Making farmers markets more accessible to Americans in food deserts can boost the number of low-income customers who regularly shop there, and may even offer more promise for improving diets than bringing in traditional grocers. That's according to researchers who looked at what happened when the farmers market in Flint, Mich. — much of which qualifies as a food desert — moved downtown.
Availability of nutritious foods is of particular relevance in Flint, where the city's water system is now infamously contaminated with lead and other toxins. Public health officials there are spreading the word that consuming fruits and vegetables and other nutritious foods high in calcium, iron and Vitamin C can help reduce lead absorption. (Editor's note: We'll have more on those efforts next week.)
Rick Sadler, a public health professor at the Flint campus of Michigan State University, first interviewed shoppers at the Flint Farmers' Market in 2011, seeking to understand the demographics of its customers. Three years later, the market made a controversial move from an industrial area north of the city core — inaccessible to public transit and pedestrians — to a central downtown location across from the bus station. That prompted Sadler to return in 2015, to see if the customer demographics had shifted. They had: At the new location, the market was seeing far more shoppers from the city's poorer neighborhoods.
[For more of this story, written by Tracie McMillanm ,go to http://www.npr.org/sections/th...w-more-poor-shoppers]
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