Sunshine, Sandwiches, & Sustainability: A Look At the Life of Maggie Arian
8 Minute Read
*With the support of Maggie Arian, After Hours has collaborated with The Farm New Marlborough on multiple events to highlight and celebrate Berkshire County’s local food system. As another young entrepreneur pushing to bring awareness to foodways and supporting local agriculture, Maggie has become an inspiration for the After Hours team.
Article Made Possible by Lee Bank
Harvest Festival photo by Ingo Schweers, September 28, 2024.
When it comes to today's world, speed is the name of the game. We:
▪ can search online for instantaneous answers.
▪ have the ability to watch just about any show or film on our televisions within minutes.
▪ can grab fast food to silence our hunger, be it burgers at a fast-food chain or packaged snacks at a store. Healthy? Nah. Speedily satisfying? Yup.
But wait. What about when we want to slow down? Be in the moment. Be with family. Have an old-school meal with each other. Talk. Listen. Laugh. And be certain that what we are consuming is not only tasty, but healthy. Wholesome. Sustainable. And affordable.
Meet Maggie Arian, for whom providing all that is not only her day-to-day goal, it is her life's mission. Thanks to what she has already accomplished at The Farm in New Marlborough, Massachusetts — owned and operated by farmer Tom Brazie — parents and their children can eat out on a Friday night at a wonderfully affordable price.
Let's Back Up a Bit...
... to 2002, Montclair, New Jersey, where Maggie was born and raised. Known as being a tony town, the Arian family, living in a two-bedroom apartment, was decidedly not posh. Nonetheless, whatever money was available, Maggie's mother, Pam, made sure was spent on healthy, local food. The Arians were members of three Community-Supported Agriculture systems (CSAs). And as CSAs had only recently become a thing in the US — first in New England during the mid-1980s — the Arians' ahead-of-the-curve connection shows just how aware and proactive Maggie's mom was.
The Apple Doesn't Grow Far From The Tree?
To Maggie, her mother was the root of everything: "It all stems from my mom... growing up, I was fully surrounded by as local food as you can get in Montclair. Everything was farm-to-table. My mom was super into it: macrobiotic, and just really, really invested in what you put into your body. So, from a young age, we didn't eat potato chips. We didn't have cereal. We didn't watch TV. We didn't have a TV. I didn't have fast food until I was 15!"
Well before that late-to-the-gate entry to fast food, Maggie's mother first sent eight-year-old Maggie to a Quaker farm summer camp for a few weeks, a camp she would attend for the next few years. Says Maggie: "They basically invited kids to live there and do the farming at a young age. Then at 13, I got a job at a local farmers' market in Montclair... and just learned how hard it is to farm."
In 2020, at age 18, Maggie landed a job with the bakery team at Apple Ridge Farm, a regenerative farm in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania. The farm had a large-scale sourdough bakery and fermentation program. Over the course of her two years there, Maggie became Assistant Manager of their sourdough bakery.
In late 2022, Pam Arian moved from New Jersey to Mill River, Massachusetts. One of her first goals was to find a nearby source of regenerative meat. She soon did, at The Farm, in nearby New Marlborough, MA.
For both mother and daughter, everything was going smoothly, steadily; all couched in a comforting, organic, and appropriate lack of speed.
But sometimes, of course, we can control neither the speed nor the timing of what happens in our lives. Such was the case when life-threatening chaos entered the Arian world.
On February 20, 2023, mere months after Pam had settled into her new home, she suffered a brain aneurysm — a stroke — an often fatal condition. For Maggie, speed was now dramatically called to action. "I dropped everything and moved to Massachusetts to take care of her... It was a long recovery. She was in the hospital for months. PT, OT, speech therapy, the whole thing. Yeah, it was a chaotic turning point, but it ended up being a very good one for everyone."
And Pam's condition notwithstanding, while still in the hospital, this steadfastly nurturing mother was aware enough to sense that Maggie herself needed help — help becoming rooted in her new community, as well as pursuing her life's work, namely, a commitment to local, affordable food.
Back to The Farm
A family-owned farm dating back to the 1700s, the Brazie family farm was a "local food system" long before that term was coined. (Like, back when people were still using coins. ;-)
So, was The Farm a well-established local business? Yes. But even a fully foundational family farm — a successful one — can reach a higher, sustainable, goal. And Maggie's mom, who, soon after moving to Mill River had forged a friendship with Tom Brazie, as well as his mom, Linda, knew that Tom needed help selling.
Menu designed by Maggie Arian
When, after much urging and nudging from both mothers, Tom and Maggie had their first meeting, he filled her in on The Farm's recent history: He'd started hosting Friday night dinners in 2018, usually with 30 to 40 guests. And even though about 40 acres of The Farm are swamp, there are some very large fields on the more than 100 plus acres of dry, welcoming land.
"In the back of my mind was like, I want to do sandwiches so it's really affordable." Her goal was for parents and their "... three, four, five children to be able to come and eat out... making sure that it was an affordable cost." Affordable meant a sandwich, a side, a drink, and a dessert, all for under $20.
In Maggie's first week on the job — using Tom's estimate of 40 people having dinner — she widened the margins and prepped for 50. They sold out. Wait, what? She jokingly accused Tom of having fibbed about his estimate. The following week she went way beyond 50 meals, prepping for 70. They. Sold. Out. For the rest of that year, 2023, Maggie decided to keep the number of prepped meals to 75. "I was working another job and taking care of my mom; I couldn't do more than that."
At The Farm's 2023 harvest festival — an end-of-summer event replete with live music, loads of local vendors, and of course, local food — Maggie recalls about 800 people attending.
At the 2024 harvest festival, 1,100 meals were served: a nearly 30% jump. Maggie explained the "food math": "At an event like that, if you're selling 1,100 meals, we probably had between 1,500 and 1,600 people in attendance."
As Maggie wrote in the summer of 2025 to the lucky locals who receive her emails:
Maggie is, ahem, cooking up a great new offering that will be served soon at The Farm, so locals should be on the lookout for luscious goodies.
The icing on the cake? Not only does Maggie have all the goals and successes described here, she is also a pastry chef! In fact, she currently runs the pastry program at Sandisfield Orchard!
The Magic of Transparency
Part of sustainability applies to commerce, as well: enough money must be made to keep the business going, costs that include maintaining or upgrading equipment as needed, covering travel, merchandise, and labor. That said, sustaining or expanding goods and services doesn't need to include seeking greater and greater profit, something of a hallmark — and expectation — of businesses today.
Maggie and the Menus: Photo of Maggie Arian at The Great Barrington Farmers Market, May 10th, 2025 , taken by Emma Arian.
For Maggie, transparency from food providers about their costs and choices fosters awareness in the customer: learning how many miles a truck has to travel to pick up supplies or to transport livestock to be slaughtered gives people agency to make informed decisions; to choose what they want so they can make choices based on information, not due to fancy packaging and advertising.
Maggie is quite grateful that folks are increasingly aware of — and care about — what they consume: "I think that people are now looking at prices, but are also like, Okay, if I spend $3 more a pound, I can get beef that is raised in New Marlboro, born in New Marlboro, and fed by New Marlboro grass, and like, that $3 is worth it to me to not have these growth hormones put into my body that are then put into my children's bodies or put into the water after I pee."
Perhaps, following the model set by Maggie Arian, we can all utilize the healthier, slower, and community-oriented roots from yesterday's world: today, and tomorrow.
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