A former Queensbridge Houses resident is bringing fresh produce to his community.
Lashawn “Suga Ray” Marston, 40 operates the Community Food Hub program in the NYCHA housing project to address residents’ need for fresh, affordable produce.
Starting in 2023, Marston, who now resides in Astoria, Queens, partnered with Connected Chef to create the food hub. The hub offers free grocery boxes sourced from farms in upstate New York and surrounding states once a week. Connected Chef is a community-led non-profit distributing affordable local groceries to families in Queens, NY.
The Community Food Hub provides residents with 35 free grocery boxes based on a sign-up list that was established a year before the program’s start. If residents receiving the boxes do not use the service for four weeks, other residents on a waitlist take their place to receive the fresh produce.
In addition to the free boxes, the Community Food Hub offers a sliding-scale payment program where residents can pay what they can for up to 30 pounds of fresh produce. The fresh produce options change weekly and normally include potatoes, carrots, spinach, herbs, legumes and other options. Marston said the program combats systemic restriction of fresh produce.
“Something I’ve learned is that a food desert happens naturally. What’s happening in our communities is not a food desert. It’s food apartheid, because it’s a systemic restriction of fresh produce,” he said. Marston said that, in all actuality, Queensbridge residents live in a food swamp, a term he describes as an area oversaturated with fast, processed foods.
“Queensbridge has two Chinese restaurants, there are five delis, a Wingstop, Wendy’s, they’re about to open, a Little Caesars, there’s a chicken spot. There’s no good food, and even the supermarket in Queensbridge, sometimes you buy stuff from there, and it’s outdated when you buy it,” he said.
Marston, who is vegan, hosts other food-related initiatives, including a cooked vegan food giveaway coinciding with the Community Food Hub. Connected Chef purchases cooked vegan meals from local restaurant partners Urban Vegan Roots and The Migrant Kitchen to give away for free at the weekly event. Marston said he feels it is crucial to expose residents to healthy vegan food options, as he believes many Queensbridge residents are suffering from food-related illnesses.
“High blood pressure, diabetes, cancer, are the main things. People in Queensbridge have a high level of asthma. I’ve understood that food is medicine,” he said. He added that residents should think about how food is “impacting your cells, your organs, your mental function.”
In April, Marston and Connected Chef launched a farm stand for residents to purchase more produce on a sliding scale. The farm stand is available at Queensbridge on Thursdays, and the team also sells produce in a lot on 49th Avenue and 5th Street in Long Island City from Thursday to Saturday. Marston said some of the motivation behind the farmstand was understanding that the free produce baskets are not sustaining everyone in Queensbridge Houses.
“It may not even sustain the whole family for a week. So you can still purchase fresh fruits and vegetables, and we also sell some of the same stuff that we give out in the boxes, plus some more stuff,” he said. “Our whole motto is that everyone should have access to fresh, affordable produce. No one should leave hungry,” he said.
Connected Chef also hosts in-school food justice education programming with schools located in Jackson Heights and Corona. “We also provide free [produce] boxes. In Queensbridge, there are only 35 boxes a week, but through the schools and the [farm stand], we’re giving away around 100 for free every week,” he said.
Much of Marston’s motivation to provide fresh food to his community comes from his experiences. The food equity advocate grew up in Queensbridge and still has family living in the housing project.
Marston said his life changed in 2008 after his incarceration and the passing of his father and sister to cancer. “A lot of my family died from food-related illnesses, and just learning the impact that food has, not just on physical health, but on mental health, on behavior, on emotional wellness,” he said. Marston was compelled to help his community fight food insecurity over a decade before launching the current Food Hub program.
“In 2010, I would buy deli meats and stuff like that from the supermarket, and I would make sandwiches, and I would go through my neighborhood, or go on the train, and just see who was hungry,” he said. “I understood that hunger also drives emotional instability and could create more mental illness. So I just wanted to feed people,” he said.
By 2020, Marston was working for the U.S. Census Bureau. When the COVID-19 pandemic started, Marston started a food giveaway program at the Astoria Houses and later Ravenswood Houses and Queensbridge Houses, bringing together housing and food justice organizations, including Connected Chef, and representatives from the U.S. Census Bureau. This program was the catalyst for the creation of the Community Food Hub.
Marston said future goals for the Community Food Hub program include adding another weekday to service the program and opening the waitlist up to more Queensbridge residents.
Marston’s parting words: everyone deserves healthy food.
“You don’t have to settle for the BS food that they sell us, the fast food. You don’t have to live with illness. You can live healthy, even though you’re in the projects, even though you may be poor or close to it. You can still have a dignified life, and you deserve to,” he said.
