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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@gilanet.com>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Street Beets
  • Date: Fri, 17 Jun 2005 15:32:47 -0600

http://commongroundmag.com/2005/cg3205/streetbeets3205.html

Street Beets
Two Young Food Activists Use a Diesel-Powered Mobile Market to Bring
Organics to West Oakland.
by Jason Mark


It’s an early spring afternoon and all is quiet in front of the
Missionary Baptist Church, a cinderblock parish on Oakland’s impoverished
West Side. Then the Mobile Market pulls up. Painted a cheerful orange and
purple and blasting hip-hop tunes from a pair of solar-powered speakers,
the custom-designed delivery truck trails behind it a whiff of
popcorn—the scent of a biodiesel engine. Within minutes, the truck’s
back doors swing open to reveal a fully stocked grocery on wheels, with
neat rows of fresh produce, shelves of organic dry goods, bins of grains
and nuts.

It doesn’t take long for the Mobile Market to attract attention. A
neighbor walks up with his 7-year-old daughter, high-fives the Market’s
driver, Brahm Ahmadi, and begins chatting as he picks out organic peanut
butter and juice. A young man wearing a knee-length Harlem Globetrotters
jersey strolls by and peaks inside. “Is this the People’s Grocery?”
he asks. “This is hella tight.”

He’s right. With its graffiti lettering — “Fresh Produce! Affordable
Prices” — and bumpin’ soundtrack, the 2-year-old Mobile Market is
generating a lot of excitement for its innovative way of bringing natural
foods to families in West Oakland. A community of 32,000 people where 70
percent of households live below the poverty line, West Oakland has dozens
of liquor stores, but only one supermarket. The People’s Grocery, a young
nonprofit group, is determined to change that.

Started two years ago by a pair of twenty-something activists-turned social
entrepreneurs, People’s Grocery is pioneering a model to provide healthy
foods to low-income communities at prices they can afford. It’s not that
the people of West Oakland don’t want to eat well, insist the folks at
People’s Grocery, it’s that nutritious foods are simply not available
in their community.

Biodiesel Mobile Market

“The majority of people in West Oakland would prefer to eat natural foods
— that’s what they were raised on: that’s what was normal,” says
Malaika Edwards, one of the co-founders of People’s Grocery. The problem,
she explains, is that “the prices are high. What we’re doing is
providing access to healthy and affordable food.”

“I spent a lot of years being an activist, trying to stop things from
happening,” Edwards recently told the San Francisco Chronicle.” This
gives me an opportunity to build the world I want to see. The results are
very tangible: to see kids try a piece of fruit for the first time gives me
hope.”

Earnest and determined — but equipped with an easy smile and quiet
charisma — Edwards recounts some People’s Grocery history. In 2003, she
and co-founder Brahm Ahmadi — both former staffers of the youth-oriented
environmental group YES! — launched People’s Grocery with a program
called “Collards and Commerce.” Eight West Oakland teenagers spent a
summer learning the basics of nutrition, business development, cooking, and
organic gardening. During the course of the program, the participants
decided that what their community desperately needed was an organic
grocery. Creating a whole new brick-and-mortar store was out of the
question, so the group started the Mobile Market as an interim step. Today,
People’s Grocery runs urban agriculture classes for youth at three
organic gardens in the city, and supports a peer-to-peer program that sends
high schoolers into classrooms to talk with other students about the
dangers of fast food and the importance of nutrition.

With its edgy combination of street sensibility and social justice, the
Mobile Market has become something of a media darling. But buzz and
business success are two different things, as a recent Tuesday afternoon
with the Mobile Market demonstrated.

At the first stop, McClymonds High School, only a handful of the hundreds
of students flooding out of classes stop to buy something. At the second
stop — the Missionary Baptist Church — curiosity translates into just
one paying customer.

The People’s Grocery founders acknowledge that economic sustainability is
their most pressing challenge. Foundation support makes up about 70 percent
of the organization’s $200,000 budget, which leaves Mobile Market
struggling to turn a profit. People’s Grocery is grappling with two
important tests: improving marketing and outreach to the West Oakland
community and encouraging the organic industry to reach beyond the largely
white customers on whom it has based its current success.

Inner City Organics

“If you see a face on these [packages of organic] products, it’s
basically a white face,” says co-founder Brahm Ahmadi, an energetic
29-year-old who manages to keep an eye on the store even as his gaze drifts
to the middle-distance of his bigger visions. “The organic companies have
mono-cultured themselves into a niche segment. We are trying to remind the
pioneers of the organic food movement, many of whom got started in the
sixties, of their original mission.”

With his baggy jeans, hooded sweatshirt, and hoop earrings, Ahmadi
doesn’t quite fit the picture of your typical MBA. But after several
years of business school — begun, he says, when it became apparent that
People’s Grocery needed more economic acumen — Ahmadi has the lingo
down pat, and terms like “price point” and “strategic marketing”
spill out of his mouth.

The real danger, as Ahmadi sees it, is that two parallel food systems have
emerged. While the affluent and upwardly mobile have access to healthy
groceries, poorer communities are condemned to grow fat on diets of cheap,
unhealthy foods. The rich have the luxury of choosing low-fat, farm-fresh
cuisine; the poor must struggle to find nutritious foods. The difference
helps explain why an obesity epidemic is sweeping across America and
causing a deadly spike in heart disease and diabetes among the nation’s
poor.

A solution, according to Ahmadi, is for the organic and health food
companies to recognize that they need to reach poor communities if they are
to grow beyond their current tiny market share. Taking organics to
lower-income communities is not only an ecological and social necessity,
but also an economic one.

“The idea is to leverage the success of the organic industry so that it
benefits low-income communities,” Ahmadi says. “Organic is basically a
niche market for the rich. As a corporate endeavor, they have to look for
increased growth and they have to find emerging markets. We’re making the
case for low-income communities to be those emerging markets.”

On the Mobile Market’s third stop of the afternoon, it becomes apparent
that the model Ahamdi is talking about has real potential. Suddenly, the
van is hopping with customers. A longtime People’s Grocery member,
daughter in tow, is busy buying lettuce and soymilk as a new client stocks
up on fresh bread and organic soups. (Membership is free and restricted to
West Oakland residents who get a 25 percent discount on packaged and bulk
foods.)

“Without [the People’s Grocery], you can’t get organic produce,”
says Nyeema Brown, after signing up to become a member. “That’s why
it’s so important that we have them. I don’t want to be a guinea pig
for all the pesticides they’re putting in our food. I can’t always buy
organic, but I try to as much as I can.”

People’s Grocery employee Cindy Villanueva, 20, says that community
awareness about the importance of organic foods is growing.

“When I first started working here, I used to eat a lot of fast food,”
says Villanueva, who began working at People’s Grocery after graduating
from McClymonds High. “But then I opened my eyes to how bad it was for
myself. I try to eat, you know, fruits and vegetables. And I try to tell my
friends about it. At first they were, like, ‘What are you talking
about?’ But now they’ve started to listen. They support what I’m
doing.”

Jason Mark is the co-author, with Kevin Danaher, of Insurrection: Citizen
Challenges to Corporate Power. He is researching a book about the future of
food.







  • [Livingontheland] Street Beets, Tradingpost, 06/17/2005

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