For one of the wealthiest states in the country, there certainly is an awful lot of food insecurity in Massachusetts. By one estimate, 1 in 3 residents here experienced food insecurity just last year, and with federal funding to food assistance programs in limbo, that number will most certainly grow.
On this week’s Joy Beat, we’re spotlighting a local business that’s doing something about it. In just the last three months, Seven Hills Pasta, a Boston-based artisanal pasta company, has donated more than 4,400 pounds of high-quality pasta to food banks and community college pantries.
Giulio Caperchi is the founder of both Seven Hills Pasta and the Agro-Eco Project. As they put it:
“Our main mission here at the Agro-Eco Project is to produce healthy food, fruits and vegetables that we then donate to the food pantries that serve our community here in Central Massachusetts. What we’re trying to do is include perennial vegetables within the annual vegetable donations we do weekly and bi-weekly.”
It’s a simple but powerful idea: buy produce from small farms, donate it to food banks and help fight hunger while building a more equitable food system.
Giulio joined GBH’s All Things Considered host Arun Rath in-studio to share more about this journey. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of their conversation.
Arun Rath: For people who haven’t heard of Seven Hills Pasta or the Agro-Eco Project, give us the rundown. How did it all get started?
Giulio Caperchi: The project of Seven Hill Pasta and the Agro-Eco project started out of a passion for food that I’ve had throughout my whole life. I was born and raised in Italy, and —
Rath: You like to feed people.
Caperchi: I love to feed people, and most importantly, my grandmother loved to feed people — what in Italy we call “la nonna.” My nonna had a small plot of land just north of Rome, and she used to have a small vegetable garden and some chickens and some pigs, and she just instilled from a very young age a love for growing food and preparing delicious food through organic practices — you know, without pesticides and synthetic fertilizers — that would go on and feed the whole extended family. That’s kind of where the original passion for growing healthy food and preparing fantastic dishes came.
Around 2015, when I moved to the United States with my wife, Carol, who is a Shrewsbury, Massachusetts native, we started Seven Hills [Pasta]. We saw a small niche in the market: no one was doing dry pasta products. There’s many fresh pasta companies out there — fantastic companies that have been making fresh pasta for a very long time, but no one’s doing it dry and shelf stable.
In 2015, my wife and I imported pasta machines from Italy and started Seven Hills Pasta. The name “Seven Hills” refers to the Seven Hills of Rome, which is where I was born. In parallel, we also bought a small, eight-acre farm out in Rutland — tomatoes, eggplants, zucchinis — and turning them all into value-added products to sell at farmers’ markets.
Slowly, the pasta company became more successful, and we had to kind of specialize in the production of high-quality, artisanal, bronze-extruded and slowly air-dried pasta. We decided to divide the two. The farm would become a very small nonprofit, and the pasta shop became more of a wholesale producer of pasta.
We changed the name of the farm to the Agro-Eco Project. Agroecology is a type of farming practice originating mostly with the indigenous communities in Latin America, throughout the Andes and in Central America. We’re trying to farm with nature as opposed to farming in the extractivist, industrial, very damaging farming that is widespread all over the world.
Our farm is also no-till; we’re not releasing carbon, and we’re very proud of those practices that we’ve put into place. All of the produce grown on the farm is donated to local food pantries. It makes us very proud to deliver high-quality produce.
Rath: Tell us more about the Agro-Eco Project and its mission.
Caperchi: The Agro-Eco Project has three main aims.
The first one, of course, is: Let’s bang out vegetables in high quantities, grown in the most sustainable way possible and bring them to food pantries. The second aim has an educational aspect to it — farm tours, farmer-to-farmer series — where we talk about the type of agriculture that we practice. The last one is the culinary [aspect], which links back to the pasta shop and the love of preparing great food.
We really like to position ourselves in between growing healthy food and preparing delicious food. For example, when we do our donation bags that go out, you might get a head of lettuce, five tomatoes, some potatoes that we all grow, and we’ll also put in a recipe card with tips and tricks, little hacks that you can do to make healthy meals at home with the produce you’ll receive.
Rath: That’s awesome. I love the educational aspect of it. And I understand there’s another branch of this — tell us about the Greater Table Initiative and how it works.
Caperchi: The Greater Table Initiative works by purchasing food, especially when we’re not in production, from a local food hub. The food hub aggregates it, and we can purchase from them. They have, in turn, purchased from local farms and artisans, and we especially use it for augmenting the produce selection in the winter when we are lacking because we’re not growing, especially with eggs, meat and sometimes dairy as well.
Through Seven Hills Pasta and the Agro-Eco [Project], the next initiative is scaling us up to the Greater Table Initiative. We started talks with the Greater Boston Food Bank to do a $20,000 pilot program to go out and purchase local produce and products from local farms to then be redistributed to the communities in need in Eastern Massachusetts.
That comes on top of the ongoing food relief efforts that we help the Greater Boston Food Bank with. Since April, we have donated over 4,000 pounds of [pasta]. By the time our last donation goes out, we will have donated almost 10,000 pounds of pasta — dry, shelf-stable, locally produced in the heart of Boston — to the Greater Food Bank for distribution throughout their network.
Each box is a pound. It comes out to 10,000 boxes of pasta, which is a lot of pasta, if you see it all lined up. The benefit is, of course, it’s shelf-stable, so it can last, and the food bank can slowly distribute it as it needs.
Rath: Giulio, I’ve been sitting here transfixed in the way I’ve really been in this interview because, in addition to being joyous, this is just so fascinating and ingenious, and an application of positive principles in so many ways. You must have seen at this point some wonderful effects of getting this food out into the community and feeding people.
Caperchi: Without a doubt. When we deliver our produce, especially the fresh greens and tomatoes, particularly to the small food banks that we serve in central Massachusetts — which are all led by volunteers, by the way; very few paid positions in there — it’s just a labor of love to see the farm and the volunteers really working together to bring happiness, joy and what we think more than anything is a right. A right to good food.
It’s a shame that food insecurity in a state as wealthy as Massachusetts is at the level it is, and how the situation has gotten worse in the past four or five years since the pandemic. It’s a shame that we’re seeing hunger relief efforts from the higher levels of government being cut. It’s time for everyone to step in.
That said, there’s no amount of vegetables we can grow on our small farm that can even put a dent in the problem. This problem needs to be solved way higher up to make any sort of statistical change in what is an absolute shame.
We are also in a world of abundance — that is really where the dissonance is very, very clear. According to the USDA, 30% to 40% of the food produced by this nation is thrown out, and we have food insecurity. That is something I find deeply immoral and absolutely wrong. We know the fixes; the fixes are very easy.
This is a podcast about joy and about possibilities, and we have the tools at our disposal to not have this issue. Absolutely, it should not be an issue in a part of the world where there is an abundance of food and an abundance of funds. No scarcity in food. No scarcity in funds. There is a scarcity of will, and perhaps a scarcity of democracy.
The Agro-Eco Project and Seven Hills consider a fundamental right of every human being, which is that of having a hot meal at the end of the day.
Rath: You’ve realized so many of these great passions your grandmother has instilled in you. What do you think she would say about these projects?
Caperchi: My grandmother is still alive.
Rath: Oh! What does she think?
Caperchi: She is very, very happy.
Rath: Still in Italy?
Caperchi: Yes, she’s still in Italy. Yep, still tending to her garden. My children have had the opportunity to tinker in her garden, and so I’m very happy that that experience is transcending generations.
Her experience is that of … she was very small when Italy was occupied by the Nazis and remembers the German soldiers and running up to the hills and hiding. That was scarcity. And the resourcefulness of having to grow your own food in a moment of utter crisis — the Second World War.
Rath: Yeah, that generation knew real hunger.
Caperchi: Exactly, real hunger. They had to find inventive ways to produce food, and those stuck. A lot of these techniques are now at the forefront of cutting-edge, organic and sustainable agriculture. It’s important to learn the lessons of a generation that struggled through and push them forward to the new generations, especially seeing that a lot of the problems have not been solved, and some have gotten worse.
It’s important that those lessons of resilience, inventiveness, empathy, compassion and helping one another are passed on.
If you’d like to nominate someone or something for the Joy Beat, leave us a voicemail at 617-300-BEAT [2328].
