"I know how it feels to need help buying food," Cate Black told me. Growing up in Katy, Black was on school-lunch assistance after her father lost his job.

Years later, she became a young architect in Galveston and founded Galveston's Own Farmers Market (GOFM), which opened for business in 2012.

As she was organizing the market as a tax-exempt nonprofit, she gained a broader perspective through conversations with staff at St. Vincent's House, a free community clinic, which enlarged her thinking from the value of the type of temporary assistance of her childhood to the value of ongoing access to food. "They tuned me in," she said, "and taught me the necessity of access to good food for everyone."

This approach has helped the market earn bragging rights among Houston-area markets by implementing food access and outreach programs that no other producer-only market comes close to.

Only 16 months after it opened, Black succeeded in getting the market authorized by the USDA in early 2014 to participate in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps. This distinguished GOFM as the first Houston-area producer-only market to accept SNAP clients, and it remained the only one until spring 2015, when the East End Market, which occasionally has a few local produce vendors, became the second.

Today, GOFM is one of just two producer-only markets participating in SNAP. The Urban Harvest Farmers Market on Eastside Street, Houston's largest producer-only market, which opened in the fall of 2006, began accepting SNAP customers only in the winter of 2018. (Several markets operated by the City of Houston are authorized for SNAP, but these are actually produce outlets that make fruit and vegetables that are not necessarily local available in neighborhoods where they are scarce.)

While GOFM's access programs began with SNAP, they have not ended there. In February 2015, Black's successor in directing the market, Casey McAuliffe, a young Galveston County farmer and as of last year also a La Marque city council representative, initiated a "double dollars" program, another first in the Houston area.

Such programs are called by various names, depending on the particular market or particular funders, but their purpose is to double the dollars spent by SNAP clients up to a certain amount each market day. GOFM is the only Houston-area market with a double dollars program. It has been funded from the beginning by donations from individuals and philanthropic foundations in Galveston.

McAuliffe also got GOFM authorized to distribute vouchers for fresh fruit and vegetables to women receiving assistance through the USDA's Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program. As with double dollars, GOFM is the first and only Houston-area market serving WIC customers through vouchers.

Why go to the trouble? Like most bureaucratic requirements, the ones to participate in and administer programs like these are tedious and time-consuming, uninviting at least and at most downright daunting. But what you get when you do is more equitable, just and democratic access to fresh, locally produced food, which is better not just for consumers and producers but the community as a whole.

A recent report of the Union of Concerned Scientists notes that while SNAP participation helps financially unstable families eat more regularly and healthfully and reduce annual medical costs, SNAP expenditures also create ripple effects. With SNAP assistance, families can more readily cover other expenses, such as housing, utilities, transportation, health care and education, which improves their own lives and simultaneously contributes to the local economy. Public assistance helps the public, not just individuals and families privately.

FOOD ACTIVISM: The women changing how Houston eats

The latest USDA reports show that 42 million Americans rely on SNAP, with an average monthly benefit of $125.80 at a total cost of about $68.1 billion, representing nearly 80 percent of the total cost of the farm bill. According to the Farmers Market Coalition, in 2017 SNAP participants spent a total of more than $22.4 million of their benefits at farmers markets throughout all 50 states, an increase of 35.2 percent from 2012. The coalition attributes this to outreach and public education programs designed and mounted by farmers markets to serve their communities, the type of outreach GOFM exemplifies.

At GOFM in 2017, almost $5,000 in SNAP benefits were spent. Double dollars added about $1,100 to those expenditures, and $1,500 in WIC vouchers were spent. For a young, still growing market, these figures are substantial, and with ongoing educational projects, bode well for GOFM's increasing impact on the Galveston community.

Still, the generally higher cost of food at farmers markets compared with grocery stores raises a number of issues, most of them pointing to an ongoing need for more extensive public education about what real food is (as opposed to processed, food-like items made mostly from nonfood ingredients) and who profits from the money we spend at grocery stores.

Because it's not farmers. According to the USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service reports based on 2018 data, more than 80 cents of every dollar Americans spend on food at grocery stores goes to processing, wholesaling, distribution and corporate marketing. What do farmers get? On average, a mere 14.8 cents, as calculated by the National Farmers Union using USDA data.

These figures underscore why most small-scale farmers and some medium-sized ones depend on selling directly to customers at farmers markets and through community subscription arrangements (CSAs), charging prices intended to cover their actual costs and allow for some margin of profit, rather than selling at rock bottom prices to wholesalers.

But the pricing dilemma remains. McAuliffe has frequently described it in a way that encompasses personal and civic concerns. As farmers, she and her husband want to sell not just to the affluent but also to those with little if any expendable income. "Yet we have to charge a real price, one that we weigh against the labor of sowing the seed, tending the beds, harvesting each crop by hand and preparing it for sale. The real price of food means our offerings cost most than what many are used to. Being in a market that actively works to bring low-income households into the process of teaching everyone the benefit of eating fresh, local produce is a win-win for us."

Bringing everyone in

So, how do they do it? GOFM has developed extensive outreach methods to welcome SNAP and WIC clients and other Galveston residents into the community and to educate everyone about cooking and eating natural, unprocessed foods and how to make wise, economical purchases.

McAuliffe calls this outreach the Real Food Project. It is currently funded largely by grants she has gotten from Galveston's First Presbyterian Outreach Fund and from the Moody Methodist Permanent Endowment Fund. (GOFM also hosts OkraFest, which this year welcomed more than 300 paying attendees, accepted more donations of food, beverages and service than ever and featured higher-dollar silent auction items than ever, all of which added about $16,000 to GOFM's coffers.)

As McAuliffe and a host of volunteers have developed the Real Food Project over the past five years, it now has four main components of outreach: community cooking classes, community dinners, monthly market tastings and a young gardeners program.

Community cooking classes take place on a regular basis in various venues, including a kitchen wares shop and WIC clinics. Chefs are among the teachers, and so are people who just enjoy cooking. Many classes, especially at WIC clinics, are conducted by McAuliffe in Spanish, as she is bilingual.

The community dinners arose from McAuliffe's providing fresh, local meals at parenting classes at the Family Service Center of Galveston County, and they have since expanded to other venues, such as the Rosenberg Library and the Galveston Housing Authority's Gulf Breeze Apartments, located directly across the street from GOFM's market site, the Bryan Museum.

GOFM board member and Galveston attorney Elizabeth Spears assumed responsibility for community dinners a year ago, because she is devoted to the market and loves to cook. "I aim to model simple meals that feature farmers market items with ordinary things from traditional grocery stores. It has been an absolute delight to see people of all ages bravely try foods they have never seen before!" she said. "Last year, I featured radishes at one of the dinners. Many parents and kids had never tasted radishes before. And many loved them! Same thing this year with spaghetti squash and salads 'with stuff in them,' referring to fresh cooked corn on the cob and hard boiled eggs tossed in a mixed green salad."

Monthly market tastings are currently handled mainly by volunteers from the Galveston Seventh Day Adventist congregation. McAuliffe describes this group as "crazy diverse, with a lot of people from other countries, and it's awesome. And a lot of them eat really healthily because they eschew coffee and fat and beer and those sorts of things."

The young gardeners program involves students and a number of volunteers in cultivating vegetable gardens in three Galveston Independent School District (GISD) elementary schools. This project grew from the dreams and determination of GOFM board member and volunteer Nan Wilson. Wilson grew up in Galveston and moved away for much of her working life. When she retired and returned to be near family, she felt "sadness and shock at seeing widespread diabetes and heart disease in my own family and in general in communities of color on the island."

She was prompted to begin communicating with people in GISD and with McAuliffe about starting a school gardening program. Wilson won everyone over, and, with her ongoing leadership as a volunteer, the program began in the fall of 2017. Its main accomplishments so far? "Having more than 40 third- and fourth-graders learn how to grow their own food, experience many healthy vegetable and fruit dishes," Wilson said, "and take home fresh produce to their families regularly over the course of the last academic year."

FED BY IMMIGRANTS: The history of Houston food

This varied, nearly constant outreach is essential to the success of access programs at GOFM or any market serious about creating an inclusive community and simultaneously expanding farmers' customer base. Not just GOFM but other similarly effective markets – for example, the Sustainable Food Center's markets in Austin – do extensive outreach and public education. It is not enough just to become authorized to serve people in SNAP and WIC. It is not a case, "If you build it, they will come."

A number of farmers at the Urban Harvest Farmers Market welcomed the recent authorization to serve SNAP clients, but they have been disappointed in the lack of outreach. Hardly any SNAP participants come, they've found.

David Glover of Tejas Heritage Farm is personally committed to serving people with limited incomes, and for years has placed a sign in his vending area indicating that he welcomes SNAP participants. Though he couldn't transact sales through SNAP before market authorization, the sign was his way of signaling to SNAP participants that he welcomed their business. When any SNAP participant expressed an interest in his products – meat products, which are even more expensive compared to grocery store prices than vegetables – Glover explained that he couldn't accept SNAP but would subsidize their purchases himself by giving 50 percent discounts. "But it's still more than they would pay at a grocer," he said, and he has few takers. "I just don't know how to reach participants. I think knowledge of the market and its participation in SNAP is the biggest barrier."

Glen Miracle of Laughing Frog Farm agrees. "Urban Harvest and all us vendors could do a better job getting the word out that SNAP is accepted. Very few SNAP customers come."

How you can help

At the same time, however, in a political irony with potentially tragic implications for thousands of people all over our country, SNAP is currently under assault, mainly by Republicans in the U. S. House of Representatives, and some in the Senate, as lawmakers fight over provisions of the 2018 farm bill.

Though most SNAP participants who are able to work do work, the House version of the bill would reduce the limit on benefits from three months to one month for able-bodied adults without dependents who aren't employed for at least 20 hours a week or who aren't enrolled in government job-training programs.

And, among other things, it would also make proving eligibility for SNAP more arduous and impose higher costs for replacing the Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards, used like credit or debit cards, to expedite SNAP purchases.

EDITORIAL: Cuts to SNAP would hurt working poor in Texas

Given these circumstances on top of the ordinary challenges a market faces in developing effective food access programs, what, then, is to be done? How can we help sustain effective access programs such as GOFM's and bring about more like it?

A good place to start is to call our senators and representatives and urge them to vote against work requirements and other changes that would make SNAP benefits harder or even impossible to come by.

And don't stop with phone calls. Vote on November 6 and in every election. At every political level – local, state, national – make candidates' positions on food access and related social justice issues part of what determines who gets your vote.

Closer to home, if you buy food at a farmers market that doesn't participate in SNAP or WIC or hasn't developed outreach programs to attract SNAP and WIC participants, then start a conversation with market management and with farmers and other customers about learning from and emulating GOFM. Volunteer to help. And keep talking and agitating until food access becomes a priority, a real priority – not an abstraction, not an ideal paid lip service – but an actual, demonstrated priority, with bureaucratic requirements met, operational procedures established and outreach programs flourishing.

Oh, and one more thing – head to Galveston on a Thursday afternoon or a Sunday morning and buy some great, locally produced food and be inspired.

Pamela Walker is the author of Growing Good Things to Eat in Texas: Profiles of Organic Farmers and Ranchers across the State.

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