Integrating EVERYTHING
How a Hospitality Group is Creating a Sustainable Farm-to-Community Approach to Increasing Access to Fresh Food
I first enjoyed James Beard-finalist Chris Williams’ progressive Southern food at the historic Eldorado Ballroom, during a celebration of Toni Tipton-Martin’s The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks. One item Tipton-Martin features in her multi-award-winning book is a red cardboard box with a pale blue lid titled Lucille’s Treasure Chest of Fine Foods — a collection of over 200 printed, well-organized recipe cards by Lucille Bishop Smith, Williams’ great-grandmother.
Smith, the namesake of Williams’ restaurant Lucille’s, was not only a successful cookbook author — her collection was reprinted five times — but also a dynamic educator and entrepreneur. Born in Crockett, Texas in 1892, she was an accomplished caterer; developed vocational culinary programs for public schools; created the Commercial Food and Technology Department at Prairie View A&M; invented Lucille’s All Purpose Hot Roll Mix, the first packaged hot roll mix sold in the United States; and much more. She also inspired Williams to become a chef and to approach his company, Lucille’s Hospitality Group, as an organization that is operating restaurants and actively making communities better.
Standing in 99-degree heat, Williams’ vision for fostering systematic improvements is coming to fruition at Bates M. Allen Park as he makes food for Kendleton, Texas’ annual Juneteenth celebration. Williams, with the help of a young boy from the community, chops and then tosses just-picked zucchini, cucumbers, sweet potatoes, onions and herbs with vinaigrette. All the produce is from farms currently operated by his nonprofit Lucille’s 1913.
Founded during the pandemic, 1913’s initial goals were to feed frontline medical workers and to provide culturally appropriate meals to the elderly in under-resourced communities such as Sunnyside, a historic African American neighborhood on Houston’s southside.
As the organization neared one million meals distributed, it began to evolve. “The meal program had served its purpose perfectly,” says Williams. “We needed to protect our elders, keep them out of grocery stores. It did that. It ran its course. So, we pivoted to empowering people, taking care of people who need access to food and jobs. I want us to have a deeper impact if we are going to invest all this time and money.”
To achieve this goal, Williams and his team are developing an ecosystem of neighborhood-focused farms, production kitchens and retail outlets that will increase access to food and provide jobs in underserved communities. “The whole point of the project is to provide access to fresh foods but also to employ people from the community and to give back the gift of farming and self-sustainability,” says Williams. “It starts with the farming,” he adds. Currently, Lucille’s 1913 has two main farms. One is raised beds behind the Power Center, a business incubator and event space in Southwest Houston that is being revitalized by The Community Collective for Houston, another nonprofit co-founded by Williams. The other is 10 acres, three currently in production, at Bates M. Allen Park in historic Kendleton.
The town, which is southwest of Houston in Fort Bend County, was founded by emancipated slaves after the Civil War. “My family was part of the founding fathers of this community,” says Williams. “At one point it was a farming Mecca.”
However, Kend leton’s Black residents, like the nation’s, lost farmers and access to farmland. According to the UDSA, in 1920, there were approximately 950,000 African American farmers; today there are 45,508, representing only 1.3 percent of the farmers in the United States. That reduction has been accompanied by a loss of $326 billion in African American farm acreage according to a study published by the American Economic Association. The causes range from the growth of large-scale corporate agriculture to systematic discrimination by the USDA and banks that blocked Black farmers' access to loans and other programs. For Kendleton’s residents, this translates into driving at least 15 miles to find fresh food.
To help solve this problem, Fort Bend officials reached out to Lucille’s 1913 about partnering with them on a meal program. The county had limited funding options, but it did have land. Williams and county officials identified 54 acres that were available and suitable for farming and decided to kick off the partnership with 10 acres in Kendleton.
To turn those acres into productive farmland, Williams hired Jeremy Peaches as the nonprofit’s horticultural director. Peaches, who comes from a long line of farmers, was born in rural Mississippi, where his grandmother and many of his neighbors had gardens and farms. He moved to Houston when he was six and grew up in Sunnyside. After earning a Bachelor of Science in Agriculture/Animal Science from Prairie View A&M, he returned to Houston and founded Fresh Life Organics, a farm and agriculture consulting company. In addition, he and Ivy Walls co-founded Caribbean-inspired farm-to-table restaurant Kuji Kitchen and Fresh House Grocery, which is providing local produce and products to Sunnyside.
Peaches has been tasked with growing food appropriate for the communities the nonprofit serves and for restaurants like Lucille’s and Williams’s new restaurant Late August, while hiring and training members of the community to farm. “We want people to work with Jeremy and to learn how to activate the land and get the benefit of getting decent pay,” says Williams, who thinks that systematic change in our inequitable food system requires creating good-paying jobs.
Williams also thinks it requires, as he says, “growing for people’s palate.” He’s learned from observing other organizations and from his own experience that an approach that doesn’t consider a community’s culture and cuisine and just provides a random selection of food often dehumanizes the recipients and leads to waste. During the pandemic, Lucille’s 1913 prepared 500 food boxes to be distributed at Cuney Homes. Williams selected produce based solely on prices. He learned later that much of the produce went unused because it wasn’t what people knew how to prepare or were used to eating. “If I have to provide a recipe to use these ingredients, then I’m using the wrong ingredients. We want to grow familiar ingredients: squash, collard greens, tomatoes, okra,” says Williams.
For Peaches that means developing a focused yet sustainable growing program. “We started employing different methods like intercropping, which is something generations in my family have been doing,” says Peaches. This approach involves maximizing resources by growing plants that benefit each other. As Peaches explains it, “If I’m growing okra and corn — crops that grow high — the hotter it gets, my squash, which grows low, will be shaded, prolonging its growing season.” Peaches is also minimizing tilling, using dripline irrigation to maximize water absorption and converting farm waste into fertilizer.
Eliminating waste is another key component of the team’s vision of a fully integrated farm-to-table food system. According to the nonprofit ReFED, the U.S. produced 91 million tons of food waste in 2021, which is 38 percent of all production, enough food to make an estimated 149 billion meals a year.
In addition to composting, Lucille’s 1913 is combating food waste by developing, at its fermentation lab, products such as pickles, hot sauces, kimchi and zingy dried onion and herb blends. These products can then be provided at low costs to under-resourced communities or sold at retail outlets to generate revenue for the nonprofit.
One of those outlets is The Rado Market, Williams’ new café and market, which features produce and products from Lucille’s 1913 and other Black producers and is on the first floor of the recently renovated Eldorado Ballroom (see Notable Edibles for more).
The Eldorado, built in 1939, was a cultural hub for Black Houstonians hosting artists such as Ella Fitzgerald and Etta James. Lucille’s Hospitality Group has partnered, as managing operator, with its owner Project Row House, a Third Ward arts nonprofit, to once again make that corner of Elgin and Emancipation a thriving cultural and economic center and guide the area’s inevitable gentrification in a direction that benefits the current residents — which is an often overlooked aspect of creating a sustainable, community-focused farm to-table system.
Like any organization, Lucille’s 1913 continues to evolve and adapt. “Last year we spent deep diving and beta testing, making mistakes. Now, we’re ready to hit the ground running,” says Peaches.
Williams and his team are already expanding their model by partnering with Cheniere Energy to rejuvenate several small parks by building community gardens that will be staffed not by volunteers but by paid employees who live in the neighborhood. When Fort Bend County completes a planned community center at Bates M. Allen Park, the goal is to include a production kitchen where produce from the Kendleton farm can be transformed into products or processed and frozen, so it can be available at low cost to the community year round while providing jobs in the area. It will be one more step toward ensuring Lucille’s 1913 grows, feeds and employs, while being self-sustaining.
“This organization will be a true testament to how nonprofits, private entities and government can work together to do something for the community, create jobs, change the tide,” says Peaches.
Learn more at lucilles1913.org
