All You Can't Eat

In the 'food desert' of East Palo Alto, a local farmers market wages a battle against obesity and near-starvation

"I have to spend my Sundays plotting which grocery stores to hit," says Lettecia Rayson, a lifelong resident of East Palo Alto. "I have to travel outside the city just to find a Safeway where I can get regular produce."

Rayson, who is helping organize the farmers market, says it will have tangible and intangible benefits. "The immediate effect is we would have healthy food right around the corner," she says. "The intangible aspect is that we deserve to have access to high-quality food. We've become accustomed to this insidious apathy and you don't even notice you've gotten used to this lower standard of living.

"The farmers market is a way of saying 'This is what we really deserve.' I think raising that level of expectation will cause people to get more vocal and insistent on expecting more."

Read the whole article by Crystal Allen in the Metroactive News by clicking here.