Theresa Thomas of North Fairmount has a crowd pleaser on her hands. As she sits in the neighborhood's Community Center, she's chopping up bright red peppers to add to her special variation of a Cincinnati chili chilito.
Folks at the market grab the free samples fast, even if the chilitos are made from some unexpected ingredients — lentils and beans instead of beef; yogurt instead of sour cream, and plenty of fresh veggies.
"They're surprised because there's no meat in it, but it's a protein," Thomas beams.
Thomas comes to the monthly Beekman Community Market as a volunteer chef to model how to use the free produce and staples distributed there to residents of the Beekman Corridor. That's North and South Fairmount, Millvale and South Cumminsville.
Next to Thomas, tables hold eggs, beans, Swiss chard, onions and lots of other vegetables. The food's provided by a USDA program that buys it from small local growers.
The community market is part of a broader effort by residents of the corridor to establish healthy alternative food sources in the absence of grocery stores. Thomas says her demonstrations are all about helping residents feel confident and excited about using that local food for healthy cooking.
"I'm that momma figure who they can look at and they're not afraid to ask a question, because I'll just show them," she says.
Food access as part of the larger puzzle
Years ago, North Fairmount residents could go to a grocery store just up the street for their veggies. But it's long gone. Odessa Carr has lived in North Fairmount for decades. She says she loves living in the Beekman Corridor, with its green spaces, tight-knit community, and the market. But she says when industrial jobs left the area, the grocery stores went with them.
"We had more people moving out than moving in, simply because of access to things people see as needs," she said as she sat outside the community center recently. "Transportation. Jobs. Housing. Food access. And it happened so fast, to the point where it's almost like, dang, we don't have anything here anymore."
She's not alone in seeing the challenges. The Beekman Corridor has among the highest levels of food insecurity in the city. And 40% of residents here suffer from diet-related health issues like obesity and high blood pressure.
Market coordinator Heather Sayre grew up in neighboring South Fairmount. She says the area's struggles with food access come down to a simple equation.
"When you don't have a car, it is hard to get healthy food," she says. "And around 40 percent of the people who live here in the corridor don't have cars."
Finding solutions
Nonprofit Working in Neighborhoods started the Beekman Community Market in 2023 to try and help address the food access issues. The program also includes support for community gardeners and an entrepreneurship program that fosters businesses based in the corridor. Many are food-based and sell at the monthly market. One even sells the spices cooking instructor Thomas uses in her demonstrations.
Sayre says the ideas came out of the area's climate resiliency planning, which sparked discussions about how to bring a grocery store to the Beekman Corridor. Those talks soon shifted to solutions closer to home. Once the idea for a monthly market solidified, things moved quickly. Sayre started her job coordinating the market in October 2023, and the first one happened just a month later.
"Maybe we want to still move toward that full-service grocery, but we don't want to have all of our eggs in one basket," she said. "To have a resilient food system is really important."
Back to roots
For Carr, the focus on diverse local food harkens back to the way she grew up. Her family raised chickens and pigs and supplemented what they could get from small local grocery stores with food from the land.
"My grandmother, my aunt, my mother, they went out foraging for greens," she remembers. "That's what we had to survive off of."
Carr vends coffee and baked goods at the monthly market as part of its entrepreneurship program. She also loves to garden — potatoes, okra, and tomatoes are her favorites — and she sees the Beekman Corridor as a place ripe with agricultural possibilities.
"We have the agricultural community, we just have to learn how to utilize it," she says.
Sayre agrees. She says the market program's focus on local food taps into something deeply rooted in the corridor.
"There is this agricultural background," she says. "When people moved here generations ago, their families held on to agricultural traditions. So there are a lot of gardeners and a lot of people with their own family traditions of growing food. That's a wealth of culture."
While the market is only once a month, the broader initiative also highlights fresh produce available regularly at the neighborhoods' small corner stores. Sayre says the goal is to promote more diverse local food sources in the Beekman Corridor —whether or not a grocery store locates there in the future.
Read more: