When it comes to healthy nutrition and low-income communities, you’ve probably heard these nuggets of conventional wisdom:

• Processed foods are unhealthy. The healthiest diets are composed of whole, unprocessed foods like fresh fruits and veggies, healthy protein sources and natural whole grains.
• Fresh produce is often out of reach for low-income families because it’s more expensive than processed foods, is more prone to spoiling before it can be used and is less likely to be sold in markets in low-income communities.

These things are true. Yet Drexel nutrition professor Jennifer Quinlan is hard at work this spring developing a plan to sell more processed foods in low-income communities. She hasn’t overturned the evidence on that conventional wisdom or lost her mind; instead, she’s seeking a new, sustainable path toward healthy food access.

“Over the years, I’ve seen efforts over and over again to get fresh food into low-income communities and…