Vincent Lang is eager for me to taste the Tokyo Bekana he’s been growing. The leafy green Chinese cabbage, he tells me, is packed with all of the flavor of mustard greens without the spice. We’re walking along the garden path of the North County Agricultural Education Center in Pine Lawn toward Lang’s hoop house, where the cabbage is growing. As we pass garden beds packed with collard greens and interplanted with basil—which repels insects—Lang chats about what he’s been able to grow this season: peppers, peaches, apples, pears, sage, garlic, chives. Potatoes are a sore subject this year, but this is the garden’s third run of beets. Lang plans to stretch the growing season all the way up to the week before Thanksgiving—he wants to harvest collard greens for the big food holiday. Inside the hoop house, Lang lifts up white insect netting to reveal the Tokyo Bekana. He plucks a bright green leaf for me to try. It’s crisp yet buttery, sweet yet a little peppery. It tastes like April to me, even though this is autumn.
Lang is the farm supervisor for the NCAEC, which is part of A Red Circle, a nonprofit started by Erica R. Williams. A Red Circle seeks to increase access to healthy food for residents of 12 North County ZIP codes. Lang, Williams, and A Red Circle staff survey residents, engage with them in community speakouts, and get feedback during the nonprofit’s Good Food Friday events to see what the NCAEC should grow. Williams’ goal was to open a grocery store where the farm can sell its produce. That plan recently expanded into a project Williams named the North County Community Nexus. Instead of just a grocery store, the Nexus building will also include A Red Circle’s offices; community programs, including STL Mutual Aid and Community Health Network; a café; and an on-site demonstration garden to teach residents about growing food. Williams is eyeing a building at 9300 Lewis and Clark in Bellefontaine Neighbors and has started to raise the $2 million needed to purchase it. She’s already received a $525,000 grant from Missouri Children’s Health Fund to go toward the building.
In 2014, when unarmed teenager Michael Brown was shot and killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Williams was working as a paralegal in Clayton. She says she felt that North County was “forgotten,” and she wanted to invest in it. She started talking to neighbors, then families in the checkout line at the store or while waiting at the dentist’s office. “People were sick of me,” she says, laughing. “But I had to find out what they wanted to see. One of the main things people wanted was an increase in healthy food access.” Forty-eight of the 68 North County census tracts A Red Circle serves are considered food deserts by the United States Department of Agriculture. “I tell people that when I grew up in this area, it was not a food desert,” Williams says. “The myth became, ‘Black people don’t like to eat healthy,’” she says. “Well, yes, we do.”
“THE MYTH BECAME ‘BLACK PEOPLE DON’T LIKE TO EAT HEALTHY.’ WELL, YES, WE DO.”
Williams started with teaching nutrition classes. People told her that they liked the food and asked her where they could buy it—and she realized much of it wasn’t available in the area. She started the farm on a vacant lot on Hamilton Avenue in 2018, became a master gardener, and began doing outreach to let the community know everyone was welcome. During the pandemic, when meeting in person was impossible, she picked fresh herbs from the farm, bagged them, and left them on residents’ doorsteps with a flyer explaining the farm. Word has spread. Now A Red Circle hosts Good Food Fridays, where community members can come to the farm and leave with a box of fresh produce and recipes, similar to a meal kit. “Yesterday, we had some teenagers hanging out over there,” Williams motions toward the farm’s orchard. “They were eating peaches from the trees.”
Williams’ vision for the Nexus is that it not only serves the community by providing healthy food, but that it also gives Black farmers and growers in North County a space to sell their produce. Many lack the cold storage and distribution sites they need to participate in local food retail. Lang, for instance, manages farms in both the city and in North County, from Ferguson to Riverview. Williams also wants the profits to feed back into the community. A Red Circle will own the Nexus property, but it will lease the space to North County Community Betterment, a for-profit entity wholly owned by A Red Circle, to operate the store. If the nonprofit operated the store, it couldn’t technically sell the groceries—it could suggest prices, but ultimately it would have to give the items away. By operating as a for-profit entity, Williams is ensuring that the Nexus will give back to the community through sales tax and other public revenue. If you have to grocery shop in another neighborhood, she explains, you’re sending your tax dollars somewhere else. “You’re building up their roads and their police department, while you’re looking at your neighborhood continuing to fall apart,” she says.
The mood was more hopeful at a recent Saturday farm brunch at the park across from the NCAEC. Williams had gathered a group of A Red Circle supporters to give thanks and announce the name of the planned grocery store: People’s Harvest. Chef Robert Rusan, who helped pilot the farm-to-table food program at Maplewood–Richmond Heights School District, planned the menu: tender lamb, a flavorful vegetable hash with sweet potatoes and carrots, mixed lettuces in a light dressing, scrambled eggs, and peak-season apple cider. All of it was sourced from farms within 250 miles of Pine Lawn, a glimpse at the bounty that could soon become more available in North County if the Nexus project is successful.
“This is the best meal I’ve had in a long time,” I tell Rusan after I finish my plate.
“You need to do better, girl,” he replies, laughing.
