My daughter Lucy turned 18 in March, a big event for which she asked me to make dumplings for dinner. This was no surprise: both of my kids request pork and cabbage dumplings for their birthday dinners every year. I love this, partly because it simplifies everything but mainly because the recipe is my mother’s. Those dumplings remain one of my kids’ last everyday connections to their grandmother, who was born in Taiwan during Japanese occupation, and the history implied therein. Food here is as much about emotional and historical connection as it is about being full.
The more spiritual dimensions of food aren’t exactly a priority in our current food system. The impact of this lands particularly hard on people whose food traditions differ from what is widely available in the U.S., and even harder if those folks experience food insecurity. Those who receive Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits have a certain amount of choice in what foods they can buy, but those benefits are always provisional, as the Trump administration’s recent deep cuts to the program demonstrate. And food pantries, of necessity, must prioritize quantity, cost and perishability over the more specific cultures and histories of individual clients.
One could argue that cultural congruence is an unaffordable luxury in food access work, especially in an era of government cuts and rising expenses. But neglecting a more humanistic view of what people need has its own costs: racial inequity and discrimination, disconnection, an existential loss of history and identity.
Mindful of this, local food and farming justice organization Grow Food Northampton has devoted much thought to implementing more holistic approaches to food security.
“There’s food access and then there’s food sovereignty, which I think of as the next level in food access,” said Erin Ferrentino, Grow Food’s food access director, in a recent phone interview. In their view, “food sovereignty means providing lots of different ways for people to access or have a relationship with foods of their choice,” allowing people more ownership and agency over what they’re eating and how they’re accessing it.
To that end, the food access wing of GFN has established a number of programs for low-income Northampton residents: a Free Mobile Farmers Market program, which makes the rounds of nine low-income housing sites every week to deliver local produce and other farm foods; and community gardens installed and maintained at public housing, which provide residents the resources and mentorship to grow the produce they want to eat.
But the program I find most intriguing is the Living History Garden, which occupies a third of an acre at GFN’s organic Community Garden on Meadow Street in Florence. Previously, the Living History Garden grew flax and sugar beets as a kind of historical record, acknowledging the crops grown by 19th-century Florence abolitionists in an effort to provide ethical alternatives to the enslaved labor-powered cotton and sugarcane industries.
Now, however, in addition to flax, Grow Food grows crops like chilacayote and white eggplant — culturally specific foods grown either by or at the request of local residents who find themselves living far from their original homes.
The evolution of the garden, according to Ferrentino, is a way of further chronicling colonialism’s ongoing impact by featuring stories of local community members and their experience with food and food history. For those who use the garden, the growing of the crops themselves is an act of both preservation and liberation.
The garden’s za’atar plants, for instance, have been provided by a man who brought the herb over from Palestine and nurtured it over the course of 40 years. (Wild za’atar is traditionally foraged in Palestine, but in 1977, Israel made foraging for the herb illegal.) And last summer Ferrentino grew white eggplant — popular in Ghana but distinctly less available in the U.S. — for a local Ghanaian resident who shares the harvest with friends.
In deciding what to plant in the Living History Garden, Ferrentino asks folks at the Mobile Markets what foods they miss from home, and conducts outreach to Grow Food’s community gardeners as well. But the garden is organic in more ways than one. Ferrentino described the excitement of those who, either at the market or in the garden itself, recognize the foods they rarely, if ever, come across in stores here. That revival of memories and connection builds a sense of unexpected possibility, leading them to suggest other foods for planting — exactly the kind of agency and food sovereignty the garden hopes to encourage.
The plot is open to the public year-round, and, beginning in June, Grow Food hosts events that explore the history, associated memories, and kitchen uses for the garden’s crops. Those seeking a taste of that connection before June, though, can find it in the garden’s online interview archives, where you can listen to Louai Abu-Osba (Palestine) on molokhia, and Mary Margaret Chapman (Mississippi) on okra.
The interview with Efadal Huq is particularly arresting. In it, he describes the bottle gourd — “one of the most loved vegetables” in his native Bangladesh — as a herald of winter, a time of ease and relief from the tropical country’s heat and rain.
“There is a part of me that always misses the familiarity of vegetables that I knew,” he said, adding that, to him, seeing bottle gourd growing in the Living History Garden is like “a little piece of home has grown out of the ground here.” One comes away from his short interview feeling that the garden is growing food for both the body and soul.
Francie Lin is a former staff member of Grow Food Northampton.