong in China, which included fawning dithyrambs