Here’s a cheerful thought for Thanksgiving – a mobile famer’s market bringing fresh organic food from family farms to urban neighborhoods in a converted 1987 international diesel school bus.
Farm to Family in Richmond, Virginia targets inner city neighborhoods that are called “food deserts” where the only access to food is a convenience store with almost no fresh or healthy food available. The bus makes its rounds from local farms to urban streets not only bringing fresh food at each stop but also teaching about cooking and growing it, passing out free seeds as they go.
The urban garden movement was just beginning a few years ago when I started this blog and it’s really catching on. More and more people are getting down in the dirt and growing some of their own food. Part of this, I think, is a desire to save money and have healthy food, “downsizing” and becoming more self-sufficient, but I think there’s also a deep longing to connect with the natural world and get back to our roots, literally, in these unstable times. There’s nothing like sitting on the ground and running a handful of dirt through your fingers to connect you with where you really are.
It does my heart good to see folks like the Farm to Family bunch taking the initiative, transforming an old school bus and bringing not only the good food but the knowledge of how to grow it and the seeds to do it, too. I wonder if anybody has figured out how much less CO2 would be put in the atmosphere if we all started growing our own food close to home. Imagine that.