When Meisha Gayle moved to southeast Raleigh from Jamaica about 10 years ago, one aspect of daily life brought her more anxiety than anything else: Grocery shopping.
Southeast Raleigh has been federally classified as a food desert ever since the city’s two Kroger locations closed in 2013, leaving many residents miles away from affordable grocery stores.
“You had to travel out of your way or purchase at a significant markup, and a lot of the time the produce and the food was not a quality that was very high, so you were purchasing things that were spoiling very quickly, that had clear damage, because that was all you had access to,” Gayle recalled…