Volunteering with Veggie Mobile

I hope everyone is having a fantastic labor day weekend! I finally have a break from my new hectic schedule to relax! 🙂

Yesterday I spent the day volunteering with the Capital District Community Gardens’ Veggie Mobile! The veggie mobile is just one of the great programs that the community gardens puts together.

The veggie mobile’s mission is to drive to underprivileged/low income neighborhoods and provide the residents with fresh produce at low cost. A lot of times people who live in these areas don’t have easy access to grocery stores. These areas are also known as food deserts. Isn’t it funny how in the suburbs there are three huge grocery stores within a short distance of each other but in these neighborhoods there are none? The stretch of Central Avenue in Colonie with a Price Chopper, Hannaford AND Shoprite comes to mind when I think of that. Something has to change here. But, yesterday we drove to the inner-cities of Schenectady, Albany and Troy–areas lacking close grocery stores.

The customers get on the truck, shop around and pay for their produce right on the truck. It’s such an awesome concept! They can use food stamps (now called SNAP) or FMNP coupons (Farmer’s Market Nutrition Program), which can be used on any produce grown in New York.

We also provided them a bag of free fruit and/or veggies if they tasted the sample recipe of the day that we were offering for “Taste and Take”. Yesterday we were sampling Japanese plums! The Taste and Take recipe varies each week.

My job was helping out with loading and unloading the produce onto the truck, giving out samples of the taste and take, and helping customers bag their groceries. Working on the veggie mobile was such an awesome and eye-opening experience! The number of people who don’t have access to fresh food is astounding, and I’m hoping with programs like this, in the future, more can be done about it.

Check out some of the other awesome programs that CDGC runs, the Produce Project, Community Gardens, and Squash Hunger. Click here if you are interested in volunteering.