Turn the Eat Around

Wander into Brooklyn's Red Hook neighborhood on a Saturday morning in summer, and you'll see a sight not uncommon in New York City these days: a thriving and diverse farmers' market. Neighborhood denizens cluster around stands offering free-range meat, fresh cheese, cream-on-top milk, and a whole array of fresh fruit and vegetables, many of them grown right down the block.

Yet unlike most of New York's bustling green markets, which tend to thrive in upscale residential and shopping areas, this one lies in one of the city's poorest neighborhoods. Red Hook's median family income is below the federal poverty line of $19,000 for a family of four, and 40 percent of the neighborhood's families live on less than $10,000 per year, according to the 2000 census. More than 80 percent of its population lives in public housing.

In fact, not many outsiders actually wander into Red Hook. When New York City's legendary city planner Robert Moses patched together plans for the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in the 1940s, he let the road slice right into the working-class area, leaving it shoehorned between the traffic-choked highway and New York Harbor. According to Ian Marvy -- cofounder of Added Value, the nonprofit that runs the farmers' market -- that isolation is only one of the historical legacies haunting the neighborhood.

In the 1950s, the maritime industry that had long defined the area moved to New Jersey, leaving a void not only in dock jobs but also in the support economy: small shops, restaurants, and the like. Rapid white flight followed, financed partially by the GI Bill and facilitated by the construction of highways and suburbs. According to Marvy, by 1960, Red Hook's population had plunged from 50,000 to 15,000. Today it stands at 11,000 and, local sources say, is about 40 percent black, 40 percent Latino, and 20 percent white.

Marvy, a youth advocate, first came to Red Hook in 1998 to work with young offenders through the Red Hook Community Justice Center. "I realized that the kids doing community service weren't doing anything that was meaningful to them, or to the community," he says. "It was this wasted resource -- here you had these kids who really needed to learn some new skills, and this community that could really have used some youthful energy. And all they were doing was picking up trash in a park, or re-shelving books in the library."

Marvy talked a local nonprofit into letting his group manage a community garden that had fallen into disuse. He was surprised by how readily the kids embraced the work. "Not only did the kids dive right into gardening, they kept coming back to hang out in the garden even after their service was done," he says. While they loved to garden, they also needed a legitimate way to make money. Because Red Hook's only supermarket had closed down -- making high-priced, low-quality produce sold in bodegas the only option for fresh food -- market gardening suddenly seemed like an ideal solution.

Along with colleague Michael Hurwitz, Marvy launched Added Value in 2001. Their first project was the Red Hook Farmers' Market, where they sold goods grown on their own garden plots and by area farmers. By 2003, they had gotten permission from the city to farm an abandoned three-acre baseball park in Red Hook. Today, a local supermarket has reopened, but Added Value is still going strong. In addition to offering fresh, high-quality goods to neighborhood residents through the farmers' market, the nonprofit sells salad greens to two nearby restaurants, both recently named among the five best restaurants in Brooklyn by New York magazine. Since opening in 2001, Added Value has provided training and a paycheck for 85 neighborhood teenagers.

Red Hook still has its problems; there's an active drug trade, and residents suffer the health issues common in many low-income neighborhoods. Marvy notes that of the seven students currently in the program, two have diabetes, "and every one of them has at least one family member with it." The neighborhood's diabetes hospitalization rate is twice the New York City average for children, and 50 percent higher than the city average for adults.

But there's no shortage of hope, either. Added Value is currently working with a local elementary school on a food-systems curriculum for first-graders. "The whole first-grade class is spending three of their 35 hours of classroom time each week on our farm, learning all about where food comes from," Marvy says. At a recent PTA meeting, the kids brought their parents to the farm. Says Marvy: "There were all these little kids tugging their parents by the shirtsleeves, saying 'See? I told you there was a farm in Red Hook!'"


Click here to find out how federal policies are making low-income eaters sick.