New Haven Independent

Sullo is one of hundreds of seniors who make her green market purchases with Senior Farmers Market Nutritional Program (SFMNP) coupons. Very much like the WIC (Women, Infant, Children) program, SFMNP coupons are funded half by the federal government and half by the state agriculture department and come in booklets of five three-dollar coupons. The key is that they are good only for purchase of fresh produce from state-certified farmers markets.

Mary Sullo came to the market on a stunningly beautiful Thursday afternoon at Quinnipiac River Park. Meanwhile, a bus full of seniors from Bella Vista had spent several hours shopping, many using their SFMNP coupons. They were transported to the market by the city’s Department of Elderly Services, as the culmination of a day’s outing. The shopping with the department-distributed coupon booklets made the day for many vendors.

Leo Tancreti said about 80 percent of his business this day was due to seniors. So he loves seniors. He especially loves Mary Sullo, who baptized his daughter Cheryl at Our Lady of Pompeii church many decades ago, at which time he had seen her last. They had their reunion over the zucchinis.

“About three weeks ago, she was here shopping,” said Tancreti, who is the principal of Tancreti Farms of North Haven, which is enjoying its first year with CitySeed’s program. “And she looked and me, and I looked at her, and, boom. She has a wickedly good memory.”

“But I shop here,” Sullo said, “not only because we go way back, Leo and me, but he has such good stuff.” Sullo bought some corn, but only two dollars worth. Since the coupons from her SFMNP booklet come in three-dollar denominations, Tancreti said, “Choose something else, Mary. He suggested the squash, big enough to fall out of your hand, but Mary wasn’t interested.

“Then how about the tomatoes?” he suggested, with his genial smile.

“Mary, you’ve got to choose something to get it up to $3. I’m not going to cheat you. The seniors are some shoppers,” Tancreti added. “They bargain a lot. I like it. And, boy, do they ever inspect the corn.”

In the meantime Sullo was contemplating. She put her head together with Ethel Bookert (in the red in photo above), a young woman on her job the first day from Companion and Homemakers Agency, on Elm Street, because Sullo cannot live alone.

“All right,” Sullo concluded, “I’m going to treat Ethel. We’re going to have squash and tomatoes.”

“Good choice,” said Tancreti, and he helped her select two large tomatoes, ox heart tomatoes, so named due to their shape and serious size. Then they talked about the old days, the real estate business in which they had both been engaged decades before.

On a day when the farmers’ market was showing healthy signs of becoming a genuine destination — picnickers, human Frisbee-players cavorting with a dog assistant, a group lining up to buy burritos from the La Carreta cart set up beside Tancreti’s farm stand — the seniors definitely had contributed.

It wasn’t the first time the senior centers had collaborated with CitySeed markets for their mutual benefit. “We’ve had seniors last season too,” said program director Nicole Berube (pictured with her Youth At Work-sponsored assistant Kaeila Vidro, a student from the Sound School), “but they never seemed so happy as today, or so many of them,” she said.

Why was that? “I think in part it was a beautiful day, and the Department of Elderly Services’ idea of bringing the groups here as a culmination of a kind of outing for the day was a terrific idea. And we had prepared this recipe book for them too, cooking ideas for people who live alone and on low income. But also, they found here what they were looking for. They found brownies and breads that were reasonably priced and they bought those too, with cash. Because the coupons are permissible only for fresh produce. You know, SFMNP is a great program. Each dollar spent benefits seniors and the farmers. It’s too bad the program is only partially funded.”

Another CitySeed spokesperson, Benjamin Gardner, said the coupon booklets, which go to low-income seniors, were available in New Haven for only about 1400 people. He suggested the number fell far short of the 4,000 or so low-income senior Elm City residents he estimated are eligible. State Sen. Toni Harp and others had sought to provide full funding, but her efforts, Gardner said, were not successful in the last legislative session.

But all that was not part of the picture on the beautiful food-and-light-filled afternoon. Heather Carter, of Northfordy Farms in North Branford, a longtime participant in CitySeed’s market, was here selling squash, tomatoes, yellow melon, and onions to this senior; she confirmed an informal survey, that at least more than half her business this day, like Leo Tancreti’s, was from older folks. But she hadn’t run into anybody that she had baptized, or baptized her. Not yet.