Content via Huffington Post
If you live in St. Louis, Missouri, a bus brimming with fresh produce may just turn up in your neighborhood or at your job.
The St. Louis Metro Market is a full-service grocery store on wheels. The bus, dubbed “Turnip1,” is stocked with fresh fruit, vegetables, meat, dairy and bread from local farmers and community gardens. MetroMarket also likes to promote where its food came from, and uses the overhead space on the bus, where you’d typically see ads, to tell those stories. Outside of the bus, workers and volunteers offer nutritional information and food demos that show customers how they can prepare the food sold on the bus.
But MetroMarket isn’t just a farmers market on wheels.
“I would hate people to get lost in the novelty of what we do because we sell groceries on a bus,” Jeremy Goss, a Saint Louis University medical student and one of the founders of MetroMarket, along with Washington University graduates Colin Dowling and Tej Azad, told The Huffington Post.
Because the true brilliance behind this nonprofit, which got off the ground with grants, donations and a free bus provided to them by St. Louis’ metro transit department, is rooted in the specific places in which the bus parks — corporate parking lots and low-income neighborhoods void of one vital business.
“Entire communities in St. Louis don’t have a grocery store,” Goss said. “It was very frustrating to us.”
