BUFFALO, N.Y. — Today for our Most Buffalo Story of the Day, we're taking you to a truck that helps families put fresh food on their plates.
The Massachusetts Avenue Project does a lot of great work in our community, and the Mobile Market is just one of its programs.
"It's just important that people have nutritious, fresh food brought right to them," said Tabitha Wechter, Mobile Market Outreach Coordinator at MAP.
The Massachusetts Avenue Project, or MAP for short, brings its Mobile Market, a farmers market on wheels, to 14 places in Buffalo. On Wednesday, 2 On Your Side caught up with it at the Neighborhood Health Center on Lawn Avenue.
"We focus on areas that experience food insecurity, so we're able to bring fresh, locally grown, in-season produce to neighborhoods that might not have access to it," said Tabitha Wechter.
"Not everybody has the means to get out and find that food at the source, but we're coming to them, and that's pretty cool," said Emily Gonzalez, MAP Communications Manager.
Organizations reach out to MAP saying there's a need and ask them to come with the truck loaded up with locally grown produce.
"A lot of it is grown right on MAP's urban farm. We're located on Massachusetts Avenue on the West Side, and then we partner with over twenty farms all in the Western New York region. Some are in the city, and others are suburbs surrounding," said Tabitha Wechter.
MAP can sell the food at affordable prices with the help of grants and funding. For customers, payment methods like SNAP, Double Up Food Bucks, and farmers market nutrition programs are accepted.
"Food insecurity is definitely a problem in Buffalo. It's very apparent whether you're, like, driving through or at our market sites, and we hear a lot of stories and experiences from our customers about why it's tough to find the food that they want to find, whether there's not enough grocery stores or the quality's bad, or it's too expensive, and so it's a real struggle that people experience and that's why we're doing that we're doing," said Tabitha Wechter.
The selection changes every week based on what's in-season.
"But we also try to provide culturally meaningful food to people so we have a lot of different varieties of peppers and eggplants that you might not see at, like, a typical grocery store because we try to talk to our customers and see what they want us to grow. What they're interested in buying," said Tabitha Wechter.
"I think it's amazing actually. Like, it's so good to see, like, all the different people, like, having the chance to have all this food and being able to afford all this food, I think it's such a great thing," said Zaid Martinez, MAP Youth Apprentice.
Everyone is welcome to shop at the Mobile Market.
"Food is medicine. You can get a lot of what you need right from the food that you eat, and because it's mostly naturally grown, it's safe to eat, and it's sustainable, and you know that the, because it's local, you're able to know your farmer, and build that relationship, and just be a part of your food system, and so when food is grown close to home, it has more nutritional value, and we really pride ourselves in offering a really diverse array of options," said Tabitha Wechter.
MAP has its big fundraiser, Raising the Roots, coming up on August 24.