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Market Mobility – Red Stick Farmers Market brings fresh produce to food deserts

It’s a meal she’ll never forget, and it wasn’t even her own.

Two years ago, Cleveland native Sunanna Chand, now 25, moved to Baton Rouge on assignment with Teach for America. She was prepping her Lanier Elementary second-graders for a field trip one morning when a student approached her with a question: Can I bring my bag lunch on the bus?

Let me see it, Chand replied.

Dutifully, the boy dug his arm into the crinkle of brown paper.

He pulled out a roll of cookies, a bag of Doritos and a bottle of Mountain Dew.

“As a teacher, I saw so many health disparities,” says Chand, the outgoing Community Outreach Coordinator for Mayor Kip Holden’s Healthy City Initiative, who moves to Nashville for graduate school later this month. “A lot of children were overweight, and it was easy to see the connection between education and health. That’s when I knew I needed to do something to help solve that problem.”

For the past year, Chand has been at the hub of a citywide, multi-million-dollar, 58-agency effort with one goal: to make Baton Rougeans healthier.

As many as 103,000 residents of East Baton Rouge Parish live in what experts term a “food desert”—that is, an area with insufficient access to fresh, healthy food. An estimated 25,000 of those are children, according to 2012 data from Baton Rouge’s own Pennington Biomedical Research Center. Irrigating these food deserts with fresh produce and local, responsibly-made goods has been a target for many, from major medical institutions like Our Lady of the Lake to grassroots community organizations such as Together Baton Rouge.

It was three years ago that BREADA began planning and fundraising for a mobile version of its popular Red Stick Farmers Market, a focal point of the mayor’s Healthy BR efforts. If so many in the parish had no means of traveling downtown on Saturday mornings to purchase produce from dozens of area growers, the market would travel to them; specifically, those living in areas like 70805, 70807 and 70802 that are dominated by processed food-filled corner stores and drive-thru franchises, says Copper Alvarez, executive director of the 17-year-old economic and agricultural non-profit.

This spring, the Red Stick Mobile Farmers Market finally rolled.

May 15 started as another typical morning at the bus stop for Pauline Jackson, waiting on her ride to work at the Louisiana Art & Science Museum, until she saw it. Across the street from Do It Big Auto and spanning five parking spaces in the lot of the Scotlandville Branch Library, a canopy of white tents was shading red-and-white checked tablecloths, each covered with baskets and boxes of fruits and vegetables just picked from Louisiana soil. It was a veritable picnic smack in the middle of her food desert.

I have a little time, Jackson thought, and she wandered over to the mobile market. She became its first customer. 

“To have food this fresh, it means so much,” she tells Jeremy Baker, operations manager for the market, as he rings up her canvas bag of vegetables. “I’m just glad y’all are here.”

Next to Baker is Lisa Gray, a North Baton Rouge native, who serves as a coordinator for the market. A year ago Gray began taking her 8-year-old daughter to the downtown farmers market in an effort to improve her diet. She is seeing results with healthy weight loss and clean doctor visits.

“I live in 70807, and so many people there have health that is severely compromised, and they don’t even realize it,” Gray says. “Stop eating out of a can! Access is one part of the problem, but education is another issue.”

Gray and Alvarez agree the mobile market must address both.

“What is this?” asks shopper Bridget Udoh as she snaps photos of massive leafy greens. “Oh, I see—Swiss Chard. That’s what I need. I need it in my life.”

Standing under a nearby tent, baker and Forte Grove co-owner William Cooper is seeing the importance of fresh food access face-to-face. He greets customers curious about his jalapeno cheddar bread and crunchy Ranger cookies. He rattles off lists of natural ingredients like the alphabet.

“You won’t see any crazy long names here,” he says, pointing to his packaging. “All the ingredients, a third-grader can read them.”

Cooper is testing the waters here at the mobile market, but hopes his Plaquemine-based bakery can increase its labor force to allow for regular participation.

“These folks are in exile from mainstream America due to ZIP code and immobility,” Cooper says. “Knowing that, there’s a responsibility to create a better community.”

Looking across the Forte Grove table, Tiffany Franklin shakes her head slowly.

“Decisions, decisions.”

With her wrist wrapped in a large gold bracelet that spells out the word “BLESSED,” she reaches for a fresh loaf, thanks Cooper, pays and adds the bread to her bag.

“I’ve got four bunches of greens right here,” she says. “And I can’t wait to get them in the pot.”

Though she’s leaving soon for two years to study in Tennessee, Chand pledges to return to Baton Rouge in the near future. Her office and her dozens of partners have used best practices from other cities, but she believes Baton Rouge’s mobile market can be the model for others.

The needs in this city are great, she says, but so are the opportunities. Where opportunity can meet need is where she wants to be, and the growing collaborative spirit in the community is making that connection a strong one.

“Baton Rouge is not as competitive as other cities I’ve been in, which means its growth potential is incredible,” Chand says. “The city is at a tipping point, and positive things are about to explode.”