Sustainable CAPE's Harvest Highlights: A Win-Win for Everyone Involved
“It’s a little like the TV show where they give you ingredients and you figure out [what to] make,” says Eliza McFeely. She’s talking about the fresh produce Truro Community Kitchen (TCK) receives from Sustainable CAPE through its Harvester Highlights program. “It keeps us inventive.”
Sustainable CAPE launched Harvester Highlights, entering its fifth year, to encourage the awareness and purchase of local food. Using funds from a Massachusetts Department of Agricultural Resources grant, private funding, and business sponsorships, the organization purchases fresh produce from different Cape Cod growers at full market value and donates it to soup kitchens in Provincetown, Truro and Orleans throughout the year. This gives growers business they likely would not have during their slow season and increases access to healthy foods for area residents who might not be able to get it otherwise. “Paying farmers a fair wage for their product while leveraging private and government funds to increase the supply of local food on Cape Cod benefits everyone,” says Sustainable CAPE’s founding director, Francie Randolph.
Taking into consideration what the program’s harvesters grow, and what they are able to produce at a given time of year, Sustainable CAPE identifies each month’s highlighted ingredient. Typically, these range from salad and sauté greens to mushrooms, root vegetables and eggs. “We try to shift between people and purchase as much as we can,” Randolph says. Geographically, the farmers are spread from Brewster (Chatham Bars Inn Farm, which sells vegetables and sometimes donates them when they have a surplus) to Truro.
Arin Hirst, of Sketchy Greenhouse in Orleans, has been a Harvester Highlights collaborator since 2021, providing salad and sauté greens. “Most small farmers in my similar scale and age could probably use a little more consistency,” says the 34-year-old Orleans native, who grows outdoors at Putnam Community Farm in his hometown and also grows microgreens in a Truro greenhouse. “It would be great if there were more programs just like [Harvester Highlights] where we get basically farmers’ market prices.”
“It’s a real win-win for my farm,” says Dave DeWitt of Dave’s Greens in Truro. “For this program to be able to offer us a real, viable wage for our produce sings out. We can grow some volume as far as poundage and get really fairly paid for that poundage. That’s the bottom line for me.”
DeWitt, who helped establish Sustainable CAPE with Randolph, grows a wide range of vegetables on five-plus acres at two locations outdoors and more than 38,000 square feet of greenhouses. But he is most well-known for his salad mix, which he grows for Harvester Highlights. “My salad mix is easy enough to plan ahead to get out even if it’s the shoulder season or the dead of winter,” he says. “I could extend my season if I needed to. As long as I have about 45 days’ notice, I can get a crop out to them.”
“It’s so incredible to have fresh and local food,” says Robert Sweetman, a member of the Soup Kitchen in Provincetown (SKIP) board of directors. “The chef loves getting it and incorporating it into our menu.” For SKIP, the benefits of Harvester Highlights are threefold, Sweetman says: It “increases the deliciousness of our meals because it’s fresh and local; makes our diners aware of farmers; and saves our budget for other things.”
SKIP serves a hot, nutritious mid-day meal with homemade soup, salad, an entrée, dessert and fruit Monday through Friday from November through April at the Provincetown United Methodist Church. Sweetman says the soups are always stars, boosted by winter produce SKIP receives through Harvester Highlights. “Last year we got mushrooms [from Uli’s Mushrooms], which were amazing.” The chef featured them in “the most delicious mushroom soup.” Pea shoots, from Out There Organics in Truro, went into salad and a stir fry. On Fridays, Sweetman explains, the kitchen often features Chinese dishes. In April, every diner went home with a half-dozen eggs from Wellfleet Chick Koop, that month’s ingredient.
In addition to the weekday lunches, volunteers pack a separate meal on Fridays for clients to have at home over the weekend. During the 2023-24 season, SKIP served 26,000 meals, or roughly 1,000 per week – up 15% from the last few years. The organization employs a full-time chef and part-time dishwasher for six months of the year, an office manager full-time for six months and part-time for the rest of the year, and has about 100 volunteers. Sweetman explains that along with providing meals, the organization tries to create a sense of community. “It can be isolating on the Cape in the wintertime,” he notes. “But there’s also islands of people doing food work.”
With the meals, SKIP works to inform diners about the origins of the food they are eating, calling attention to the local items that have been donated and how they are incorporated into different dishes. Sustainable CAPE helps, publishing a monthly newsletter for its recipient organizations to distribute. Each month the newsletter highlights the farmers whose food was used to make the meal(s) and includes nutritional information about the featured produce item, as well as information on how to access free and discounted fruits and vegetables through the Nutrition Incentive programs it funds. In April, SKIP’s final month of the season, Jackie Optiz, Sustainable CAPE’s Harvest Highlights coordinator, came to talk to diners about the summer farmers’ markets and the Nutrition Incentive programs available there during the summer months. “I really love Sustainable CAPE,” Sweetman says. “It’s a really wonderful organization, providing these foods, and we just love figuring out when they’re coming and what we’re going to make that week. It’s fun.”
TCK’s McFeely says, “It’s always lovely to have fresh produce to give to our clients.” As in Provincetown, Uli’s mushrooms are a coveted ingredient. Recently, “The cooks used them to make a stroganoff. It was outrageous.”
The Truro-based nonprofit was founded by part-time residents David and Wendy Sobel and their son Eli in April 2020 in response to needs that became apparent during the early days of the pandemic. Every Tuesday, in the kitchen of the Christian Union Church, a core group of six or seven volunteer cooks prepares and packages roughly 120 meals, down from a Covid-high of 180-190. Volunteer drivers deliver them to households that have registered for the service. Recently the organization shifted from using brown paper bags to reusable bags and containers. “We’re very proud of that,” McFeely says.
Each meal includes a hearty entrée with sides, a salad, a sandwich and fruit. Often Bagel Hound in Wellfleet donates bagels, too. McFeely estimates that for some elderly clients, there is probably a couple of days’ worth of food in every bag.
“We work on a small enough scale that it’s like cooking for friends,” McFeely says. Sometimes she and her fellow cooks work from recipes, but usually the crew creates their own dishes. Peruvian pork stew with poblano chilis was a recent standout.
Donations from Sustainable CAPE help TCK save money and fulfill its dual mission. “Feeding people is the main thing we do, but we are working on creating community,” McFeely says. “I love the idea that we’re also bolstering local agriculture. In a way, we’re connecting people who live here with people who farm here.”
Lower Cape Lunch (LOCAL), in Orleans, prepares meals weekly for its 95 clients. The nonprofit gets most of its food from Greater Boston Food Bank once a month and stores it in a freezer. “We have to take what we can get,” says Eleanor Winch, one of five volunteer cooks, “which is why we so appreciate Sustainable CAPE.” Local salad and sauté greens, mushrooms and more allow the organization to stretch out their offerings and improve the quality and diversity of the meals they offer.
As a classic example of the program’s win-win for providers and recipients, some of those greens come from Sketchy Greenhouse, usually in May when Hirst often has a surplus of cool season greens like kale and arugula. He says, “It’s always been nice to have a big sale scheduled in” at the end of his slow season, when most local farmers’ markets have yet to get going. And he explains that not a lot of the state’s funding for food insecurity has gone directly to farmers. “Harvester Highlights is a good example of how it can be directly disseminated and used most efficiently to maintain local food systems.”
For most of its history, LOCAL served lunch on Tuesdays and dinner on Thursdays. During Covid the group transitioned to a grab-and-go format, with delivery available for homebound clients. On Mondays, a crew of volunteer cooks prepares the week’s meals in the kitchen at St. Joan of Arc Catholic Church in Orleans. On Tuesdays, a second set of volunteers arrives at the church kitchen to pack the meals. Sometimes they also do last-minute cooking, like boiling pasta. Clients all receive one bag with two meals. Each meal contains soup or salad, an entrée, bread or roll and a simple dessert, like cookies. Recent offerings included boneless pork chop with apple compote and mashed vegetables and baked fish with rice and salad.
“When we get mushrooms, we’re able to produce something that’s more upscale,” Winch says. “This year we used them in a beef stroganoff. While that’s not particularly upscale, for many of the people we’re serving, they wouldn’t do that for themselves. We try to give them something that’s a little bit different than what they can easily cook for themselves.”
Sometimes Sustainable CAPE includes recipes featuring highlighted ingredients in the newsletters or distributes them at their related Harvest Highlights Workshops. This series, in which local farmers, chefs, nutritionists and herbalists share their knowledge – sometimes with cooking demos – is designed to offer creative education while focusing on a monthly local crop. Sessions are held at outer Cape libraries, and each year has its own twist. The first featured farmer videos; the second, events exploring local food as a community. The next two years focused on meeting participating farmers, then local chefs cooking with local ingredients. This year’s theme is sharing cultural heritage through traditional foodways.
The series offers another way to show area residents the many ways in which, as Randolph says, “Food, place and our bodies are all linked. If we take care with land and water and plants and the health of our bodies, that is taking care of our community.”
Andrea Pyenson has been a food writer and editor for more than 20 years, contributing to publications including The Boston Globe, Edible Boston, The Washington Post and Fine Cooking. She was co-author of three cookbooks with chef Andy Husbands and his barbecue teammate, Chris Hart, an editor of the Boston Globe’s New England Seafood Cookbook. Andrea divides her time between Truro and Newton.
For information about Harvesters Highlights and other programs Sustainable CAPE offers, visit: sustainablecape.org
