ATLANTA — Darryell Moss drove to Allen Temple AME Church in Atlanta from South Fulton for a bite of food and a morsel of wisdom. A couple hundred other people packed the church's fellowship hall to feed the body, mind and spirit.
They're participating in the Fulton County Fresh Mobile Market, a program cooked up in conjunction with the University of Georgia Co-op Extension. It feeds families by not only giving them fresh produce, sourced from the Atlanta State Farmer's Market, but actually teaching them how to use it.
"A lot of us don't have a whole lot of money to put toward food and food prices are so high," Moss said. "So this kind of supplements. We learn about the sodium intake, how you should be preparing, what you should be buying, reading labels, because a lot of people don’t know that. They need to be doing those things.”
Von Baker, director of UGA's Extension office in Fulton County, runs the Fulton Fresh Mobile Market. It costs Fulton County about $250,000 to run the program and hire staff, Baker said. She added that the county-wide efforts are felt most during the summer and fall sessions of the program. Each hosting venue happens to be in a food desert, where mainstream grocery stores are a mile or more away and fresh fruit and vegetables may not always be accessible.
“We show them how they can feed their family healthy meals on a budget," Baker said. "When citizens consume fresh produce, they help to reduce incidents of diabetes, high cholesterol, hypertension and they learn how to prepare healthy recipes with low or no sodium for their families.”
The Fulton Fresh Mobile Market runs through Nov. 2. For the full schedule and list of locations, click here. The program builds healthy habits bag by bag, feeding families for a fraction of the cost and feeding their mind and spirit along the way.
"The vegetables they give at the end is a plus, but the benefit comes from the classes they give and the recipes," Moss said. "These are tools you can take and apply to your everyday life that enriches your life."