Inside a Food Bank Just Say Yes Lesson

There exists in New York City a groundswell of green. It’s not located in Central or Prospect Park, nor is it located in the forests of The Bronx. This green lives in the nearly 100 acres of community gardens and farms planted across the five boroughs of the city. Rooted on rooftops and vacant lots, these greenspaces are vital sources of food, fellowship, and education for the communities they serve. They’re also in constant danger of being destroyed from gentrification, displacement, and development. In this blog post, we’re going to explore the history of urban agriculture in New York and talk about why it's so important to the fight against hunger in our city. We’ll also chat with The Campaign Against Hunger, a Food Bank member agency that currently operates two farms in Brooklyn. ''They were getting ready to take something away from our community, something too important to lose... I told them I was born poor, I live poor, and I’m going to die poor. I don’t beg. But these are for the community. I asked [the city] to help me.” Out of context, these words from a 1982 New York Times interview could be about anything: affordable housing, local grocery stores, schools, churches. But spoken by then 82-year-old activist and environmentalist Hattie Carthan, they were about trees, specifically the 1,500 trees she had spent her twilight years planting as the leader of the “Bedford-Stuyvesant Beautification Committee.” When Carthan first moved onto Vernon Avenue in 1953, it was a beautiful tree-lined street in the heart of Bed-Stuy. But over the course of a decade, all but three of the trees had died, thanks in large part to neglect from the city. To fight back against this deterioration, Carthan organized her neighbors into the T&T-Vernon Block Association. Together, they held a BBQ to raise funds for four trees, which, when planted, quickly died. But thankfully, a much sturdier seed had taken root. By 1966, the Beautification Committee was in full swing and breathing new life into Bed-Stuy. At its height, it powered over 100 different block associations, each of which took ownership of its respective trees. In addition to her duties as Committee chair, Carthan also taught classes on tree care and conservation to students in the neighborhood. She would then hire and pay these same students to be part of her “Neighborhood Tree Corps,” which oversaw the maintenance of the hundreds of ginkgos, sycamores, and honey locusts blooming in the borough. Though Carthan received occasional grant support from the city, the Committee was always run by and for the community. In truth, her trees didn’t just beautify the neighborhood... they saved it. Carthan’s work marked a major turning point for urban agriculture in New York City. Though victory gardens had been popular throughout the 1940s (yielding some 200 million pounds of fresh produce for New Yorkers during the war), they mostly faded away by the early 1950s. After that, the only farm gardens left were owned and operated by city parks. Carthan, then, was one of the first to bring the practices of conservation and environmental education out of the bureaucratic system and into the streets. In many ways, she identified something that would come to inform the movement for years and decades to come: Greenspaces could revitalize and sustain historically underserved communities. This idea was put into practice throughout the 1970s by a variety of groups, most notably Liz Christy’s “Green Guerillas,” who planted sunflowers in traffic medians and threw seed bombs into vacant lots along the Bowery. The group blurred the lines between private and public space, seeing every crack and crevice as an opportunity to grow something beautiful. As the still operational collective writes on its website: “The green guerillas began rallying other people to use community gardening as a tool to reclaim urban land, stabilize city blocks, and get people working together to solve problems.” And work together they did. As the financial crisis of the 1970s left public and private lands abandoned by NYC developers, groups like Christy’s moved in to transform and repurpose these plots for the good of their surrounding communities. There was such a gardening boom at this time that the Department of Parks and Recreation established the GreenThumb Program to provide resources, licenses, and protection to these spaces. But as the green revolution began to feel more and more unstoppable, the economic prosperity of the 90s and early 2000s brought things to a screeching halt. Gardens were razed to make way for storefronts. Farms were decimated to grow high-rises instead of neighborhood-sustaining produce. Though coalitions were formed and lawsuits were leveraged against the government, there was little that gardeners and farmers could do to safeguard their land. As recently as last November, a group of 54 organizations came together to present the city with “From the Ground Up: A Petition to Protect New York City’s Community Gardens.” In it, they make a clear argument for why these spaces are so important: Community gardens alleviate food insecurity by providing folks with ready access to fresh, nutritious food. By increasing access to fresh fruits and vegetables, community gardens help to confront public health disparities caused by racial and socioeconomic injustice in historically marginalized Black and Latinx communities throughout the city. Community gardens are a community-led response to environmental racism, helping to curb disproportionate air pollution and susceptibility to illness. Community gardens help to correct unequal access to greenspace in NYC by providing low-income New Yorkers with space to learn from and connect with nature. At Food Bank, we recognize the vital role that urban agriculture plays in the fight against hunger in our city. That’s why we partner with organizations across the five boroughs that operate their own community gardens and farms. One of these member agencies is The Campaign Against Hunger, which currently has two farms in Brooklyn: Far Rock Farm in Far Rockaway and Saratoga Farm in Bed-Stuy, not a stone’s throw from where Hattie Carthan planted her first tree nearly six decades ago. Like Carthan, TCAH takes a community-first approach to everything it does, which Director of Programs Tamara Dawson told me is what makes its farms so special. “For us, it’s important to understand our community and what it needs,” explained Dawson. “Before every growing season, we do a survey with our clients to figure out what they want to see, what they want us to grow. This is why we grow things like callaloo, snowy eggplant, and dwarf okra... we grow over 100 different species of produce because we want to meet the needs of individuals. It’s so nice when you see a family come in from wherever they’re from and say, ‘Oh my God! You have this?!’” It’s a transcendent moment, one that speaks not only to the importance of access and representation, but to the very power of food itself to affirm who we are and where we come from. By planting vegetables, fruits, and herbs from all over the world, TCAH builds an instant bridge to home for its neighbors, a bridge that might otherwise not exist at all. Aside from growing culturally appropriate food, TCAH also educates and employs students from the neighborhood to run and operate its farms. The Green Teens Program hearkens back to Carthan’s Neighborhood Tree Corps in that it empowers kids to give back and protect their communities. It also pays them, which allows them to support local businesses, take care of family, and live their lives with more dignity and freedom. “We are a product of our environment and of what we eat, [which is why] it’s so important that our farms are youth-run. It’s important for us to educate our youth not only on how to grow food, but how to stand up and be an advocate for food justice. Our green teens go out and partner with seniors in the neighborhood, show them different plants they can grow in their apartments, show them how to grow a tomato plant on the fire escape. It’s important that we give back to our community and that we educate from within.” Now more than ever, we must do our part to protect these invaluable spaces. As the New York City Community Garden Coalition (NYCCGC) and Earthjustice write in “From the Ground Up,” the way to do this is to increase legal protections for community gardens and farms by designating them as Critical Environmental Areas. That way, farmers will be able to grow food, educate the public, and sustain neighborhoods without fear of having their livelihoods destroyed. So spread the word, contact your local councilperson, and visit a garden in your neighborhood today! Taking the time to connect with the land and the people who work it will undoubtedly change your relationship with whatever city you call home.

The sound of a trickling hydroponic tower mixes with the excited chatter of second graders as they gather in the well-equipped science lab at their Brooklyn public school. Food Bank For New York City has partnered with this school for nine years, supplying not only vegetables, but comprehensive nutrition lesson plans, teacher training, and guidance on healthy eating through our CookShop program. The school's CookShop educator, Ms. Elzoghby in the elementary school's well-equipped science lab. Launched over 30 years ago, CookShop is all about empowering teachers with the resources they need to educate their students about cooking, nutrition, and physical fitness. It aims to foster enthusiasm in children for fresh fruits, vegetables, and healthy whole foods. Each year, CookShop Classroom reaches over 13,000 New Yorkers through partnerships with 60 schools and 20 after-school programs. Let’s hop back into our Brooklyn classroom to see this dynamic program in action... Tasting notes students have charted. CookShop provides comprehensive lesson plans for educators. Ms. Elzoghby, the CookShop educator, guides the group of 16 students through the process of preparing a fresh salsa with cucumber dippers using vegetables provided by Food Bank. As the students begin cutting their cucumbers, one exclaims, "They smell good!" When asked about their favorite vegetables, responses include lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes, corn, and carrots. Two students even discuss a famous YouTuber's knife skills, showcasing their growing interest in cooking. A seven-year-old practices knife skills.Students collaborate on making salsa. "I'm a chef at home!" one student proudly declares, while another chimes in, "I know how to use real knives." Their enthusiasm is palpable as they collaborate on the salsa recipe, eagerly calling out the next ingredients needed: “vinegar and oil!” It's clear they've learned their way around a salad dressing. Ms. Elzoghby helps a student add olive oil to dress the salsa. Ms. Elzoghby even incorporates math questions into the lesson, asking, "If I need to add two teaspoons, but I only have a half-teaspoon measurement spoon, what should I do?" She receives the correct answer of four total from an eager eight-year-old. Nutrition Education incorporates many subjects, and the curriculum is infused with math, science, literacy, and Social Emotional learning. Enthusiasm abounds: students eagerly raise their hands for extra carrots. When the vegetables are cut, but before it’s ready to be tasted, Ms. Elzoghby reviews the group's rules: "Don't yuck someone's yum" and "Don't eat until everybody's been served." With a countdown of "3...2...1...eat!" the tasting begins. Students are served salsa and wait until everyone has some to taste it. Food Bank's CookShop program encourages children to love fruits and vegetables. The group seems to enjoy what they’ve prepared, and one student excitedly says: "I'm gonna taste the juice! Good to the last drop!" While some find the onions "spicy," others delight in their flavor. Many even come back for seconds, a testament to the program's success in encouraging healthy eating habits. A student carefully tastes the "spicy" onions. As the lesson concludes, the students file out of the science lab having tasted six different vegetables in one lesson. Ms. Elzoghby reports that more students are trying the cafeteria’s offerings at their daily salad bar. Healthy eating habits have left the classroom and entered everyday life. The impact of Food Bank's CookShop program is evident: by nourishing both minds and bodies, CookShop is cultivating a generation of informed, enthusiastic, and healthy young New Yorkers. This salsa allowed the students to try more than 6 vegetables in one lesson. A holistic approach to Nutrition Education includes gardening. Food Bank's CookShop program has a much greater reach than most nutrition education programs in the city and is currently serving 63 schools. It employs a train-the-trainer model that enables more teachers to provide this type of education within their schools. Each year CookShop trains about 600 teachers to implement the program. For more information on how you can support or get involved with CookShop, click here.

In this post, we’re going to cover all the things you can and can’t donate to the network of food pantries and soup kitchens that power our work at the Food Bank For New York City. While our donation dos and don’ts may differ from other hunger relief organizations, they should still provide you with a better understanding of what kinds of resources organizations like ours are generally looking for. But before we get into our full donation chart, we want to cover a few tips and tricks for optimizing your next donation. Consider Refrigeration While several organizations in our member network may be able to refrigerate things like produce, dairy, and meat, not all food pantries and soup kitchens have this same capacity, so always make sure to double check before you donate. If it’s unclear, stick with shelf-stable goods like canned food, flour, cooking oil, or rice. Skip the Expired Goods Yes, “best of” or “expiration” dates aren’t always accurate, but that doesn’t mean you should donate expired goods to hunger relief organizations. When thinking about what to give, consider whether or not you’d be comfortable serving the item to your family. If you wouldn’t eat something past its “sell-by” date, chances are you shouldn’t donate it. No Leftovers Please You might be the best chef in the entire world, but unfortunately, we can’t accept your home-cooked meals or food items. Without knowing how the items were prepared, we’re unable to control for things like allergies and dietary restrictions. The same thing is true for any baked goods or meals you might buy from a local grocer. Don’t Break the Seal Food pantries and soup kitchens in our member network are only able to accept unopened or unused food items. This means that you can’t donate a half-used box of spaghetti or bring us a Ziploc bag of items your family no longer needs. We appreciate the spirit of this gift, but want our clients to have the same experience that any of us have when shopping for and selecting the new food items they want to eat. Prioritize Nutrition To bring a little more care to your donation, think about the nutritional value of what you’re giving. When donating canned vegetables, for example, consider giving low-sodium veggies. And if you’re thinking about donating grains or pasta, we say prioritize things like brown rice and whole grain noodles. We want to serve our clients quality ingredients that not only taste good, but do good things for the body. Now that you’ve read through these tips, take a peek at our official donation chart below. We’ve organized items into things we’d like to “prioritize” and ones we’d like to “reduce.” To learn more about our approach to community nutrition, click this link.