Field of Science

Produce bus for food deserts

There are places even in small cities where grocery stores
are too far away for walking/biking access. This is especially important when it comes to fresh and sustainable produce. In urban areas with well developed mass transit, there will often be small, strategically placed markets at major transit hubs, but neither of these is common place in the USA. This produce bus idea makes the produce market movable and capable of serving several neighborhoods. Many parts of the world still operate with lots of small markets, many specializing in just one component of groceries: green grocers, butchers, bakers, dairy, but in the USA someone invented the car and then someone else invented the super market, and while it had everything it isn't convenient for in and out shopping, so people had to buy a week's worth of groceries. This then requires much bigger refrigerators and more storage, a whole cascade of inefficiency. So it's fun to see this all devolving change back toward small and local. Friends of ours retired to a Chi-town high rise over looking Lake Michigan, a non-gardeners paradise, and they have a convenience store for dairy, produce, and meat in their building. TPP's own neighborhood has just barely walkable shopping; it takes about 20 min to walk to the "people's" market and about the same to walk to the small business areas on either side of our campus, but those areas are both bereft of real grocery shopping. While TPP does this regularly, few of his neighbors do. While living in Zurich, TPP was quite enamored with small, convenient groceries at tram stops selling food in smaller quantities, e.g., eggs come in cartons of 4, 6, and 8. Beer came in 3 bottle packs. Fresh pastas and sauces were just enough for 2, and so were smaller loaves of bread. In all of this TPP sees some hope. For example, the USA has gone through a beer revolution. There was a time when every city had one or more breweries; our own little city had up to 5, the influence of German immigrants. Then someone invented pasteurizing and bottling for beer, and bigger breweries bought up small breweries, closed them and then distributed their product over that area. And of course the beer was brewed to be all things to all people, so mediocre at best. This continued until there were only 37 breweries left in the whole USA! Now microbreweries have proliferated and more craft beers are consumed than Budweiser, once the number one beer. So smallifying and local is good if a trend.

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