The Farm Belly
We had the pleasure of speaking with Meg Fama, who is the owner and head chef of The Farm Belly of New Haven county, a catering company that uses seasonal and local produce to create custom menus and meals. Interestingly enough, she has no traditional culinary school education. What she does have is life experience growing up learning how to cook with her grandmother, and using an abundance of fresh ingredients from her father’s garden. She can specifically remember the ripe tomatoes of summer being made into tomato sauce that could be frozen and used during the cold winter months. The lessons that she learned as a child have stayed with her throughout her life.
Meg has always put emphasis on local and seasonal produce in her work, and she has cultivated relationships with farmers all over Connecticut to make this possible. Farmers will often call her up when they have a surplus of crops because they know she will be able to make good use of them. Other times, one farm may not have all of the ingredients that she needs to create her meals, and she’ll have to make up the deficit at another location. This requires her to get creative, lean on the relationships that she has, and work with the ebb and flow of nature. The uncertainty has allowed her to thrive, and this is what she loves the most.
Even in tough times, she has been able to remain successful. When COVID-19 came to our country and we were forced to shut down, she continued to receive catering requests for her fresh and local meals. In addition, many farmers that she has nurtured relationships with over the past few decades experienced a boom in interest and sales as commercial grocery store shelves cleared. The virus has stoked a shift in consumer behavior through it’s lessons on the importance of giving our bodies the best possible defense we can against such threats. It has forced us to take a look at our eating habits, and make more conscious choices about what we put into our bodies. Do we favor packaged and processed foods over fresh, local, delicious ingredients? I want to believe the majority of people would favor the latter.
But what about those who simply don’t have access to fresh local produce? We posed the question to Meg about food access in urban and suburban communities and what can be done to improve the situation, to which she replied, “there is just not as much land available for farming. We have to get creative with the way we utilize space”. At the moment urban and suburban communities have to rely mainly on imported foods, even as they generally come with unwanted stipulations. More often than not bulk produce that is imported has been grown with GMO seeds, sprayed with pesticides, and harvested before fully ripe to make it across the country without spoiling. COVID-19 further stressed this system that these communities rely on as labor intensive food processing plants, producers, and distributors had to pivot and make adjustments to their operation practices due to the virus. The delay in receiving produce combined with a high stress situation, it seems the processed foods were cleared off the shelves faster than anything else, except maybe toilet paper.
Not only do we need to get creative with space, such as building gardens on rooftops of apartments or commercial buildings, or having more small community supported gardens, we also need to educate people on optimal food choices and give them the opportunity to make that choice for themselves. With more people like Meg focusing on fresh and local produce and supporting farms, hopefully we can eventually get to a place where more people see the value in such things, while simultaneously improving the level access. Meg will be in business for 6 years this coming July, 2021, and we are hoping to see a restaurant of hers in the near future.