Farmers and food producers on the East End have a new ally in their corner; East End Food recently named Marci Moreau as its new executive director. Moreau brings more than 20 years of experience in the food, nonprofit and health sectors to the table.
Moreau has a personal mission to promote the holistic connection between food and health. One of her daughters had a rare form of leukemia at two years old and needed a bone marrow transplant. Moreau embarked on a journey to find what diet would ease this process. Sometime later, her husband was diagnosed with cancer himself, and she redoubled her efforts to understand how food and nutrition could contribute to both physical and mental health. “Using high quality, optimally nutritional food has a direct correlation on mental health. This is what we are doing here, and what we are doing for communities will have a direct correlation on how well people are physically and mentally,” said Moreau.
East End Food’s stated mission is to support, promote and advocate for farmers and producers while ensuring everyone has access to local food, and they are undertaking a number of initiatives to fulfill it. Most people are familiar with the farmers market, which may be the most visible project. There is also East End CRAFT, which stands for Collaborative Regional Alliance for Farmer Training, a grant-funded partnership with local farmers to help them farm more effectively and sustainably. Another service is food production, where kitchen facilities are available to famers and food producers to make finished products from their raw materials. There is also help available for labeling and packaging.
“The mission of East End food is sounds pretty simple on paper, but it’s much richer and more complex as we execute it. What we are trying to do at East End food is really build a sustainable and resilient kind of food system for everybody,” Moreau said.
The theme of East End Food’s fundraising campaign for this summer is “The Power of Food,” an idea that resonates strongly with Moreau. One of the columns she writes even shares the same name. “I have what I call my guiding mantra, and it’s ‘using food to power the body and mind.’ And I also want to extend that and say using food to power communities, and that’s what we hope to do at East End food,” said Moreau.
Funds raised through this campaign will go towards completing the East End Food Hub. This complex will feature a shared commercial kitchen, a year-round farmers market, education space, and a local food storefront.
Moreau is looking forward to the opening of the space. “It’s going to allow us to have a much more efficient commercial kitchen so we can help more of our food processors in the area, more of our farmers. We’ll have a really nice, big, large educational space that will also have a local food storefront. So we’ll be able to let all our food producers have a space to sell their products as well. It will help us even facilitate more educational workshops, get out there and help the community, help the local schools, increase access to food.”
The impact of COVID is still reverberating throughout many of the institutions people rely on for both necessities and community, something East End Food hopes to address. They hope to build a sustainable system to help farmers and food producers continue to be profitable. “The way we see it is COVID made what we do at East End Food even more significant and important, because on the whole, I think future of this food economy is being threatened, and we need to ensure that it can be sustained.”