Twice a week, the nonprofit People's Grocery sends its Mobile Market to a neighborhood in West Oakland where fresh produce and healthy food is nowhere to be found. I wish the Mobile Market existed when I lived there during the 1990s. There's only one supermarket to serve a community of 30,000 and it's a wreck. From the San Francisco Chronicle:
(The Mobile Market is) cleverly designed so that, when it's parked by the side of the road with its ramp extended, it is a fully stocked but very tiny natural foods store. In addition to the sumptuously fresh organic produce, the Mobile Market carries a little bit of all the basics you'd expect to find in any upscale food store. A row of bulk hoppers dispenses organic cereals underneath a small shelf of skin-care potions. A little glass-fronted fridge entices shoppers with juice blends and natural sodas, and a shelf of organic treats near the entrance gives kids who visit the Mobile Market with their parents something to linger over.In operation for almost two years, the Mobile Market has become part of the fabric of the community. Shoppers greet one another as though they were in the neighborhood grocery store, not a vibrant purple-and-orange van decorated with hip-hop lettering and pumping out beats (solar powered, I learned later) from its roof….
The Mobile Market is able to make inroads in the community in large part because it offers these healthy foods at a low price. The People's Grocery receives significant discounts from Mountain People's Distributors — one of the nation's largest organic-food distributors — so food in the Mobile Market is sold at wholesale prices. This means that, for the 160 families that shop at the Mobile Market each week, a healthful organic diet costs no more than a menu of ramen and Ho-Hos from the liquor store.
Link (Thanks, Mark Riedy!)
