Hungry to feed

Cristiane Souza Bertone talks the way some people garden: hands busy, attention split, generosity baked in.

On a day off from her job as a behavior therapist, Bertone is outside with a friend, carving out a new garden bed at her house in Nyack, NY. She bought the place three years ago and it “never had a garden,” she tells me. She excuses herself for a moment as her friend hands her a cup of coffee and the dulcet rhythms of Portuguese fill the air.

Before Nyack, Bertone lived in Chestnut Ridge, NY, on an acre of land. But as many gardeners in these parts will attest, the deer ate nearly everything. Here in Nyack, she’s reclaiming ground — building life back into a yard that didn’t know what it was missing.

Berton grew up on a farm in Brazil in an impoverished family, the kind of poverty that can be both crushing and invisible when everyone around you is in the same boat. “We never thought we were poor in Brazil,” she said. “We were really poor. I never had a pair of jeans until I came to the United States.”

And yet, “we were never hungry,” she said. When Brazil went through a recession and “the government confiscated everybody’s money” and changed the currency overnight, she remembers her family staying steady because they had a garden.

“Growing food was simply part of life,” said Bertone. “Aside from rice and beans, nearly everything we ate came from our hands, our kitchen, or our land. We made cheeses, bread, cakes, and butter from scratch, and the garden provided vegetables year-round. Abundance was woven into everyday life.”

Bertone’s favorite food memory is a scent: homegrown coffee roasting in the morning. It carries her back to family, the feeling of waking up already wrapped in love, and memories of her grandmother.

Illiterate, but fluent in the rhythms that matter, Bertone’s grandmother raised three generations on a small piece of land. She cooked on a wood-burning stove and fed a house full of children and grandchildren. “She knew the soil, the animals, the weather, the resilience of plants,” recalled Bertone.

Those memories sit within Bertone like a compass. It points toward self-reliance, but also toward something more communal: the idea that food is a shared language, a way of staying human in the face of systems that aren’t designed to keep you whole.

When Bertone came to the United States, the shock wasn’t only cultural — it was nutritional. She found herself working for extremely wealthy families in New Jersey, seeing money up close in the form of private planes and polished kitchens, while she and her husband at the time “barely had money to buy food.”

“As a young immigrant, I went through years of food insecurity. I remember hunger very clearly — the exhaustion of it, the fear of it, the way it slowly wears down the spirit,” said Bertone. “There were times I went to job interviews thinking not about ambition, but simply: I need money to buy food. Those years shaped me deeply and changed forever the way I think about feeding others.”

In Brazil, she says, the brutal gap between haves and have-nots wasn’t something she’d been exposed to in the same way. Here, in America, the land of plenty, the contrast was unavoidable.

Hunger, she insists, is not poetic. It is not a moral lesson. It is simply a thing that happens to a body and then colonizes the mind. “When you’re not full, when you’re hungry, like that takes up your entire being,” she said. “It’s the most horrific experience. I don’t wish that on anybody.”

Bertone carries that muscle memory with her wherever she goes. Today, it shows up as radical hospitality. If you enter her house, you will be fed. Tea. Bread with butter. Something. “You’re never going to walk into a Brazilian house and not be served something to eat,” she said. “It’s cultural.”

The same instinct is what makes her almost allergic to the way Americans talk about “organic,” as if clean food is a premium lifestyle choice. She doesn’t romanticize labels. She talks about inputs. Compost. Comfrey. A soil-building routine that doesn’t require a boutique aisle. “I don’t know how to grow food any other way,” she said.

Last year, from a small patch in her backyard, she harvested 180 pounds of food. Not an influencer brag, more like proof of concept. A reminder that the line between scarcity and abundance is sometimes measured in square feet, sunlight and time.

And she is always thinking about who gets access to that abundance.

“You don’t have to go far to see food insecurity in America,” she said. “All you have to do is step out of your door.” So she does. She grows food and gives it away. As president of the Food Pantry of St. Ann’s Church in Nyack, she learns people’s patterns — who comes, who stopped coming, who’s scared now that ICE might show up. When fear keeps families away from distribution, Bertone brings food to them.

Bertone’s latest project centers around a sharing garden at the Community Garden of Love in Haverstraw, NY, operated by Catholic Charities Community Services of Rockland, where volunteers recently planted hundreds of seedlings donated by a nearby farm.

She doesn’t frame it as righteousness, but as necessity. Hunger doesn’t just hurt; it humiliates. It shrinks a person’s dignity. Feeding someone pushes back against that damage.

Ask Bertone what she loves to grow, and she doesn’t give you a single prized crop. She talks about sharing vegetables and flowers with friends and community. She calls it sacred, this simple task of “carrying food from the soil straight to the table.”