West Town Health Market

The West Town Health Market sponsored by AMITA Health Sts. Mary and Elizabeth Medical Center, 2233 W. Division St., is literally about nourishing the body. People who use their SNAP benefits automatically get $15 worth of produce every week and can triple it on purchases up to $15 for an additional $45 value.

Food insecurity is such that the market served more people in 2020 than it did in 2019. This year, the market runs noon to 6 p.m. Thursdays through October 28.

Sts. Mary and Elizabeth serves six ZIP codes, including West Humboldt Park, said Celia Gonzalez, program manager. Although the Wicker Park neighborhood surrounding the hospital at Oakley and Division streets is gentrified, the population to the west is low-income, with many Hispanic and elderly, so you will find many culturally-relevant foods.

Gregorio Bahena’s Healthy Snacks is a family-owned company that sells a variety of nuts, snacks and dehydrated fruits. Oscar Villa’s Bee-utiful Honey & Candles started in 2013, but his interest in farming dates to his childhood in Bolivia. The Puerto Rican Cultural Center sells root vegetables, sweet and green plantains, as well as sofrito, a garlic/onion/ peppers/cilantro and culantro that is a base for so many of their dishes. And Mr. Kite’s the Chocolate Shop, a neighbor of the medical center, brings fruits, vegetables and his famous chocolate treats.

Produce comes from The Urban Canopy and Willow Ridge Organic Farm, whose owner, Renee Randall, “Farmer Renee,” travels to the market from Wauzeka, WI, more than 200 miles from Chicago.

Randall picks her tomatoes a day or two before travel. “Bringing really fresh produce makes a definite difference. Produce that's fresh and ripe is bringing both taste and health to the Heallth Market,” she said.

Farmer Renee has been organic farming since 1974, when she and her three children moved from Chicago to southwestern Wisconsin. She follows the belief of Adelle Davis that food cannot be healthy if the soil is depleted of nutrients. She creates “earth juices” from comfrey and stinging nettle that she composts over the winter and feeds at planting, along with solutions she can mist on the leaves. Between June and October, she grows green, yellow and purple beans; beets, Brussels sprouts, cabbages, cantaloupe, sweet corn, lettuce and more.

Willow Ridge is located in the Wisconsin Driftless, a pristine and rolling country of bluffs and valleys near the junction of Wisconsin, Iowa and Minnesota. At Wauzeka, the Kickapoo River flows into the Wisconsin River, which joins the Mississippi downriver at Prairie du Chien. “Together we can protect this beautiful landscape from factory farming, frac sand mining and development and by supporting the ‘right kind of farming,’ do our part towards the changing conditions in the health of the planet and climate change,” she says on her website.

The “right kind of farming,” Randall says, involves stewardship of the land, which means putting down personal roots, too. There used to be about 24 small dairy farms in her area, each with 16 to 60 cows. The farmers lived on their land and took care of it; their money went back into the community.

“What’s happened is that farmers were broken in the ’80s, we lost thousands of generational farmers,” she said. Moneyed interests consolidated the land, and “used the farms as investments to grow soybeans and corn. They don’t live here so they don’t really care about it.”