The series will look at public health in more than a dozen post-industrial American cities. From his travels around the country, the producer says Syracuse seems to be on the right track.
View full sizeJonathan Bell videos the Farm Fresh Mobile Market at the Onondaga Health Department's Women, Infants and Children center on Wednesday. The footage will be included in a series, called "Building Healthy Communities," to be shown on PBS.Syracuse, NY -- A PBS dcomentary crew came to Syracuse this week to show people doing a very ordinary thing: Buying fresh fruit and vegetables at a market.
The food market, though, is not a typical grocery store. It’s on wheels, going from neighborhood to neighborhood so that people who can’t make it to supermarkets can eat healthy foods.
On Wednesday, the PBS crew found the Farm Fresh Mobile Market outside the Women, Infants and Children office on West Onondaga Street.
Syracuse will be profiled in the PBS series, “Building Healthy Communities,” expected to air next year.
The series will look at more than a dozen American cities and how their infrastructure affects public health, said Harry Wiland, one of the producers. The series has taken three years to film. The cities include Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Detroit and New York. Wiland said Syracuse represented one of many post-industrial American cities in transition.
“They are post industrial, their center has been lost,” Wiland said, “and people have gone out to the suburbs, and it has decimated the local economy.”
Wiland and his film crew took a bus tour on Monday with Upstate Medical University students and city officials to look at how the structure of the region, its neighborhoods, its zoning and its pollution affect the health of residents. They visited Skaneateles Lake and Onondaga Lake to see what happens when lakes are used as a source of water or for waste. From what he has seen in Syracuse and around the country, Wiland believes that the city is on the right track.
“I think that there is ... really a concerned community to effect change and there are many programs working together,” Wiland said. “I think Syracuse is the right size to reach many members of the community.”
The Farm Fresh Mobile Market is run by the Southside Interfaith Community Development Corporation. It is funded through grants from Welch Allyn and The Gifford Foundation.
The market provides city residents with a cheaper and more convenient alternative to grocery stores, said Diane Turner, president of the CDC. It’s particularly convenient for the elderly because it can be difficult for them to carry their groceries on the bus, Turner said. Each of the market’s 10 stops serves more than more than 50 visitors a day.
On Wednesday, Turner drove the truck as the PBS crew recorded.
“It was just natural for me. It didn’t seem like I was being filmed because I like doing what I do,” Turner said. “Once it’s aired, maybe other cities will catch on.”
Earlier in The Post-Standard: Background on the documentary and Dr. Richard Jackson, the person at the center of the story.