Some charities want to give you a fish.
Norfolk’s Bev Sell wants to stock a lake with trout, hand you a rod and reel, then teach you how to make fish tacos.
On Thursday evening at the Queen Street Baptist Church in Norfolk, Sell will launch a “community introduction” to a nonprofit called FEAST Virginia.
It’ll be a local outpost of an organization founded in Los Angeles in 2013 — an educational program devoted not to handing out food, but to giving people the knowledge and tools to feed themselves healthy food on a low budget. The acronym in FEAST’s name is a laundry list of everything Sell wants to accomplish here: Food, Education, Access, Support, Together.
For decades, the Portsmouth native has been dedicated to the problem of hunger and health in Hampton Roads. For 15 of those years, she managed Norfolk’s Five Points Community Market, a year-round farmers market whose fresh produce she personally drove around to neighborhoods without access to fresh food.
At 69 years old, Sell’s energy and perseverance border on relentlessness. The longtime activist boils over with initiatives: a shared commercial kitchen to help home cooks create legal food businesses, or an upcoming event asking chefs to concoct wholesome meals for the same $1.25 she figures church fundraisers spend on unhealthy hot dogs and chips.
But she remains frustrated by one-dimensional solutions to hunger and nutrition.
“If you’ve got the same 500 people showing up at the food bank every week,” says Sell, “something has broken down somewhere.”
After “six years of research on the internet,” what Sell says she liked about FEAST was its “holistic approach” to solving what she calls our “broken food system,” in which far too many people lack both access to nutritious food and the resources to obtain it.
“The question that keeps coming up is, ‘Where am I gonna find healthy food, and how am I going to afford it when produce costs as much as a Happy Meal?'” Sell said.
And bad nutrition has consequences, she says: Hampton Roads has one of the highest rates in Virginia of type II diabetes, according to Centers for Disease Control statistics.
On the face of it, the FEAST program is simple. It’s a 12-week food education program designed to teach small groups of participants how to access healthy, low-cost food and make meals for their family.
Each two-hour class offers a new recipe and cooking demonstration, and every meal is designed so that it costs no more than $10 to feed a family of four.
The program provides child care, and also the ingredients needed to try out recipes demonstrated during each course — or vouchers to help participants buy those ingredients themselves.
But the program also functions as a place for people in the same tough situation to support each other — most who sign up are mothers, although the program is designed to be all-inclusive, said Dana Rizer, FEAST’s executive director in Los Angeles.
To make sure healthy habits are sustainable after the program is over, each FEAST chapter attempts to find hyperlocal solutions to get healthy food into areas that traditionally have lacked it — enlisting the specific resources on hand in each city.
FEAST’s approach gets results: By the end of the classes, 73% of participants see improvements in pre-existing medical conditions, and 65% lose weight as a result of making healthier food choices, Rizer said.
But in 2017, when Sell called with hopes to start a Virginia chapter, Rizer said they didn’t yet know how to expand their model to other states. FEAST is small, and the organization’s home office still has only four full-time employees.
Sell persisted.
“Every three months I’d get an e-mail,” Rizer remembers. “She’d say, ‘Here’s what I’ve done.”
Sell enlisted more and more people to the FEAST Virginia effort — ministers at local churches who want to help their congregations get access to healthy food, chefs like Tony Williams of forthcoming Norfolk restaurant 350 Grace, and Dana Wakefield of butcher-shop restaurant Pendulum Fine Meats.
Williams was attracted by the fact that the program doesn’t try to fix everything at once, or take a top-down approach to solving nutrition. Instead, each class focuses on 10 or 12 motivated people at a time, giving them a toolkit to improve their health.
“It’s not so much telling people what to do as bringing people together,” Williams said. “And it begins to grow, and you continue to educate them in a way that’s not force-feeding. From my theater days, you can’t go to a community, put on a show and expect them to like it if it’s not the right show.”
Wakefield is helping Sell tailor the program’s recipes to Southern tastes, adapted from lesson plans that were originally designed for the Latino-rich communities surrounding Los Angeles. For Wakefield, it’s a matter of providing a familiar tether to flavors that people here already know and love.
“Everybody in this community loves grits,” Wakefield said. “Or they don’t love them but they know what they are. The question is, how can we use that healthfully? Or greens — greens are often made with fatback. How can we find a way that’s better for our health?”
Marquitta White, president of the tenant management council at Tidewater Gardens — a public housing complex in the St. Paul’s area of Norfolk — was introduced to the program through a mutual acquaintance with Sell.
White is a former chef who once cooked for pop icons Timbaland and Sean Combs, but she’s also seen hunger from the other side. She went through difficult times after the death of her children’s father, and then a debilitating car crash in 2017 after which doctors thought she wouldn’t walk again.
“I remember being homeless, using my EBT,” she said. “Me and my kids were sleeping in the car, we weren’t getting the proper nourishment. You’re going to get something of convenience.”
She believes that what’s missing for a lot of people at Tidewater Gardens — and middle-class working people, for that matter — is the know-how to fit healthy meal preparation into their lives. Instead, people resort to unhealthy but convenient meal habits, or to relying on assistance.
“You want to teach them to learn,” White said. “My grandma had me on the porch snapping peas, and I thought it was torture. I didn’t know it was going to pay off in the end.”
Over the past year, FEAST has begun chapters in five states in addition to California — mostly started by existing educational or health institutions. But the Norfolk chapter is unique in that it’s starting mostly from scratch.
This means a lack of institutional resources for food distribution — and Sell acknowledges she isn’t yet sure how she’ll arrange to get fresh produce into the communities FEAST Virginia plans to serve. Nonprofit certification is also still pending.
But after Rizer comes to Virginia to lead a training session in February 2020, Sell is confident that FEAST Virginia will be ready to lead its first group in March.
“I haven’t met anyone anywhere quite like Bev. She’s got every ounce of follow-through of anyone I’ve ever met,” Rizer said. “If the world just had Bevs — if we had more Bevs — it would be a different place.”
The FEAST Virginia community introduction will be 6:30-8 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 19, at Queen Street Baptist Church, 413 E. Brambleton Ave., Norfolk.
