When Monique Nutter's two nieces and nephew came to live with her seven years ago, her responsibilities changed.

She not only had to worry about making sure the children brushed their teeth and were ready for school on time, but needed to devise a plan to wean the children off a diet that relied heavily on processed food and instead introduce them to a healthier alternative.

"I really had to work out how to cook for these kids, and it got me thinking really carefully about what we were eating and how the food we were eating had changed so much since I was a kid," Nutter said.

She decided to start shopping at local farmers' markets. Nutter would toss potatoes she bought from the market in oil and bake them in the oven to make french fries. The dish became popular with the children, she said.

Nutter also started to investigate local foods, attending dinners hosted by member organizations of the Greater Edmonton Alliance that attempted to bring the ownership of the food system back to a grassroots level.

So when she heard about the Good Food Project, a pilot program spearheaded by Healthy Alberta Communities that allows consumers to purchase locally produced fresh vegetables to be delivered to their homes throughout the summer, she became excited about the possibility of consumers investing more in local food production.

"What the Good Food box offers is a very convenient way to buy local food, and that brings all sorts of benefits in terms of knowing where the food came from, knowing how it was grown, knowing the people growing the food are making a living from it," said Nutter, who acts as a citizen leader of the Greater Edmonton Alliance which is helping support the project.

The boxes, which will be distributed for a six-week period beginning in mid- or late July, offer eight to 10 different varieties of vegetables grown on farms in the Edmonton area. The boxes offer enough vegetables to feed a small family and cost $48 per week.

Paul Cabaj, the project manager of the program and the Alberta representative for the Canadian Centre for Community Renewal, said 250 families have already registered for the food boxes, and 400 families are expected.

Registration does not guarantee a box for a family, as deliveries will be made to neighbourhoods that have the highest concentration of families that have signed up to receive the boxes, Cabaj said.

Drop-off sites and partnerships with restaurants are also being explored. Subsidized boxes also will be offered to 10 per cent of the total number of families participating in the program. These boxes will be offered for $10 per week to low-income families in the north-central neighbourhood.

"The Healthy Alberta Communities project has been working in Norwood, north-central Edmonton for about five years, and one of the things we did a few years ago was work with the community to figure out what were the priorities for the community to make it a healthier place to live, to make it easier for people to be healthier and to make healthy choices," said Kim Raine, a professor in the School of Public Health at the University of Alberta which supports Healthy Alberta Communities. "The big issue in Norwood was food security. People didn't necessarily have access to healthy food at a reasonable price."

The biggest battle is making the healthy choice the easy choice, Raine said. "Almost everyone knows that you should eat more fruits and vegetables and go outside and play."

This article orginally appeared in the Edmonton Journal on May 22, 2009.

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The Good Food Project (PDF; 541 KB)