ONE FIVE Grocery Store Targets 37915 Food Desert

Chris Battle sits on the tailgate of his white Chevy Silverado in the parking lot of 2265 McCalla Ave., a former Dollar General just off Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue. He stares at the boarded-up building with soft, bright eyes, like a man who can already see what isn’t there yet.

This is the future home of The ONE FIVE Grocery Store, a full-service neighborhood market and project of BattleField Farm & Gardens intended to eliminate the food desert in Knoxville’s 37915 ZIP code. Real nutrition, fresh produce and a space for community including a café and meeting space, all built on a straightforward principle: every item sold at just one nickel over cost.

Sitting across from Battle in a lawn chair, I find myself flashing back to the last time someone had a vision for a grocery store on this corridor. It was 2006-ish and caddy-corner to where we’re sitting now: a much-heralded IGA anchoring the then-new Five Points Village Plaza. 

It closed less than a year later.

I’m not privy to the reasons it failed, but I can make an educated guess. In a neighborhood facing the kind of entrenched socioeconomic challenges found in East Knoxville, now and even more so 20 years ago, you can’t simply plop down a conventional grocery store and expect it to succeed by conventional measures. 

From the outset, ONE FIVE doesn’t even pretend to operate by those rules.

The need is undeniable. Much of the 37915 ZIP code meets the USDA’s definition of a food desert: an area where many residents live in poverty and lack convenient access to a grocery store. 

But there’s a Kroger just a couple miles away, right? What about delivery service? 

For many residents, especially seniors and those without reliable transportation, “just a couple miles” is a chasm. For those living in poverty, Instacart is a luxury they can’t afford. And when eggs, milk and fresh produce keep climbing in price, access alone doesn’t guarantee affordability.

Researchers would go a step further and classify the area as a “food swamp,” where dollar stores, convenience stores and fast-food restaurants vastly outnumber places to buy fresh, healthy food.

“When it’s easier to buy weed than produce, it’s a problem,” Battle says.

The consequences: higher rates of heart disease, diabetes, hypertension and obesity in communities where geography and economics limit access to nutritious options.

“So, what makes you think ONE FIVE will be sustainable?” I ask Battle, squinting at him in the late-morning sun.

He laughs. 

“It’s not,” he says. Not by itself, anyway. If ONE FIVE is going to work, he says, the community will have to help carry it.

Battle has always been an out-of-the-box thinker. 

As senior pastor of the historic Tabernacle Baptist Church, he began noticing a disconnect between the spiritual needs he addressed on Sundays and the practical realities many of his congregants faced the other six days of the week. 

In 2018, he started a community garden on church property, sharing its yield for free in baskets along the perimeter. The garden helped, but Battle quickly realized tomatoes alone weren’t going to solve a systemic problem.

He encouraged other churches to start gardens on empty plots, and a few did. He worked with Nourish Knoxville and other community partners —  Women in Agriculture, SEEED and 5 Points Up —  to launch the Eastside Sunday Market at Dr. Walter Hardy Park, open every Sunday from June to September from 1-4 p.m. 

Then an opportunity arose to take over a two-acre urban farm on the outskirt of Parkridge, formerly Abbey Field. Battle accepted, rebranding it BattleField Farm, a play on his name but also a statement of purpose: this is where the fight against food insecurity happens. When that property was sold, Battle purchased the property of their present location at 3624 Boyd’s Bridge Pike. 

I follow Battle’s Silverado from garden to garden, stopping at each one for a look around and a nod to the people and organizations who tend them. “I just help get them going and then watch them go,” Battle says. Each one, he says, is an important piece of a larger effort to reconnect the community with fresh food. 

There’s the “concrete garden,” the sprawling 100-bed Pastor Richard S. Brown Jr. Community Garden, Chestnut Street Community Garden, and a Three Sisters plot beside the Morningside Stop N Go tended by African refugees. At the flagship farm, we pause among neat rows of watermelon and okra just beginning to push through the dirt. 

Of course, the growing is only half the equation. Distribution is equally important. That’s where “Fannie Lou” comes in, a converted minibus that serves as BattleField’s Veggie Van. Named for civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, it delivers fresh produce directly into targeted neighborhoods weekly. I remember seeing it in last year’s Juneteenth Parade, volunteers passing bags bulging with vegetables to grateful families lining Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue.

“I haven’t eaten fresh produce in years,” Battle recalls hearing one customer say.

His goal is to make sure that’s no longer the case.

After years spent growing food, distributing food and finding creative ways to connect people with both, ONE FIVE feels like a logical next chapter for BattleField Farm & Gardens.

Getting the store off the ground, however, will require community support. A luncheon this Thursday will formally introduce the concept to local leaders, elected officials and potential donors while launching a fundraising campaign for the project.

One-time and recurring donations are already being accepted. Battle said the store’s long-term sustainability will depend on a combination of philanthropy, volunteers and customers who are able to pay more than the at-cost price of their groceries, effectively helping subsidize access for their neighbors. 

Battle knows the odds. Grocery stores are difficult businesses even under ideal circumstances. Opening one in a neighborhood that national chains and independent operators alike have largely avoided is an even steeper challenge.

But standing in front of the boarded-up building on McCalla Avenue, he seems less concerned with what might go wrong than with what could go right.

“Everybody deserves access to healthy food,” Battle says. “Your ZIP code shouldn’t determine whether you can get fresh fruits and vegetables.”

Fresh food is the vehicle. The destination, he says, is dignity, health and a stronger future for a community that has too often been overlooked.

The rest, he believes, will grow from there.

Battlefield Farm & Gardens: Website | Facebook | Instagram