This week on the Local Food Report, one women’s health crisis leads to a thriving local food hub.
It's early on a Tuesday morning, and I’m with Linda Navarro. She’s getting ready to hit the road in the Bootstrap Farm Club Van. Linda has been with Bootstrap for about six years, doing a bit of everything, but getting behind the wheel as food runner may be her most important role.
“I'm going to two different farms to pick up seedlings and other crops and then bring them back here,” Navarro says. “Altogether I'll be on the road about six hours.”
Bootstrap is on a busy road in Cataumet, Mass. It has the look of a farm stand, but founder Susan Sigal describes it as a local organic food hub.
“So today our food runner is going to Western Mass,” Sigal says. “For most of our crops, we go to the farms and pick up. We send our little van out with a food runner, and we go and find where the crops are. We seek local organic first, local sustainable second, just local third, organic a little farther for some of our shelf items.”
Sigal had a health crisis that inspired her to start Bootstrap in 2019. Since then, she's developed deep relationships with about 20 farms around the region.
“I had been living on the Vineyard,” she says. “I had gotten very sick and almost died. I was doing a corporate job still.”
Sigal had been incubating the idea of a food hub for seven years, she says.
“I wanted to do something with farming. I was living with farms on the vineyard. I was very connected to eating locally and not going to the grocery store. After I got sick, I was like, 'This is my window.'”
When the pandemic hit a few months later, interest in clean, locally grown food surged. There was too much demand, and not enough produce, to satisfy everyone. Bootstrap operated on a membership model, where only members could make purchases. The waiting list to become a member ballooned to 250 households.
Things have loosened up since then, Sigal says. Members still get special considerations, but anyone can walk in the tiny shop packed with humming freezers and fridges, and shop.
She takes obvious joy in educating shoppers. Today, she's sharing the lowdown on fiddleheads.
“You don't know fiddle heads?” she asks me, surprised. “Fiddleheads are an early season fern. They come all curled up. You sauté them in butter.”
Fiddleheads and ramps, or wild leeks, show up at the beginning of the season, she says.
“They're both wild forage crops, so they're hard to find, but they come in and they're great and they absolutely have a following.”
At 65, Sigal is now getting ready to retire and plans to move to France. When she put the business up for sale earlier this year, her long-time friend Kristin Bergeron says she and her husband were ready to jump at the opportunity.
“It was just so exciting,” Bergeron says. “It felt right the second we saw that Susan was interested in moving on and the place was going to be available. We were like, ‘this is a perfect fit for us, we’re huge foodies.’”
Kristin still teaches at a nearby elementary school and turns her attention to the store during weekends and summers.
In the meantime, her husband Chris is working with Sigal to learn the ropes.
“I had been 35 years working in jewelry,” Chris says. “That was my comfort zone. This was a huge, huge change, especially when you come into a specialized place where a lot of your clients know more than you.”
Chris was surprised at the number of people with significant food sensitivities who come to the hub because they can’t find food anywhere else.
“I have customers that come in that are literally looking for certain things without sugar, without [other things], that are really difficult to find.”
Chris says what started with a health emergency for Susan Sigal, lives on as a health opportunity for him.
“You hear a lot of people say, 'Well, you'll taste the difference in the food.' I can tell you, you feel the difference in the food. Your body will feel it. Your skin will feel it. You'll notice. You'll see how things will change, because it's happened to me.”
Bootstrap Farm also takes its show on the road. They have occasional pop-up farm stands at partner locations in Plymouth, Wareham, and Falmouth.
