Food security advocates see potential in proposed food center – Bennington Banner

BENNINGTON — The eventual establishment of a commercial food hub on Shields Drive was just one of the varied food security initiatives discussed during a virtual meeting on food security in Bennington County and beyond.

The Zoom discussion on March 9 was a joint meeting between the Bennington Hunger Council and the Mellon Food Insecurity initiative at Bennington College. The college and its Center for the Advancement of Public Action (CAPA) is in the second year of a three-year, $1 million grant effort to collaborate with local partners to address the systemic causes of food insecurity in Bennington County.

Megan Herrington, co-chair of the Bennington Hunger Council and District Director with the Vermont Department of Health, said the meeting was a visioning session. “The conversations from today and the work from today will provide the framework for priorities going forward,” she said.

Breakout discussions were held on the topics of food access, education and infrastructure.

Susan Sgorbati, the director of CAPA, led the breakout discussions on food infrastructure. One topic of these was the facility proposed for Shields Drive, which is in the Maneely Corporate Park in Bennington.

“Another [food infrastructure project] is the Shields Drive building, which has just been closed on in Bennington and will probably come on line within a year,” Sgorbati said. “This will have a community kitchen in it. But it’s mainly going to be a business that has to do with the distribution and production of food and marketing from farms in this whole region, going through Bennington and leaving. But they’re very committed to the food insecurity world as well.

“So how that connects, I think could be a conversation in the next couple months with those people who are opening the building and all of us,” she said, adding that it would be helpful “to have this conversation … before all these decisions are made about what’s going to happen inside that building.”

Scott Winslow, Hunger Council co-chair and executive director of Greater Bennington Interfaith Community Services Inc., said the project “has the potential for connecting the producers and the businesses and the food insecurity world all together.”

In notes in the packet for the March 8 Bennington Select Board meeting, Bennington Community Development Director Shannon Barsotti wrote that she was meeting with Assistant Town Manager and Planning Director Dan Monks and with the Regenerative Food Network “to review their plans for a food processing and distribution center on Shields Drive.”

Barsotti, who attended the March 9 food security meeting, said afterward that no written plans for the Shields Drive project had yet been submitted to the town.

A growing network

According to its website, the Regenerative Food Network aims to build what it calls a Good Food System. It defines this as “a regional, distributed network of independent but interconnected local food providers who agree to operate in a values-based, outcome-verified, and locally implemented manner.”

The network’s projects include Southshire Meats, launched in August 2020. The site describes this as “the first of our fully regenerative food brands, beginning with lamb and chicken. These animals play a daily part of the regenerative cycle of improving soil and crops at Studio Hill Farm, our partner and ally for a stronger regional food system.”

Studio Hill Farm is a regenerative farm located in Shaftsbury. Jesse McDougall, co-owner of the farm, and one of the people involved in the Shields Drive project, is an author, a public speaker, an accredited professional holistic management educator. McDougall was a guest faculty member at Bennington College for fall 2020, according to the college website.

In further partnership with Southshire Meats and Studio Hill, the Regenerative Food Network in December opened Higly Hill Processing in Wilmington, a meat and poultry processing plant.

Hogan Sennett, of Southshire Meats, said in a phone interview on Tuesday that the Regenerative Food Network will indeed be developing a facility in an existing building on Shields Drive. The project is very preliminary at this point and will be completed in stages. The first stage will involve meat processing serving farms in the region. The later two stages would include the type of storage and refrigeration capacity discussed at the Hunger Council meeting.

Sennett stressed the preliminary nature of the project at this point. “I’d hate to overpromise and underdeliver,” he said.

He said work on the facility might begin by the end of this year.

Survey farmers

Other ideas discussed under food infrastructure were to make Community Assistance Grants for organizations sustainable after the Mellon Grant runs out, possibly by putting them in the town budget or instituting a 1-percent tax fund, as was done in Dover.

Another idea is to survey farmers to see what would help them to connect with eaters who are food insecure. “I think really talking to farmers is a great suggestion,” Sgorbati said. “I don’t think that we have really surveyed all the farmers about what the best infrastructure would be for them.”

Sgorbati said the developers of the Putnam Block in downtown Bennington want a green grocer in the facility, but one hasn’t been chosen yet.

“There’s are a lot of people who would like that not to just be a high-end grocery but that it was really accessible to all people. It’s downtown, that’s a big tall order to ask from an economic model,” she said. “But since it hasn’t been chosen and we all have our networks, let’s all really make an effort to go out there and see if we can find somebody who might want to opening up a grocery store in the Putnam block that could be a different economic model that might work for Bennington.”

Better communication

In the food access breakout discussion led by Herrington, the consensus was that programs instituted to provide emergency food in Vermont during the COVID-19 pandemic had succeeded in making more food available.

But those present saw problems with communication about distribution times and also occasionally with an inadequate number of distribution slots available.

“Especially around all of the things going on, I get a lot of phone calls that people hear about things too late, especially like with the distribution boxes,” said Anna White, who works with people 60 and older at the Southern Vermont Council on Aging. “I think we have done such a good job of rising to the occasion and creating all of these things that are available, but for whatever reason, and I’m not sure what that is, a lot of my population doesn’t get the information necessarily in a timely manner.”

Participants discussed the limitations of social media advertising with an older age group. They mentioned such options as print, radio, and advertisements on public access television to get the word out.

Published at Wed, 17 Mar 2021 23:00:00 +0000