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By CHRIS LARABEE

Just over a month since Healthy Incentives Program (HIP) benefits were cut by a minimum of 50%, local businesses and advocates for the initiative are hopeful that it will be restored, as farmers, vendors and stores are seeing the effects of reduced benefits.

By MADISON SCHOFIELD

SHELBURNE — As the West County Food Pantry’s funding sources shift, the Selectboard is exploring the possibility of allocating funding and potentially asking voters to appropriate funds during Annual Town Meeting.

By MARA MELLITS

For Patricia, a farmworker in Hampshire and Franklin counties, a typical day in the growing season starts at 4 a.m. A single mother who immigrated to the United States from El Salvador in 2003, she drops her child off at a babysitter’s house before going to work. She often doesn’t pick up the child until 6 or 7 p.m., or sometimes even later if she stays to pick vegetables.

By TINKY WEISBLAT

January is National Soup Month. This designation makes perfect sense to me. When the weather turns cold, as it often does at this time of year, I can sip and serve soup at any hour of the day or night.Last week I prepared one of my favorite hearty...

By MADISON SCHOFIELD

SHELBURNE FALLS — With the towns of Shelburne and Buckland shifting the focus of their Community Development Block Grants to housing, the West County Food Pantry operated by Community Action Pioneer Valley will be facing a $50,000 budget deficit and...

By DOMENIC POLI

GREENFIELD — Health New England has awarded $50,000 to Stone Soup Café, the only Franklin County entity to receive funds in this round of a grant program that was set up to honor the former president and CEO of Baystate Health and chair of Health New...

NORTHFIELD — While the Northfield Kiwanis Club has organized its Holiday Craft Fair and Raffle for decades each December, this year marked the first time in memory where the group partnered not only with Northfield Elementary School and its...

By EVELINE MACDOUGALL

Stepping into an animal enclosure after dusk on Friday the 13th, I moved slowly among feathery shapes that appeared grey in December’s early darkness. The full moon, low in the sky, was the only light source; the atmosphere was eerie and wholly...

By MADISON SCHOFIELD

GREENFIELD — Serving up holiday spirit, members of the Greenfield Elks Lodge delivered 50 boxes of food on Saturday to residents in need of a Christmas dinner. “It’s part of what we all do around here — it’s an organization that donates to charity,”...

By DOMENIC POLI

GREENFIELD — Real Pickles, a worker-owned cooperative specializing in organic, fermented foods, has bought the 311 Wells St. building it has called home since 2009.The local company bought the property from business founders Dan Rosenberg and Addie...

By TINKY WEISBLAT

“You don’t have to have a big, fancy family tree, just some really nice stories,” Becky Baxter Clark of Deerfield recently told me. “Those are the ones that the kids remember.”Becky herself has a lot of family stories. She recently shared some of them...

By TINKY WEISBLAT

I recently put out a call on Facebook for local folks who have beloved holiday food traditions. I received a lot of responses, some of which will appear in this paper in the weeks and years to come.Jeanne Douillard of Greenfield remembers both...

By CHRIS LARABEE

GREENFIELD — More products and facility upgrades will be coming to the Western Massachusetts Food Processing Center, as the Franklin County Community Development Corporation has reeled in two separate grants.The Franklin County CDC was awarded a...

By MADISON SCHOFIELD

GREENFIELD — There’s just a few days left to purchase a ticket for the seventh annual “Taste of the Towns” restaurant raffle to support the Greenfield Public Library. Tickets will be drawn on Saturday, Dec. 7, and the winners of the $1,200 in...

By TINKY WEISBLAT

Sometimes the introductory essays I write for this column seem at first to have nothing to do with food. I promise that if you read patiently, you’ll get a recipe at the end of this one.A couple of months ago, as I was giving a talk to a library about...

By CHRIS LARABEE

DEERFIELD — With folks confined to their homes in the early days of the pandemic, but still looking for local produce, Julia Coffey and her team at Mycoterra Farm branched out to bring products to their doors in the form of Mass Food Delivery.While...

By DOMENIC POLI

Want to break bread without breaking up the family this Thanksgiving? Try leaving politics at the door.This month’s presidential election was particularly polarizing and the internet is rife with stories of people planning to skip holiday gatherings...

By ANTHONY CAMMALLERI

Leading a roughly 100-person crowd across a two-day, 43-mile trek from Springfield to Greenfield, NEPM radio host Christopher “Monte” Belmonte raised more than $572,000 to end hunger during the 15th annual March for the Food Bank.Belmonte, dressed as...

By DOMENIC POLI

GILL — For the sixth consecutive year, members of the Thomas Memorial Golf & Country Club in Turners Falls and the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office TRIAD Program gathered to assemble 150 boxes of food for people in need on Monday — albeit in a new...