Jicama in the 'hood

Legislators and local food activists are fighting to get healthy, organic food into the nation's poorest neighborhoods.

By Tracie McMillan

Read more: Poverty, Life, Food and Travel

Aug. 2, 2006 | Amid a crowd of New York City public high-schoolers, Antonio Mayers, 16, is trying -- with modest success -- to wrap his head around the idea of freezing a mango pit for later consumption as a popsicle.

"How long you put it in the freezer?"

"Just until it gets, you know, frozen. It's really good," says Michael Welch. Welch is leading Mayers and his tittering cohorts in a cooking class coordinated by EatWise, a New York nutrition and food systems education group. As simple as that mango may seem, for Welch's students -- and their counterparts in the many high-density, urban areas around the country that researchers have deemed "food deserts" for their lack of grocery stores -- fresh fruit, indeed fresh anything, is largely inaccessible. Welch has carefully selected today's dishes with his students in mind, a calculation that has resulted in a menu featuring both local sweet corn and Philadelphia Cream Cheese. "Not all these kids can afford the high-end and organic stuff," explains Welch. "I wanted it to be something they can find in their neighborhood." Continuing his presentation, Welch shows his skeptical students some of the less-familiar ingredients they'll be using: jicama, raw corn sliced from the cob, honey. Much of the produce was grown in local dirt, a particularly relevant fact given the venue: Stone Barns, the Westchester County estate James Beard-recognized chef Dan Barber has transformed into a working sustainable farm, education center and restaurant. The site is just 30 miles from Manhattan, but the combination of fine dining at Blue Hill Stone Barns restaurant and the rolling farm it overlooks are a world away from the concrete grid where Welch's students buy their groceries. Indeed, Stone Barns is to New York foodies what Alice Waters' Edible Schoolyard and Chez Panisse are to food-conscious San Franciscans: an institution committed to wholesome food and local ingredients, set on convincing the next generation to avoid industrial food in its favor. It's a lofty goal, one routinely -- and effortlessly -- sold to food acolytes, but today Stone Barns is aiming at a different audience.

There is, it appears, something lost in the translation -- and the lesson this July Saturday hits a few snags. After Welch's class has scarfed down the results of the recipes they've prepared -- the fruit salad and tuna wraps are deemed "slammin!" but the three-bean salad met with skepticism -- the group reassembles to offer their opinions.

"What did you like about the food? What do you like to make in the summer?" he asks the crowd.

"Pop tarts!" yells out Stephen Colsn, 14.

Ebony Williams, 18, disagrees. "Toaster strudels!"

"I like those!" says Colsn.

While teens' taste for sugary junk is nothing new, in this case, the kids are motivated by more than just an insatiable sweet tooth. While Colsn says he understands the importance of local food, and that he should eat more vegetables, he's quick to note that it's also easier said than done near his home in Harlem.

"At the Garden of Eden, everything is maintained," he says, referring to an immaculate, upscale grocery a 15-minute walk from his apartment. "But sometimes it costs more money. I just go to the bodega or the corner store."

Colsn might not know it, but he's just expressed one of the most salient critiques of the earnest, though sometimes elitist, slow food movement typified by Barber, Waters and their ilk: For most Americans eating healthfully is not a question of finding locally grown, organic apples. It's a question of finding an edible apple near their homes, period.

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The sheer lack of quality food in low-income neighborhoods is bringing some unlikely colleagues to the foodie pioneers' table. Spurred by concerns equal parts public health and fiscal prudence, a burgeoning movement of politicians, lawyers and advocates -- and the occasional retail developer or small business owner -- is leading a charge to improve access to better food among the nation's poor. In doing so, they are infusing public policy with a notion traditionally considered a luxury: That fresher, higher-quality food is worth some trouble.

In an effort to bring the message home, Rep. Nydia Velazquez, D-N.Y., last week introduced in the House the Bodegas as Catalysts for Healthy Living Act. Velazquez was spurred on by dramatically high rates of obesity and diabetes in her New York district, and her legislation, if enacted, would create a grants program designed to help small stores stock healthier food like fresh produce and low-fat milk, market it aggressively, and supplement their work by partnering with local health groups. The bodega bill marks the first federal effort around issues of structural access, but Pennsylvania has been testing the local waters for a while. In 2004, Gov. Ed Rendell established a state program to encourage the development of supermarkets in low-income areas found to be lacking them; since its inception, the program has spawned seven new grocers and helped four existing ones stock healthier options.

These formal legislative efforts represent the beginning of a shift from questions of consumption -- prescribing certain foods while proscribing others -- to access. As such, they also form the top tier of a vast and uncoordinated campaign to get healthy food to the nation's poor neighborhoods. Some efforts garner ridicule, as has an initiative by New York City Council member Joel Rivera to limit the density of fast food restaurants. Other projects focus on raising fresh produce right in the neighborhoods, as did the South Central Urban Farm in Los Angeles until its bulldozing a few months ago. Still others focus on retail. Brooklyn, N.Y., will soon supplement the nationally known Park Slope Food Coop -- sometimes derided as a yuppie magnet -- with a similar enterprise in East New York, a venture motivated by concerns over that low-income community's high rates of obesity and diabetes.

If using bodegas for health promotion sounds far-fetched, store owners and public health experts are betting they can prove you wrong. Velazquez's bill has backing from the Bodega Association of the United States, and was developed partly in response to recommendations from the New York City health department. What's more, store owners like Christian Diaz, a Bushwick, Brooklyn, bodeguero, are coming around to the cause, eyeing health food and fresh produce as a new market opportunity. When Diaz opened his bodega 18 months ago, he started out stocking mostly whole milk, but soon ramped up his low-fat options.

"I was only bringing in, like, two gallons" of low-fat milk at first, says Diaz. "Now I'm carrying a case and a half. Little by little, people are starting to get more oriented on the low-fat products." What's more, he's eager to start carrying quality fruits and vegetables, a service offered by less than one-third of the neighborhood's bodegas, according to a recent health department study. (The same research also found that eight in 10 of the neighborhood's food stores are bodegas.) Diaz initially explored the idea of stocking fresh fruits and vegetables, and then largely jettisoned it once he researched refrigerator costs. "The reason I put 'market' on the name of the business is I wanted to put in a fruit market," says Diaz. "People do come in and ask for it."

Part of the inspiration for legislation like the bodega bill comes from a small but growing body of research suggesting a link between poor access to food and higher rates of obesity and related conditions like diabetes and heart disease. "You can't choose healthy food if you don't have access to it," says Mari Gallagher, a national expert on local markets and community development who authored a recent report on "food deserts" -- areas with no food stores or ones a distance away -- in Chicago.

Next page: Groups like People's Grocery are the grass-roots flip side to the affluent, consumer-based charge led by Pollan and Waters