Food Trucks: A Solution to Overcoming Food Deserts?

In cities across the country, from D.C. to Los Angeles to my home town of San Francisco, a food truck craze has rolled in. And I'm all for it — I'm down with the woman by my park who sells noodles out of a wicker basket on the back for her bike, and the gal with the velvet cupcake cart, and the old standby, El Tonayense Taco Truck.

But food trucks don't just serve up delicious treats to foodie 'Friscans, they can also fill an extremely important void. In Vermont, Diggers' Mirth, a collective farm, has taken its produce to the streets in a retired postal service truck. The veggie van is able to hit neighborhoods in Burlington like Old North End, where one-third of residents live in poverty. Barry Estabrook writes for The Atlantic that folks in Old North End live in a food desert — they don't have a supermarket nearby, and often have to buy crappy produce from convenience stores.

The truck service is not only convenient, but it offers organic produce at rates more affordable than the farmers' market. Starting next year, the truck will even begin taking food stamps.

While Old North End residents are set with Diggers' Mirth, for the many folks living in the more rural parts of Vermont, the struggle for fresh produce continues, as it does for many Americans living in urban or rural food deserts across the country. TIME reports that half of Detroit residents lives in what is considered a food desert, and so do 633,000 of Chicago's three million residents.

Food trucks may be one solution to food deserts, but there are countless others, too. Years ago, I worked with Community Harvest in Washington D.C., an organization that helped establish community-run farm stands in D.C.'s most hardest hit neighborhoods, where grocery stores had closed down and people bought high-priced, unhealthy food from ice-cream trucks and corner stores. Community-run farm stands helped provide jobs for people in the neighborhood as well as a market for small, local farmers in the area. The influx of healthy and affordable fresh fruits and veggies was a boon for the community.

Community solutions to food access is key, but we need to do more. Obama has proposed a Healthy Food Financing Initiative to invest $400 million a year to get rid of food deserts and bring down our rates of obesity. The plan would help underserved communities get better-quality fruits and veggies in their existing markets or establish stores if none already exist.

So is this a local or national problem? I think it's clearly both, and we should be working on solutions at both levels. In D.C., food trucks are currently under attack, with local businesses pressuring the City Council to shut them down. You can show your support for food trucks by signing our petition asking the City Council to protect D.C.'s fleet of food trucks.

Photo credit: E. Bartholomew