Yesterday morning I woke up early to raid the Clark Park farmer's market. I was a little worried that the seasonal chilliness would have already zapped good produce from the farm fields, but look at what I found! It was the most beautiful farmer's market I have seen since I moved to Philly! If you're wondering what that purple lump is in the left hand corner, that's cauliflower! That's right, PURPLE cauliflower! I don't exactly know what I'm gonna do with yet, so if you have any suggestions, send them my way.
I spent most of the AM hours running between my house and different grocery purveyors, emptying my duffle bag and then running out to get more. I can't think of a better way to have spent a beautiful Saturday morning. But that's not to say there weren't some sobering observation made along the way.
The local, organic food distributors in West Philly that I know of are the farmer's markets, the Mariposa Food Co-op, and Milk & Honey. I visited all three yesterday, and the customer demographics are pretty racially homogenous. Mostly White people shop at these places. I also went to the food truck, the International Foods store (which always looks like it's been looted), and Supreme Shop N Bag, where the diversity of the shoppers is much higher. It's not new information to me that the health disparities between races is huge, but every time I see young African American kids stocking up on huge quantities of junk food and think of the high rates of obesity, hypertension, diabetes, and other diet related diseases that are through the roof in poor communities, I can't help but get enraged at the demographics. What really stumps me is that these two different kinds of purveyors are in the same neighborhood but are still obviously divided.
No comments:
Post a Comment