Photo by Donné Malloy.

Donné Malloy is fanatical about fresh food.

When I spoke to Malloy about her present project, the NoMa Farmers Market, we didn’t do a delicate dance of interviewer and interviewee. There was no neat question, followed by a thoughtful pause, closed with a calculated answer. Questions were barely finished being asked before Malloy was firing back in passionate, pauseless bursts.

“Right now is my favorite time,” Malloy said, running down a toothsome list of seasonal fruit. “Now you’re getting into the blueberries the blackberries the gooseberries. Oh! And the melons have started.”

Malloy ran the H Street Farmers Market for six years when she was a manager at Fresh Farm Markets. A couple of years ago, she decided she was ready to venture out on her own, and in March 2010 she founded Metro Green Markets, which works to connect local farmers with communities. The NoMa Farmers Market, running from June through late October, is the first Malloy is running under her own brand. Her vision is to eventually run multiple markets in the District.

“No matter where you live, you should always have access to fresh food,” Malloy said.

Malloy’s appetite for freshness means she’s uncompromising when a market doesn’t meet her standards. She said there’s one surefire way to tell whether vendors boasting locally grown produce are lying or not.

“Walk into a farmers market, and if they have bananas and oranges, you should run,” Malloy said. “Bananas and oranges don’t grow anywhere within 350 miles of D.C.”

Malloy does farm visits when selecting vendors for the markets she runs, noting that it’s the only way to know if they’re truly growing their own produce.

Malloy is a native Washingtonian and has lived in Northeast D.C. for 19 years. Her connection to NoMa, she said, is deeply personal. Her husband grew up in the neighborhood, and her mother-in-law, Loree Murray, was a venerated community activist in the District. The Loree Grand, one of NoMa’s new residential buildings, is named after Murray, who founded the group Near Northeast Citizens Against Crime and Drugs and helped police combat rampant drug-dealing in her neighborhood throughout the 1980s. Murray passed away before the Loree Grand was completed.

When Malloy went before ANC 6C to make her case to launch the NoMa Farmers Market, she felt she had a solid pitch, which toward its close pegged her relationship to Murray. She later learned she’d buried her most persuasive selling point.

At the end of what she thought was a well-prepared argument, Malloy divulged her connection to her mother-in-law. “At that point, I remember someone at the ANC telling me that all I had to say was ‘Loree Murray,’ and they would have said yes,” Malloy said. “I didn’t have to say anything else about the market.”

The NoMa Farmers Market kicked off this summer, and Malloy is excited about the community she has already seen develop. “It’s a neat thing for me to see the same people come by every week,” Malloy said. “To see the customers come in and hear them say, ‘this is my market.’”

Malloy loves fresh food, but it’s evident that there’s one thing she prizes just as much: community.

“I like the NoMa Farmers Market, because in the NoMa neighborhood you have the haves and the have-nots,” Murray said. “You have people coming in to shop who have disposable income, and you have people coming in to shop who are on public assistance. And they can all shop here. You level the playing field”