Jul. 21--A giant purple and green RV pulls up in front of Jericho Road Ministries on Barton Road on the city's West Side, drawing curious stares from neighbors and the refugees and immigrants.
Two teenagers file out of the rickety vehicle, toting a foldable table and containers of freshly harvested lettuce, broccoli and cherries. Inside the RV is more produce -- collard greens, cabbage, green onions and snap peas -- and nutritious bulk items including brown rice.
It is a farmers' market on wheels; a way to bring healthful food at affordable prices into neighborhoods where such food is hard to find or too expensive.
The mobile market is a new program by the Massachusetts Avenue Project, a West Side group devoted to youth development, community revitalization and increasing access to healthful foods through urban farming.
Since 2003, the Massachusetts Avenue Project has been running a farm on seven previously vacant lots on Massachusetts Avenue, where neighborhood teenagers learn to grow produce. They're also taught about nutrition and how to run a business. They learn to cook with the food they grow and also develop products, such as a bottle chili starter, with their produce that they sell.
The mobile market, organizers hope, is the next step in bringing healthful food into low-income neighborhoods.
Keeping a close eye on the project is Samina Raja, an assistant professor at the University at Buffalo's School of Architecture and Planning. She has been working with the project since it began
various efforts ranging from locating "food deserts" in the city to tracking the eating habits of the youth participating in the farming program.
The Massachusetts Avenue Project's work is critical in addressing serious food-related health problems in urban neighborhoods, said Raja, who specializes in urban planning and design for healthy communities.
"In Western New York, in Erie County, and in Buffalo in particular, there are lots of neighborhoods that don't have food access," Raja said. "Food might be available, but it might not be affordable. It might be available, but it might not be nutritious."
In many poor communities in Buffalo and in cities across the United States, she said, there's a lack of supermarkets and an abundance of corner stores where fresh produce and other nutritious foods are rarely sold.
Such corner stores often sell plenty of inexpensive, low-nutrition food: cookies, chips and soda, for instance.
"If you're using your dollar to buy calories," she explained, "it's six to seven times more expensive to obtain the same amount of calories from a carrot than from cookies."
This explains the paradox seen in low-income neighborhoods of obesity and malnutrition at the same time.
"We end up as a society blaming the individual for not making the right [eating] choices without really understanding that their choices are absolutely constrained by their environment," Raja said.
Even the teenagers who participate in the Massachusetts Avenue Project's Growing Green program aren't eating much better after they finish the program, Raja said. They're much better informed about what is healthful, but their parents can't afford the more expensive, nutritious food.
The point was driven home to her, Raja said, while she was interviewing one of the teen participants. As they talked, the boy's mother dropped off his lunch: a bag from McDonald's.
"He knew it was ironic," Raja said.
The teen went on to tell Raja that his mother won't let him go grocery shopping with her anymore because she feels he's criticizing her food choices. The truth was that the nutritious foods he wanted were beyond her budget.
Raja suggested he walk to the Elmwood-Bidwell Farmers' Market to buy fresh produce at reasonable prices.
"Do I look like I belong there?" the boy said. He said he felt out of place at the market.
Such attitudes about farmers' markets, which tend to be held in more-affluent neighborhoods, keep many low-income people away, Raja said.
"That's where the mobile market fits in," Raja said.
At the steering wheel of the mobile market -- literally and figuratively -- is Cyndie Huynh (pronounced Win), a petite young woman who navigates the unwieldy RV through the streets of the West Side on market days.
Huynh, who was hired through the AmeriCorps program in the fall to run the mobile market, said she experienced firsthand as a Buffalo resident without a car how hard it is to get to a grocery store to buy food.
"It made me more passionate," she said.
The roving RV is modeled after a mobile market started by an Oakland, Calif., organization called People's Grocery. Other cities have been trying similar approaches. In 2007, Capital District Community Gardens in Troy started a "veggie-mobile."
In Buffalo, the mobile market did a couple of test runs in the fall. Now, with the summer harvest just starting, the RV is making stops from noon to 2 p. m. Tuesday at Jericho and from 1:30 to 3 p. m. Wednesday at the Santa Maria Towers, a senior facility. As the season progresses, plans are being made to add sites on the East Side as well.
Most of the produce is harvested from the Massachusetts Avenue Project's own farms. The rest comes from local farms, including Ole's in Alden, and through wholesale natural food stores.
The market keeps its prices as low as possible. A head of broccoli goes for 50 cents. A bunch of green onions is a quarter.
Huynh recently arranged for the mobile market to accept food stamps.
"We're also working on accepting [Women, Infants and Children] checks as well," she said.
Accepting food stamps has increased sales at the market by 50 percent, Huynh noted.
The teenagers from the youth program help harvest the produce, wash and package food, and then sell the goods to the community.
The West Side market locations target two particularly vulnerable populations: immigrants and refugees, and seniors. While there are both the Tops supermarket on Niagara Street and Guercio's grocery store on Grant Street, both populations aren't always able to get to the stores because they don't have cars, Huynh explained.
The refugees on the West Side, mostly from Myanmar and Somalia, have the added challenge of not being familiar with American goods. Many are not sure how to cook the produce available at the market.
"They get the one or two things that are similar to what they eat at home and only eat that," Huynh said.
To try to entice refugees into trying produce, the market offers samples and shares recipes.
On Tuesday at the Jericho market, DeVonte Mull, 17, and Prince Saysay, 14, gave out samples of coleslaw made with apples, mint and kohlrabi, a small cabbagelike vegetable the market will be selling in the next few weeks.
The boys laughed as they stumbled over the pronunciation of the unusual vegetable. But they eagerly beckoned passers- by to try the slaw.
Inside the RV, Verdall Cole and Anthony Orta, both 15, showed off the produce selection, including lettuce they had handpicked that morning. They were especially proud of their snap peas -- a vegetable they had never eaten before.
"It's like candy," said Anthony, who now likes to snack on them raw.
Faustina Sein, who is from Myanmar and who works part time at the Journey's End office at Jericho Road, was delighted by the vegetable selection in the RV.
"I like vegetables," she said after stepping off the RV with a bag full of broccoli, asparagus, cucumbers and peas.
Sein, who now lives in Cheektowaga but used to live on the West Side, agreed that it's hard for many immigrants who don't have cars to buy produce. She said her community will come to embrace the market.
"If they know it's here, a lot of them will come and shop," she said.
Mary Schmaul, who lives in Kaisertown and who had come by bus to a diabetes class at Jericho, was thrilled with her cache: a head of cabbage, one bag each of red and green leaf lettuce and two cups of brown rice, all for $4.75.
On disability and living on what she calls a "very fixed" income, Schmaul said she struggles to find affordable produce in her neighborhood--food she knows she needs to eat to help control her diabetes.
"This is great," Schmaul said. "I wish we could get this in South Buffalo."
mbecker@buffnews.com
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