Next week is Hunger awareness week here at NEPM, but honestly we’re very much into feeding people everywhere, and especially across the four counties of western Massachusetts everyday.

So we get a bit of a jump on the process by talking with Executive Chef/executive director of Stone Soup Cafe in Greenfield, Kirsten Levitt. She talks to us about their general mission of nourishing more than just the body, their recent foray into culinary instruction, and how the community comes together to make their daily operations happen.

There’s a lot of that community that believes strongly in what Stone Soup Cafe offers all of us, including our Live Music Friday Guests, Forest Avenue String Band, who will play a benefit show for the cafe on Nov. 12th.

We head to Hatfield to talk with the latest generation helming a 100+ year old farm that’s become synonymous with potatoes in these parts. Diane Szawlowski-Mullins comes to the studio to let us know how Swaz’s Potato Farms keep the area full of spuds all year round, even with the floods.

We hear about the many faces of hunger seen by the Amherst Survival Center with director Lev Ben Ezra. They help us to understand that it’s much more than just providing food to those in need, and that the folx in need can often be in the places you least expect.

And this week’s Wine Thunderdome at State Street Deli, Wine & Spirits offers an opportunity to not just discover the spectrum of Shiraz, but a way you can get your own wine on while simultaneously helping out the Food Bank of Western Massachusetts.