As so many Americans seem to be learning after years of shopping at big-box industrial supermarkets, open-air food markets are more than just a place to buy the week’s groceries. They serve as a hub of activity and a way to invest in one's community by supporting local farmers. When you visit or live in a place that’s not where you’re from, markets can also be instructive: they can teach you about the value that a city puts on shopping for, preparing, and most importantly, enjoying food.
An innovative way to tackle the obesity epidemic comes on four wheels, as mobile farmers' markets are working to solve the lack of nutritious, fresh food in food deserts around the nation.
We need to talk about local food. Not Monsanto, lopsided subsidies, or food miles. I don't want to talk about veganism, haterade, or Portlandia either. I want to address the four most basic problems faced by farmers every day so we can all chip in and make an effort to solve them.
There are plenty of cities trying to tackle obesity with punitive measures, by banning sodas or ditching vending machines. A new program in Washington, DC is taking an opposite approach, encouraging healthy eating not by preventing people from eating poorly but by subsidizing healthy foods.
In the spring of 1961, Alderson Muncy, a miner from West Virginia, traveled 22 miles to a grocery store where the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture awaited his arrival with a television crew and $95 in food stamps. The food allowance would need to cover meals for the jobless man, his wife, and their 13 children for a month. As Muncy loaded up his Jeep for the trip home, The New York Times reported that he had a shopping cart full of groceries “prominently including vanilla wafers and two boxes of cake mix.”
