Balanced on a swivel chair in her bright, airy Chelsea office, Ruth Katz sorts files between mouthfuls of soba noodle soup. As executive director of Just Food, the nonprofit organization she co-founded in 1994, it is her fundraising skills that keep salaries paid and the lights on. Katz owes her accountant a budget and her most generous donors a report on a recent conference. Only the hundreds of vegetable seed packets spilling from two giant sacks just outside her office door signal that Katz’s real ambition is to reinvent the New York City food system, one neighborhood at a time.

Just Food addresses two stubborn social problems—the lack of access to fresh, healthy food for low-income people and the disappearance of small family farms—through one innovative program known as community-supported agriculture, or CSA. A CSA is a food-buying club that links an individual farmer with a New York City neighborhood in a relationship that benefits both the supplier and the buyer. The CSA concept offers farmers a secure, predictable source of income. In return, the CSA members receive fresh, organic produce from a local farm at a reasonable price.

CSA’s first appeared in rural communities in the United States more than 15 years ago. But it was Just Food that recognized a few years later that low-income people in urban environments have the greatest need of access to farm-fresh food. Recent studies link poverty to poor nutrition, obesity, and disease, making the group’s mission seem doubly urgent.

Katz’s organization has an outsized reputation among food activists—despite a paid staff of just three people and an annual budget of about $350,000. Robert Gottlieb, a professor of urban and environmental policy at Occidental College recently applauded Just Food in Newsday. He cited its ability to “combine environmental, health, nutrition, transportation and poverty issues as part of its organizing approach, breaking out of the traditional definitions that have often pigeonholed groups and issues.” Katz shares the credit with Kristy Apostolides, 26, who manages the CSA program, and Kathleen McTigue, also 26, who directs the complementary City Farms program. Just Food depends on a network of volunteers, including eight AmeriCorps interns known as Vistas, who help launch new projects in low-income neighborhoods city-wide.

“We don’t just look at food from the low-income access angle, or the nutrition angle, or the farmers’ angle,” said McTigue. “We try to represent and understand all those different angles, and bring those groups to the table.”

Just Food works by forming partnerships. To date, they have sponsored 33 CSA’s in New York City. They estimate that one in 2,000 city residents eats food from a CSA. Each group is a self-sufficient entity created by a farmer and his customers—if Just Food disappeared tomorrow, the CSA’s would still continue. The first groups started in traditionally affluent neighborhoods, attracting middle-class families looking for pesticide-free food. Today Just Food focuses on bringing CSA to low-income areas: their most successful groups rely on a base of affluent members who subsidize the cost for less comfortable neighbors.

On a chilly Saturday in early March, Katz convened a meeting of regional farmers and their urban customers in an auditorium at Columbia Teacher’s College. Bill Halsey, a wiry, bearded farmer in blue plaid flannel, who grows vegetables on Green Thumb Organic Farm in Water Mill, New York, showed up to meet Katz and some of the 180 members from his Cobble Hill, Brooklyn CSA. Halsey represents the twelfth generation of his family to farm on the East End of Long Island.

A veteran of farm stands and farmers’ markets, Halsey is now a committed CSA farmer. Every Tuesday from June to December, Halsey, or one of his crew, drives the Green Thumb truck loaded with organic vegetables and flowers into the city. A volunteer helps him to unload the lettuces, squashes, or herbs picked that morning and then the farmer heads back home. Members collect their shares in the early evening; each receives an equal amount of the week’s crops, usually seven to ten different vegetables.

This spring each CSA member will pay Halsey a $377 annual fee—which amounts to about $13 a week—to purchase their share of the Green Thumb harvest. Members contract to take whatever the farm season supplies. If giant horn worms decimate the tomatoes, or scorching June weather ruins the lettuces, Halsey’s members understand that they suffer the loss along with their farmer.

The benefit of CSA to farmers is clear—members pay for their share long before the growing season starts, generating interest-free capital to purchase seeds, repair machinery, and pay wages. Farmers understand what the Just Food model offers them. Katz got a typical reaction from a Wisconsin farmer recently. “His eyes just lit up,” she said. “He was so excited to hear about the role of city members, so farmers don’t need to be bothered with collecting funds. It’s a good way for the consumers to take some responsibility for agriculture.”

Concepts like responsibility, fairness and justice punctuated Katz’s conversation when I met her for a pancake breakfast one morning before work. She is slim and youthful at 44, with rich brown hair and a bright smile. She wore a favorite green turtleneck sweater that complimented her hazel eyes. She was passionate about Just Food’s mission and articulate about the practical results of her programs. It was easy to see why grant-givers are persuaded that Just Food is worth funding.

Colleagues and friends report that Katz’s ability to lead an organization like Just Food is rooted in her optimism about the possibility for social change and a remarkable tolerance for those who are less romantic. Katz herself connects her attraction to the nonprofit world to her childhood in Chicago. “When you’re a kid, you have a strong sense of what’s fair and what’s not fair,” Katz said. Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968 made a strong impression on her. Two years later, Katz’s father, Melvin, passed away, a decade after he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. She added, “I think some of these things converging politicized me at a very young age.”

Katz studied political science at Carleton College in Minnesota and then went to Africa with the Peace Corps. A two-year tour in Gabon focused her attention on sustainable development and agriculture. On a break, she visited a friend teaching in a Kenyan village in 1984, the year when East Africa came to the world’s attention because of the Ethiopian famine.

“Students were starting to not come to class because they were hungry and they couldn’t concentrate, and there was a lot of begging,” Katz remembered. Yet she believed that the drought wasn’t entirely responsible for the hunger she saw. While food crops shriveled in the field, some pockets of well-watered land were still lush and green—and planted with tea, a cash crop grown for export.

Katz explained, “That was part of . . . the World Bank structural-adjustment policy, to encourage Kenya to . . . export goods so they could have capital to build the country. Obviously that does not affect villagers. So it was pretty heartbreaking to see with your own eyes what policy actually does to people.” Some might argue that the World Bank policy would ultimately help Kenyan villagers, but in Katz’ view, an agricultural policy that yielded hunger was misguided.

She returned to the United States and enrolled in a master’s program in International Development and Social Change at Clark University. She studied the mixed results of the “Green Revolution” for Africans—and for Americans. “Modern agriculture hasn’t really worked very well for us in a lot of ways,” Katz explained. New pesticides and fertilizers increased crop yields for some farmers but degraded the environment.

In 1988, Katz moved to New York City to search for a job with an international development organization. She found freelance work reviewing grant proposals for philanthropic foundations. An application from the Northeast Organic Farming Association captured her attention and she started attending NOFA events.

“People would ask me where my farm was,” Katz recalled of the meetings. “Everybody else was a farmer. I was definitely a fish out of water, but just loving it. I would just sit and listen and try to understand, and that’s where I learned about what was going on here.”

Katz found herself in the middle of the sustainable agriculture movement. By the early 1990’s, the movement united activists looking for alternatives to conventional, pesticide-dependent farming and groups alarmed about the loss the regional food system. She befriended Kathy Lawrence, another transplanted Midwesterner who worked for the New York Sustainable Agriculture Working Group (NYSAWG).

Ten years ago, Lawrence and Katz sat down with other activists to develop a similar working group for New York City. The result was Just Food. Lawrence became the new organization’s executive director and is widely credited with Just Food’s initial success. She developed the CSA program in 1996 and added the pivotal low-income outreach component in 1999. By October 2000, when Lawrence left Just Food to lead the National Campaign for Sustainable Agriculture, a federal policy advocacy group, both of Just Food’s flagship programs, CSA and City Farms, were in place.

Meanwhile, Katz had become an accomplished fundraiser for nonprofit organizations. The Just Food board invited her to become interim director and hired her full time in December 2000. “By the end of the two months, I realized that it wasn’t a part-time job, it was a full-time job,” Katz recalled. “I didn’t realize it was two or three full-time jobs.”

Ten years after Just Food’s founding, Katz believes the original goals of the organization are increasingly relevant: “We want to help save our region’s family farms, we want to have high-quality, fresh produce available for all New York City people, regardless of income,” she said. “We want to educate the New York City public about the issues that they can get involved in by voting with their food dollars.”

Education is a critical part of the CSA experience. “Realizing that food grows on a farm is one thing, and then actually wanting to support a farm is another,” said Apostolides, the CSA program director. Prospective members often don’t understand why they need to pay upfront for their share, but they get it once they meet their farmer.

Most New Yorkers join CSA’s initially because they want organic vegetables at a reasonable price. Freshness sells shares. Jeanne Bergman, of the West Village CSA, tells prospective members: “You haven’t had a rutabaga like this since you left the old country—even if the old country was Brooklyn.”

Just Food encourages their CSA’s to seek out low-income members, especially groups that need fresh, nutritious vegetables like the elderly and HIV-positive men and women. Apostolides helps organizers make their CSA affordable through sliding-scale share fees and installment payment plans. So far, 18 CSA’s offer reduced price shares specifically for low-income members; many also accept food stamps.

By all accounts, making CSA work for low-income members tests Just Food’s mission; it requires an incredible amount of work. Susannah Pasquantonio, a member of the Hudson Guild CSA in Chelsea, stressed the amount of time and effort it takes to reach out beyond their traditional CSA membership. Each spring, CSA organizers visit Chelsea senior centers, go to housing authority meetings, post flyers and knock on doors. Pasquantonio said, “It takes a lot of work and a lot of follow up. People are not sure about paying a lump sum. It’s risky for [low-income] people.”

Just Food has founded CSAs in some of New York’s most impoverished neighborhoods, including East New York, Red Hook, Washington Heights and Harlem. “We’ve been focusing a lot on the South Bronx,” said Apostolides, “because of the severe poverty that’s up there and the lack of food, good food at least. There are a lot of fast food joints in that area.” Once Just Food attracts a host community group, they match them with a Vista intern who helps find a farmer, recruit members, and set up the payment structures that will allow low-income members to participate.

Debora Greig, a recent graduate of Vassar College, works with the St. Benedict the Moor community center in the Mott Haven section of the Bronx. Their prospective members are exactly the ones that Just Food is trying to reach through CSA. “Most, if not all, are on assistance and food stamps—or are falling through the cracks and need emergency food” from soup kitchens and food pantries, said Greig. “There’s a real need for fresh, good food. In the pantry you get a lot of sugary things and things you have to fry.”

A few days after the March conference, I joined Bill Halsey in a Queens neighborhood facing similar nutritional issues. Halsey had driven his ancient, hard-used blue Ford minivan to the Two Coves section of Astoria. Mark Sweeney, a Just Food facilitator, and several community representatives wanted to talk to him about starting a CSA for their neighborhood, a virtual “food desert.” Several large housing projects shelter a population of senior citizens and mothers with young children but there is no supermarket; small stores sell expensive packaged foods. However, it seemed anything but certain that the Two Coves CSA would get started this year—even weekly share payments of $10 would need to be heavily subsidized by community charities.

Gail Harris, the director of the Two Coves Community Redevelopment Program, worried about attracting sixty members able to afford ten dollars a week for the entire 20-week season. She suspected that local residents would rather use their food stamps for meat, milk, and bread, not Halsey’s vegetables. “In this neighborhood, in terms of commitment, you’re not going to get a commitment,” she explained to Halsey.

Halsey nodded, “Yeah, they’re very low income.”

Harris continued, “But you can get a key group: I’ve got the charities, the Church, Goodwill, the environmental center, I think that’s do-able.”

Denise Dollard, the outreach coordinator of a local Catholic parish food pantry, jumped in: “I don’t follow you on that. Are you saying that we’re paying and the people are picking up for free?”

Harris hesitated. “Let’s say, for example, that we’ve a sliding-fee scale, let’s say maybe they contribute five dollars and maybe I will contribute 15 dollars. That would make 20 dollars, ten and ten.” She paused. “Some of our families don’t have money. They just don’t have the money. They don’t have jobs. We want to make sure they get something.”

Dollard turned to Halsey: “I understand this is your living but I think it’s very expensive. You gotta realize that it’s double the price of what I thought it was going to be coming in. And that’s not your problem, that’s our problem because of this neighborhood.”

The meeting adjourned after everyone agreed that it was too soon to sign a contract with Halsey. Katz understands and it sympathetic to the issues raised by Dollard and other anti-hunger activists. She said, “[They] are rightly concerned that people are having a hard time making ends meet, but we pay less for food in this country than anywhere in the world. We shouldn’t be looking at that as a place to make cuts: we should be looking at better wages.” Katz acknowledges that nutrition education is an essential component of CSA: low-income people have to want the food that farmers like Halsey can provide.

Later I asked Halsey about the prospects for a Two Coves CSA. “You gotta be a little bit flexible,” he told me. “But you know the farmer can’t be subsidizing the impoverished in America, as much as we would like to. We’re only a step away from impoverishment ourselves.” He laughed wryly, adding, “I mean we’re the low man on the food chain now, we’re producing it, and I think there are other groups that should step forward and help with the nutritional needs of the country.”

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