Hilltown Families 
Let Them Eat Pie! ❥ Tuesday Market Supporting Food Security.
Note 29, We Eat Pie for Good Purposes
Kids ages 13yo and younger interested in culinary arts and local food are invited to bake their favorite fruit pie using local ingredients to submit to the Tuesday Market annual Pie Contest happening on Tuesday, September 10th. ❥ Baking a pie is a great way for food-enthusiastic kids to learn and/or practice kitchen skills, including basic math and kitchen chemistry. Utilizing local foods (berries, apples, peaches, milk, butter, or maybe even local flour!) in a pie can also help to connect youth with the network of local food that surrounds them here in Western MA.
FoodStampsX2 is the brilliant brainchild of Ben James and Oona Coy, farmers (Town Farm) and farmers’ market managers (Tuesday Market) in Northampton (not to be confused with their brilliant children, Silas and Wiley). The idea was pretty simple: make sure that people could use their SNAP (food stamps) benefits at the Tuesday Market. Then, the idea got better: have the first ten dollars’ worth of benefits doubled at the market for those receiving SNAP benefits. The FoodStampsX2 represents win-win: local food to people that may struggle to afford it along with a boost of dollars to hardworking farmers growing food locally.
Enter Gina Hyams, my Berkshires friend (and extraordinary connector; it’s her superpower). Her Pie Contest in a Box inspired my son. The scene went like this:
My son Ezekiel, on couch, examining Pie Contest in a Box: “Let’s have a pie contest.”
Unattributed idea that belonged to one of us: “At the Tuesday Market.”
Me: “To raise money for FoodStampsX2.”
Ezekiel: “Typical.”
Tuesday September 10th, 2013 is the third annual Pie Contest at Tuesday Market to help raise money for FoodStampsX2…
I’ll be there, of course but it wouldn’t happen AT ALL without the amazing Oona Coy and Ben James and the generous farmers and the sponsors—from Steve Herrell (with some a la mode vanilla to share) to River Valley Market, GoBerry and Cornucopia to the judges, this year including State Representative Stephen Kulik.
Get baking, folks. You can read all the rules. Or you can just come to Tuesday Market to eat PIE.
But that’s not all…. This month, because we have so vastly increased the number of people participating in the program, we’ve launched an Indiegogo campaign to raise $15,000 toward our FoodStampsX2 Program. We had amazing help from Stephen Richardson, who made the film (via Landry Communications—with thanks for donating the time and use of equipment) and the Ephemeral String Band for the musical accompaniment in the film.
Watch. Give. Spread the word. Paradise will be even dreamier when we ensure that its bounty can be generously shared.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sarah is a writer, who lives in Northampton with her husband and four children. She contributes to Preview Massachusetts Magazine, as well as other publications and writes a parenting blog Standing in the Shadows at the Valley Advocate. She moved to the Valley to attend Hampshire College—and found the Valley such a nice place, she stayed!
[Photo credit: (ccl) Sarah R]
