In Eastern Massachusetts, one in nine people uses a soup kitchen or a food pantry.
One in nine.
I recently attended the monthly operations meeting of the North Shore Hunger Network, a 20-year-old group of people representing agencies from Amesbury to Beverly committed to serving the food insecure.
Eileen O’Shea, director of Community Outreach for the Greater Boston Foodbank, was there that day, along with representatives from Our Neighbor’s Table in Amesbury, Acord in Hamilton, Beverly Bootstraps, The Adventist Church in Beverly, Haven from Hunger serving Peabody and Salem, and Gloucester’s Open Door.
Everyone sat scattered around a large conference table, their own crumpled brown bag of a thrown-together lunch in front of them. Each one of the group looked tired and preoccupied.
There was almost no pre-meeting chatter or networking. The members ate their lunches in silence waiting for the meeting to begin. Improvement in business isn’t happy news for these people, and business is up.
Sarah Grow, development associate for The Open Door, reported that last year Open Door served 5,438 people representing 2,260 households. That’s 14 percent — or 1 in 7 — Gloucester, Rockport, Manchester, Ipswich and Essex residents.
There have been cuts in the USDA support this year. While Massachusetts is the one state in the nation with food assistance as a line item in its budget, Massachusetts Emergency Food Assistance Programs (MEFAP) will probably be level-funded this year.
Massachusetts food assistance agencies are waiting anxiously for the House of Representatives to vote.
The agencies represented at this lunch table reported a 40 percent increase in food pantry and soup kitchen use since the fall.
The North Shore Hunger Network operations meeting is an opportunity for the North Shore food assistance agencies to share best practices and to discuss how to best provide nutrition and advocacy to people who are struggling to feed themselves and their families. At this table, the agencies trying to fill the widening hunger gaps in our communities find their own support.
“Together we’re stronger,” Julie LaFontaine, Open Door’s director, said, stronger to educate, seek funding, and to leverage their buying power, to figure out if there is a place where they can get a better price for eggs for each of their food pantries if they buy them together.
A large dose of happy news came to the North Shore Hunger Network in December, when they learned that Gloucester’s Open Door had received one of 13 State Giving Grants from Wal-Mart — $25,000 to expand their Mobile Markets Program through the North Shore Hunger Network.
Working with their local housing authorities to identify the largest concentration of need, Beverly Bootstraps and Haven From Hunger will be able to offer the same positive food distribution model to Beverly, Peabody and Salem, with operating and technical assistance from the Open Door, starting in June.
The Mobile Market is a free farmers’ market, modeled on a program begun by City Harvest in New York City, that has been operating in Gloucester since 2005.
The theory and practice is about getting locally grown fresh fruits and vegetables — grown by the Food Project, Appleton Farms in Ipswich and Farmer Dave’s in Dracut — into neighborhoods where need is high and access to food difficult. The Mobile Markets have proven to heal at many levels.
While the food is free, the program requires that participants help set up and break down the stands each week. There are cooking demonstrations at each market, snacks like Shrek Smoothies made with mango, bananas and a bag of spinach, appealing to kids who are green vegetable shy.
The market focuses on providing good nutrition and cooking ideas, rather than “assistance,” and builds community on the side.
Again, it’s sad news that business is up, but the changing model of food assistance, with an interest in providing local fresh fruits and vegetables, teaching healthy cooking practices, and building community, is good news for everyone. This important grant is just one example of what the North Shore Hunger Network collaboration means, and reason for the members at the lunch that day to smile.
Here is a wonderful recipe I presented to the North Shore Hunger Network as a low-fat, low-sodium dish, straight from the famous Italian Cookbook author Marcella Hazan.
It’s one of the most delicious pasta sauces you can make, but has just three ingredients: a can of tomatoes, five tablespoons of butter and an onion.
Low sodium, low fat (OK, it’s butter, but it’s a little more than one tablespoon per person; Fat free altogether just isn’t right), I call it the miracle of Italian cooking, when star-studded meals are produced with the simplest ingredients.
Anyone in any neighborhood would find this bowl of pasta rich, flavorful, delicious. Don’t distrust that short ingredient list.
As I told the agencies at lunch that day, to know this recipe is to never buy a jar of processed pasta sauce — full of sodium, fat, and ingredients no one needs — again.
Marcella Hazan’s Basic Tomato Sauce
(Enough for 1 pound of pasta)
Ingredients
One 28-ounce can whole plum tomatoes roughly chopped with their juices
5 tablespoons salted butter
1 medium yellow onion, peeled and halved
Instructions
Heat a heavy, medium saucepan over medium heat. Add all of the ingredients and bring to a simmer. Turn the heat to low to keep a steady simmer. Cook for 45 minutes, or until droplets of fat float free of the tomatoes. Stir occasionally. Discard the onion. Serve over cooked pasta.
To cook the pasta, bring four quarts of water to a boil. Add 1 tablespoon of salt to the water, and then add 1 pound of pasta. If cooking more than 1 pound of pasta, add another quart for each additional half pound.
Cook the pasta for the time allowed on the box. Drain the pasta in a colander, immediately return it to either a warm serving bowl (pour some hot water in it and then pour it out.) or the same pot you cooked it in.
Pour the sauce over the pasta, and toss very well: Take two wooden spoons, or two forks, reach down into the pasta and lift it up again so the sauce settles over all.
Keep doing this for at least a minute. The sauce and pasta merge in a way that never happens when the sauce is just plopped on top of the pasta, and the whole dish becomes much more elegant and delicious.
• • •
Food for Thought runs weekly in the Times’ Taste of the Times section and is written by Heather Atwood, an author and mother from Rockport. Questions and comments can be sent to Heather at heatheraa@aol.com. And follow her blog at www.heatheratwood.com.