Driving food, health, community and a big bus
Food is the foundation of our health and vitality, however the act of eating has never been purely biological.
At Fresh Truck, we believe that community engagement must be paired with food retail to effectively shift how families shop, cook, and eat. Through our programs we revitalize food culture in the neighborhoods we serve, while ensuring that all families have access to healthy food options. To meaningfully advance food as a public health intervention, it is critical that we design for culture and access.
Food culture
Food culture is the combination of our traditions, rituals, history, experiences, and physical space that tie back to food; the foods we like and don’t like, secret family recipes, and the neighborhood grocery store. It’s a learned behavior from our families, schools and institutions around us. We believe American food culture is richer and healthier when it doesn’t come from a box and that’s what we aim to celebrate. Kids who are excited about helping in the kitchen, home cooked meals being shared around a dinner table. Revitalizing healthy food cultures means considering:
Rituals and traditions — Our food identity is shaped by the kind of food we were served, how it was prepared, presented and eaten. We reinforce these traditions by repeating them for holidays, Sunday dinner or daily eating patterns.
History — What we eat, how and when is dictated by hundreds of years of experimentation, preparation and geographic availability. Food history is visible in recipes, techniques and flavor combinations. Everyone has a rich food history that doesn’t include golden arches.
Experiences — Every time we experience food by shopping, cooking or eating, we are shaping our food culture; we know this to be especially true for young children. The more exposure we have to a certain foods, the more it becomes acquainted with our taste buds and preferences.
Environment — The space where we make our food shopping decisions influences what food we purchase and eat. Over time, the most prominent food sources are what becomes familiar and comfortable. The difference between fast food on every street corner vs a farmer’s market has a stark impact on the health of a community.
Food Access
Food access research is typically accompanied by a map or infographic with certain regions greyed out for their lack of grocery stores. This fuels the common misconception that food access is only related to geographic proximity of a grocery store, when actually the term ‘food access’ was defined at the World Food Summit of 1996 as,
“When people at all times have access to sufficient, safe, culturally relevant, nutritious food to maintain a healthy and active life.”
This definition asks us to move beyond geographic proximity as a proxy for whether families are actually able to access healthy food. Here are the key factors that drive how we choose to develop our market locations:
Geography — Geographic proximity to food is the most obvious determining factor of our likelihood of consumption. Research definitively shows that we eat more healthy food when it’s available in our neighborhoods.
Food Culture — Our individual food culture influences how we experience the food options around us. Even if a grocery store is across the street it does not ensure that the shopping experience or product offering is culturally relevant. This mismatch often causes families to favor more culturally relevant, though less healthy, food sources.
Affordability — Even when a healthy food source is close by, the food available might be more expensive than what families can afford — we love farmers markets, but the price point can be exclusive. When healthy food is priced out of reach people are forced to turn to cheaper and less nutrient-dense, processed foods.
Inclusive design — Grocery retailers, and their product offerings need to reflect the wide range of social, physical, and cultural needs within a community. Mobility, access to cooking equipment and dietary restrictions all dictate food accessibility.
As a collective of organizations, government agencies, healthcare institutions, businesses and individual advocates that care about health, we need to rethink the formula for how food access is addressed. By taking measures to incorporate the nuances of food culture in our solutions we can more effectively benefit our most marginalized communities and make sure everyone has access to reliable, healthy food options.
We’re Fresh Truck and we work to radically impact community health by celebrating a vibrant neighborhood food culture and getting fresh food to the people that need the most. To make that happen we operate retrofitted school buses as mobile produce markets and food-health learning spaces in Boston.
