Part 3: Roxbury & Somerville
In our visits to restaurants, we have entered homes and crossed borders to taste food from across the world. However, for every place that offers food, there are more places wherein people cannot even afford food. To acknowledge the reality of food inequality is to first emphasize the privilege associated with the phrase the “taste of home”. To do this, we look at the greater Boston area and efforts to combat food insecurity throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.
In the last 18 months, the on-going pandemic has made the inequalities between food more evident as the need for food provisions rose to unprecedented numbers. One organization that appeared was, “Project Restore Us,” a food delivery operation spearheaded by Tracy Chang, head chef at Cambridge based restaurant, PAGU.[1] When numbers dropped low in restaurants, PAGU sought to connect the excess produce in kitchens directly to those in the community with the greatest need. To keep up with the changing conditions of the pandemic, they shifted their model of individual home food delivery to partnering with several open food markets, across the city, to directly bring the food to those that need it.
During the summer, I ventured out onto the Orange Line and traveled south until I reached Roxbury Crossing, to volunteer for a day with Project Restore Us. Tucked into the corner under the looming concrete awning, their collapsible table was hurriedly set as the morning crowd emerged. A colorful farmers market was right around the corner, full of bright green produce and verdant vegetables that gleamed in the open sunlight. On the table, cardboard boxes full of rice, wheat, and a variety of beans were opened up to the eager eyes of older women standing in line. Though they lack the diverse colors of the grown produce right outside, the prices of the items, as low as $1 for a bag of pinto beans pulled eager people in closer to the table.
Along with purchasing individual bags, whole boxes of grain and beans can be bought—a popular option for families. At the beginning of my shift, an elder woman bought four boxes of rice and beans, and then instructed a young boy in Spanish to watch over them diligently. But these boxes weren’t for the immediate family, my co-volunteer informed me—these boxes are to be shipped far outside the country to relatives back home. As I watched from the corner of my eye when the woman returned with an older man and a trolley, I was fascinated at their determination— but more so, the great compassion for this family to not think of themselves but those far away in need.
As I manned the table, I could hear an assortment of languages on top of each other. From Spanish, to Vietnamese, to Cantonese and even Swahili. I found myself google translating “bulgar wheat” in Vietnamese & gesturing animatedly with my hands to explain to an older lady what exactly they were holding.
Project Restore Us Collage. Image by Authors.
Project Restore Us does not accept food stamps as a form of payment (though the adjacent farmer’s markets do). Over the course of the day, several people would come up with hopeful looks in their eyes, only to falter with dejection when we would have to turn them down. However, PRU accepts farmer’s market coupons: coupons that can be used at any market in Boston and are provided by religious and community organization to city residents.
Along with the PRU table, there was a small table set up with an ice box of prepacked food lunches at the other entrance. Mary Ann Nelson, a warm & gentle spoken lady stood the line in front, trying to catch the attention of children in line with their mothers to offer them a school lunch. As part of the Boston Public School System, she was trying to bring school lunches to children in need during the summer when school was not in session.
Though I only spoke to her briefly, I sensed an enduring passion for creating equitable food access throughout our conversation. When she discovered I was an MIT student, she eagerly starting listing ideas that she had: from creating little raised flower beds for immigrants to grow their own food, to gardening spaces within residential units, to expanding counter space of residential kitchens. She informed me of the inequalities present in food access—from “ghetto pricing”, where the same market with the same product can hike up the prices to the discrepancy of sanitation standards of different stores based on the area they serve. It was apparent to me, that the access to food was more than just the presence of a physical grocery store—it was a larger and more complex social issue that had to be tackled at all levels.
On the other side of town, and several months later, Ana and I traveled to Food for Free, a warehouse distribution center for food in Eastern Somerville. The main goal of “Food For Free” is to rescue excess food within the community and redirect it to under-served populations. [2] An equitable future for them is where everyone, regardless of background, has access to “fresh, healthy [and] delicious food”.[3]
We hobbled out of our bumpy Uber car ride and were greeted with a nondescript one-story brick building, congruous with the industrial surroundings. After a brief phone call, Stephanie Smith, the Vice President of Food for Free Programming, greeted us at the entrance, ushering us in to put down our bags and make ourselves comfortable. Though we had caught her right before closing, Stephanie was generous with her time and answered all our questions with great enthusiasm and knowledge.
Food for Free operates as the middle man between food pantries and food banks. Across the country, food banks receive both state and federal funding. This means that they are generally larger with a greater capacity to store food; rather then conducting face to face interactions with clients, food banks operate as distribution hubs to smaller food pantries.
Food for Free’s operations are split into two parts: food rescuing and food repacking. Through food rescuing, Food for Free visits several grocery stores and other food distributors, every day of the week to round up any excess food. On their programs side, they package food to deliver meals & groceries to a variety of recipients: from schools, to housing facilities and directly to homebound residents. Their network impacts the whole Greater Boston area, extending as far North as Marblehead.
Food for Free Photo Collage, Image by Authors.
As Stephanie toured us around the facilities, she explained to us how the main operations work. The storage facility stores pounds and pounds of food- from freezers full of crates of frozen items all the way to skyscrapers of boxes full of pineapples. In the back, a large open space is lined to the walls with miscellaneous items: from onions, to cereals to vegetables that all center around an open space with portable conveyor belts. One of their programs, Just Eats Grocery Boxes wrangles together volunteers along a long assembly line, to pack around 672 boxes of groceries a day. From staples like pasta and grains to beans and vegetable, volunteers operate in 2 hours shifts around the conveyor belts to meet the day’s quota.
Over the pandemic, as the need for food grew, also did the number of volunteers rise—with the ability to pivot and a willingness to serve, Food for Free saw a doubling in volunteers. However, the program cannot keep up with the continual rise in food insecurity without a larger facility and increased funding to meet this demand.
In the supply chain of food, there are several hands that the food passes through, from the hands that collect the groceries, to those that package the food to ultimately the hands that deliver meals; the food we eat has journeyed far lengths and passed through many communities before arriving on our plates.
Project Restore Us & Food for Free are a few of many groups of people with the common goal of bringing equitable food access to all. However—even still, the simple need for a meal is too great of a task for the existing infrastructure to fulfill.
[1] 2, Nov. “Who We Are.” Project Restore Us, https://projectrestoreus.org/who-we-are.
[2] “Food for Free.” FoodForFree.org, 29 July 2021, https://foodforfree.org/
[3] Ibid.