Hardly
any of us get the recommended amount of fruits and vegetables in our
daily diet, but I can tell you from experience that making salad is
expensive, time-consuming, and more complicated than a typical lunch.
It’s not exactly fast food. Yes, you can get a salad at many fast food
outlets, but have you seen the prices? A startup founded by Luke
Saunders called
the Farmer’s Fridge aims to change all that, by offering salad from vending
machines, for as low as a dollar in selected low-income areas.
Most
of Saunders’s machines are installed at private office buildings, food
courts, and convenience stores, where the salads cost upwards of $7.
Eventually, he wants to drive down the price to the point where anyone
can afford them.
The Farmer’s Fridge machine at the East Garfield
Community Center is his initial attempt to bring healthy food to a
low-income area. The buck is a nominal fee—the salads are actually
day-old donations that didn’t sell at the corporate locations. (All of
the salads are perfectly good for up to three days.)
It
sounds like a good idea, although you can see where the economics could
be the project’s undoing. I would imagine there would be a great many
salads
not sold for $7, leading to plenty of $1 salads, but how
could you sustain the project with such massive markdowns? The question
in
the article at The Atlantic
is: would people each healthier food if it were more convenient? There
are some who will never eat fresh vegetables no matter how cheap and
convenient they are. And although my family will eat salad, it has to be
custom made or offered salad bar-style, as everyone hates some
ingredient that the others love.
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