Every Tuesday from 1:00 to 2:00 PM, before the first customer even reaches the tables, our Mobile Farmers’ Market crew is unloading crates of produce in front of the Los Medanos College Healthcare District (LMCHD) Community Garden at Pittsburg Health Center. Staff come out first, often on their break, followed by patients who linger a little past their appointments to see what’s fresh that week. It’s a new stop for Fresh Approach, but it’s already starting to feel like a neighborhood fixture.
Building Regulars, One Week at a Time
Ask our Food Access team what’s changed since the stop launched, and the answer isn’t about sales numbers. It’s about relationships. One customer, a woman who uses a wheelchair, comes every week with her sister, who pushes her from the clinic to the market and back. They wait an extra 30 minutes after their appointment just to shop, then catch the bus home with their produce. What started as a quiet, brief exchange has turned into real conversation: they now tell our team what they’re cooking with what they buy.
Connecting to Food as Medicine
For many who shop at the Pittsburg stop, the draw is simple: fresh produce, and more of it than they expected to find. Like all Fresh Approach Mobile Farmers’ Market stops, shoppers here get a 50% discount when they participate in CalFresh/EBT or other government assistance programs, and VeggieRx vouchers can be used toward their purchase, too.
Christina Nelson, Fresh Approach’s Food Access Manager, oversees this kind of coordination across all our program sites, working with vendors, staff, and volunteers, and making sure customer needs are met through the institutional partnerships that make a stop like this possible. For her, the Pittsburg location is a direct extension of Fresh Approach’s Food as Medicine work.
“By working in collaboration with the Pittsburg Health Center, including their staff, nurses, doctors, and patients, we can encourage healthy eating as a means to improve health,” Christina said. Patients can walk out of an appointment and directly into the market, where fresh, local produce is available at that 50% discount for eligible shoppers. “Knowing the direct correlation between eating fresh and improving health outcomes, the mobile market makes eating well more accessible,” she added.
A Step Toward a Mobile Food Pharmacy
Christina draws a direct comparison to make the concept click. “Similar to how you go to the clinic pharmacy to get medications to treat an illness or vitamins to prevent disease, you can stop by the mobile food pharmacy to purchase produce to improve or maintain your health,” she explained.
Paired with VeggieRx nutrition classes and vouchers, customers can effectively be “prescribed” healthy eating. “Through the means of vouchers or expanded match discounts, [customers] can more easily incorporate it into their life,” Christina said. And the appeal goes beyond health outcomes, sourced from local farms within 200 miles of the Bay Area. “The produce selection on the truck is fresh and delicious, making you want to get more each time you come back,” she said. For anyone unsure what to do with an unfamiliar vegetable, how to store it, or how to cook it, Christina points to the staff as a resource: “Our friendly staff can give you advice and guidance, much like your pharmacist.”
Voices from the Market: Denise String
Denise works at Pittsburg Health Center, and she found the market through a flyer posted on her floor. She’d shopped at a similar market at Kaiser before, but says this one stands apart.
“This one’s so much better, and more affordable, and really good,” she said.
On a recent visit, her basket included cucumbers, broccoli, spinach, Thai basil, nectarines, Concord grapes, and okra, with a hopeful ask for plums that, this time, the market couldn’t fill (plum season, it turns out, is frustratingly short). Denise isn’t much of a cook herself. She sticks to what she can eat fresh or toss into a simple salad, and passes the rest to her mom, who handles anything that needs a stove.
“That’s honestly the dream for us,” our team told her. “We love hearing that the food goes to many people.”
Denise also asked where it all comes from, a question our team hears often. Every item at the market is sourced from local farmers, some as close as Concord. For Denise, that’s exactly what she can taste. “It’s so fresh, and the sweetness of it. You can tell it’s not mass-produced.”
What’s Next
Christina and a new intern will be on site at the Pittsburg stop each week, continuing to gather stories from participants and partners at the health center as the relationship between the market and the clinic deepens.
The Pittsburg partnership also allows us to explore a deeper connection between healthcare and food access. Many patients served by the health center are enrolled in Medi-Cal, making Pittsburg a promising place to explore what a “mobile food pharmacy” could look like, where a healthcare provider could connect a patient not only to a recommendation to eat healthier, but to fresh, affordable food that can help make that recommendation possible.
Looking ahead, we hope to explore whether this model could eventually be supported through healthcare funding, including potential partnerships with Medi-Cal health plans. In other words, could a provider refer a patient to a Fresh Approach “mobile food pharmacy,” and could that referral help make the food itself more accessible? As the partnership grows, we hope to learn what it would take to make that vision a reality.
