Which U.S. City Is Close to Eliminating Its Food Desert?

Food deserts — areas without access to nutritious food — dot urban areas. As we previously pointed out, attracting a big-box supermarket isn’t the only solution. San Francisco is proving this by adding fresh produce to bodegas that once relied solely on peddling booze and smokes to the community.
The City by the Bay’s comprehensive approach can be traced back to an initiative started nearly 25 years ago. The Food Trust of Philadelphia, one of the most ambitious programs of its kind in one of America’s poorest and most unhealthy big cities, began in a public housing development in South Philly, with volunteers piling mounds of fruits and veggies on one long table outside the project each week. Since 1992, they’ve taken their work beyond that first farmer’s market, improving access to healthy food and nutritional information for nearly 220,000 residents in poor neighborhoods — making Philadelphia one of the first cities to meet the First Lady’s “Let’s Move” challenge to eliminate food deserts entirely by 2017.
“We started to see that farmer’s markets provide seasonal access to fresh fruits and vegetables, not a long-term solution — or the only solution. They really only can open in summer on the East Coast. We realized it was really important to look at the longer term and more comprehensive approaches to food access,” says Candace Young, The Food Trust’s associate director of research and evaluation. Around 2004, “the first thing we did was we mapped out areas of the city that had low access to supermarkets and high-diet related deaths — the pockets of the city that needed better access. We sent that report to policy makers and practitioners, the health community and its advocates, the food retail community. What was built from there was this multi-million dollar public-private initiative to build new or even just renovate supermarkets around the whole state.”
Just how much of a difference can access to fruits and vegetables in a neighborhood actually make? Research shows that living in a food desert isn’t simply an inconvenience for locals or a matter of how long the bus ride will be; it’s linked to serious health problems like obesity, hypertension, heart disease and diabetes. But The Food Trust’s work appears to be making a dent. Between 2006 and 2010, obesity among kids in Philly decreased by five percent — the first downward trend since 1976.
A key aspect of The Food Trust’s work in Pennsylvania involved renovating bodegas — corner stores where the average elementary school student in Philadelphia buys 350 calories worth of food on each visit, according to a 2008 study. More than one quarter — 29 percent — stop in twice a day, five days a week. That means they’re consuming roughly an additional pound of food from this retailer every week.
In response, The Food Trust convinced corner store owners to sell more fruits, vegetables, low-fat dairy and whole grains and offered money for renovations. Since the Healthy Corner Store Initiative launched in 2004, it’s established a network of 650 stores. With $30 million in public financing and $90 million in private financing, it can pay for upgrades that are as easy as buying new refrigeration for $500 and as tough as building a whole new mega-mart for several million, Young says. In total, the organization funded 1.67 million square feet of retail development and created 5,000 jobs.
“Corner store owners are a very different business than large supermarkets. They’re a convenience model: you want to get in and out. Oftentimes, you go in to buy chips and a drink, a pack of cigarettes or a lottery ticket,” Young says. “Partly what we’re trying to do is shift to a culture of health around corner stores, where they’re seen again as small grocery venues. Instead of packaged foods, I may need to grab eggs, some milk, some bread and a couple of fruits for me and for my family.”
There’s still some debate about whether these interventions are the best way to deal with food deserts. Some critics point to a lack of causal evidence and say the theory’s “intuitive” underpinnings don’t check out. “If you live next to a Mercedes dealership, that doesn’t mean you’ll buy a Mercedes,” Adam Drewnowski, an epidemiology professor at the University of Washington, tells the Washington Post. “And it’s the same with living next to a grocery store: That doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll start eating salads.”
After the first pilot at a handful of stores, The Food Trust documented a 35 percent increase in the sale of healthy items and an even bigger boost — 60 percent — in produce sales. That means $100 in extra profits every week for sellers.
Anecdotally, too, customers seem to be buying. “Now, when I’m talking to people who come into the store, they are asking: What do you have fresh today? And I can say I have apples. I have oranges. I have all kinds of stuff,” says Catalina Morrell-Hunter, one storeowner in North Philadelphia who joined the network after 15 years in business. “We have a refrigerator in the store that we didn’t have before. It has yogurt and fresh fruit and fresh vegetables. And I try to get other products that are better for you, healthier and lower calorie. I’m more conscious of that now.”
The Food Trust’s supporters point to a drop in obesity as evidence something’s clearly working, but they’ll also readily admit fresh food at corner stores isn’t the only explanation. In the City of Brotherly Love, access to fresh and affordable food, amenities for exercise and information to make healthy decisions all go hand-in-hand. Philly’s also added nearly 30 miles of bike lanes, launched a media campaign about sugary drinks that was seen 40 million times and established parent-driven “wellness councils” in 170 public schools.
“We believe that supermarket access is one piece of a comprehensive approach,” says Yael Lehmann, The Food Trust’s executive director. “While bringing in healthy food stores into neighborhoods, we also want to be teaching kids how to eat healthy in schools, we want to be having cooking demonstrations at recreation centers, running farmers’ markets in neighborhoods. All of these things combined is what can improve the health of people and their neighborhoods.”

How Do You Get People to Eat Better? Bring Healthy Food to a Nearby Corner

The cash register has never been busier at Radman’s Produce Market in San Francisco. At 201 Turk St., it’s located smack in the middle of the Tenderloin district, a neighborhood associated with homelessness, substance abuse and extreme poverty and one that you don’t want to be wandering around late at night. Within a two-block radius of Radman’s corner store, police recorded 730 crimes within the past six months.
All of which makes the offerings on owner Fadhl Radman’s shelves even more surprising. He doesn’t peddle the junk food, liquor, cigarettes and pornographic magazines that are the primary items sold at many other bodegas in the area. According to a 2011 count, there are 270 outlets selling tobacco in the district — more than one quarter of all the outlets in the entire city, all condensed in a couple blocks.
“Poison, it’s just poison” is how resident Steve Tennis defines what’s in stock at many other corner stores. “Mothers with little kids in their arms [or] in their strollers. What is the first thing these children see that are two, three years old? Candy, alcohol, dirty books. Nothing healthy,” he tells New American Media. “If this is your experience, week in and week out, it doesn’t take long for you to get hard wired to that food source.”
Because of recent renovations to the store he’s operated since 1998, Radman now sells fresh fruits and vegetables, many farmed in the nearby Central Valley, and has a butcher cutting and grinding meats. He stocks 50 types of fresh produce — staples like apples, oranges, bananas, grapes and tomatoes and less familiar items like celery, broccoli, red lettuce, Italian parsley and kale. It’s made his 2,250-square-foot store a much-needed island of greenery in the impoverished district.
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“The whole idea is to try to modify people’s eating habits,” Radman tells the San Francisco Examiner. “Build up their interest in fruits and vegetables.” At the same time, he can improve his bottom dollar, gaining a bigger profit from produce with a higher sales margin.
Unable to persuade a full-service supermarket to open nearby, the Tenderloin has always struggled with nutritional offerings. The changes to Radman’s store were backed by a city program known as Healthy Retail SF, a $60,000 effort to fix up five stores in San Francisco neighborhoods defined as food deserts, a low-income area lacking healthy food providers. Healthy Retail SF simply looked at existing retailers in the community and invested in the best assets: the bodegas. The collaborative effort between the Mayor’s Office, the Office of Economic and Workforce Development (OEWD) and the Department of Public Health, gives funds and business advice about how to reconfigure shelving and store layout, upgrade refrigerator units and advertise successfully.
“Small investments can go a long way towards creating healthier and more sustainable communities,” Joaquin Torres, OEWD’s deputy director, writes in an email.
After the new upgrades are installed and stores reopen, the next challenge is ensuring the business’s long-term stability. The program’s backers liken their efforts to a three-sided stool: community engagement, physical redesign and business development. Without any of the three, the plan teeters over.
A 2012 survey found that 57 percent of Tenderloin citizens do most of their shopping in other parts of San Francisco. That purchasing power — two-thirds of residents spend more than $100 a month on groceries — means that about $11 million leaves the Tenderloin every year. Redirecting those dollars from Safeway and other supermarkets back into local businesses isn’t easy, but so far, the city’s efforts have gained traction. One store has increased overall sales by 23 percent since the remodel, and all the locations have documented increase in the number of sales of healthy fruit.
You can’t change neighborhoods overnight. But as Healthy Retail SF is finding, adding produce to bodega shelves is a good place to start.
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Rebuilding New Orleans’s Lower 9th Ward, One Bag of Groceries at a Time

New Orleans native Burnell Cotlon has spent the last five years on a mission. He’s turning a two-story building that was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 (along with most of his Lower 9th Ward neighborhood), into a shopping plaza. Already, he’s opened a barber shop and a convenience store, and as of last November, is providing the neighborhood — identified as a food desert — with its first full-service grocery store in almost a decade.

The Lower Ninth Ward, which experienced catastrophic flooding during Hurricane Katrina, has had a much slower recovery than most New Orleans neighborhoods. Before Katrina, the area had a population of around 14,000 and boasted of the highest percentage of black homeownership in the country. According to the last census, however, only around 3,000 people live in the neighborhood. Many of its roads are still torn up, it lacks basic resources and the closest full-service grocery store is nearly 3 miles away in the neighboring city of Chalmette.

Burnell’s merchandise is still mostly limited to non-perishables and fresh produce, but he hopes to add poultry, bread and dairy this year.

 

This New Federal Program Provides Better Food to Low-Income Individuals

A new federal program will allow low-income families to eat healthier food and spur the local economy at the same time.
The Food Insecurity Nutrition Incentive (FINI), approved alongside this year’s Farm Bill, will put $100 million over the next five years into the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP, aka food stamps). As CBS News reports, the money will go towards programs such as Double Up Food Bucks, which allows farmer’s markets to match the amount a SNAP recipient might spend, meaning they can double up on fresh fruits and vegetables. According to NPR, the $100 million will also be matched by private funding, so there’s a potential of $200 million going towards the program.
Crossroads Farmers Market, outside of Washington D.C., is one of the many farmer’s markets that already run a similar program. Rosie Sanchez, a SNAP recipient and market volunteer, tells NPR that the program “is very important…You know why? Because I get up to $15 for free. So I have $30 every week. With my $30, I’m able to buy fresh, local — it’s not expensive. It’s the best!”
MORE: An Oasis in One of America’s Largest Food Deserts: the Local Quick Mart
The initiative is important because the average daily amount offered to low-income Americans through SNAP is only $4.50 a day. And because fruits and vegetables at the grocery store tend to be more expensive than, say, a bag of chips, recipients can develop health concerns due to poor diets, such as heart disease, diabetes or obesity. Thanks to the new program,  SNAP recipients have effectively doubled their purchasing power for healthier fare.
A policy brief from the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Johns Hopkins Center found that “if Americans increased their daily consumption of these foods to meet federal dietary recommendations, the nation’s costs related to the treatment of cardiovascular disease alone could drop by $17 billion.”
Another plus with FINI is that it entices communities that are considered food deserts (low-income areas with limited access to fresh produce) to start farmer’s markets. Encouragingly, access to local fruits and vegetables is already increasing, the Project for Public Spaces (PPS) found that the number of farmer’s markets increased from 2,863 in 2000 to 7,175 in 2011.
An investment of $100 million over five years doesn’t sound like a lot of money when the payoff could be much bigger.
DON’T MISS: 50 Million Americans Suffer From Food Insecurity. Here Are 6 Simple Ways You Can Help

3 Newcomers That Are Finding a Better Way to Feed the World

While young people often have the reputation of being picky eaters and filling their plates with only chicken nuggets and French fries, that’s hardly applicable to all teens and twenty-somethings. In fact, in 2014, many youth are working to solve the crucial problems of our food system — including childhood obesity, food deserts and high prices.
Enter Food Tank, a think tank that’s working to build a global community for healthy eaters. It has set its sights on young people who are developing and employing local ideas that can, and already are, having a widespread impact where it really matters. Here, three foodies that make Food Tank — and us — excited about the (edible) future.
Can you imagine having an online cooking show and publishing a cookbook all before you turned 15? That’s exactly what Remmi Smith did — and that’s not all the Tulsa, Okla. resident is doing to inspire her fellow teens to cook nutritious meals. She’s also a student health ambassador for Sodexo, a food service company, and is a member of Future Chefs, which helps urban teens find work in the restaurant industry after graduation.
Tyson Gersh, 25, is playing the long game with Michigan Urban Farming Initiative (MUFI), a nonprofit organization he founded that works directly with communities to convert empty lots into working produce farms. With an aim to “promote education, sustainability and community,” as its website says, MUFI’s 2,500 volunteers are creating a new generation of self-sufficient, local food producers, while also making people more aware of the origins of their food.
We all know that kids love sweets, and it’s okay to indulge them once in a while. At the young age of 13, Nicky Bronner wasn’t about to lay down when his parents tried to deprive him the processed junk foods he loved. So he and his father started Unreal Foods, a brand of sweets made from sustainable palm oil, grass-fed dairy and traceable cocoa and excluding corn syrup, GMOs and preservatives. Today, at 17, Nicky’s candy is now available at big chains like Target and Kroger, putting healthier snacking delights into mouths all over the U.S.
Read about the other innovators at EcoWatch.
MORE: How Much Food Could Be Saved if College Dining Halls Saved Their Leftovers?

One in Five Baltimore Residents Lives in a Food Desert. These Neighbors Are Growing Their Own Produce

Boone St. Farm operates on two vacant plots in the center of East Baltimore Midway, one of dozens of neighborhoods in Baltimore identified as “food deserts.” Cheryl Carmona adopted the land in 2010 with two goals — that it serves as an urban farm that grows and provides fresh produce for its neighbors, and as a community garden where residents can learn about growing their own food.
Dozens of neighbors have pitched in and, four years later, Boone St. Farm has grown thousands of pounds of affordable produce. Residents on food stamps pay only $5-10 a bag. The community plots are used for gardening workshops and offer classes in nutrition to students at the nearby public school. As Boone St. Farm enters its fourth season, Carmona plans to include local cleanup initiatives and other projects aimed at making the farm an essential part of the neighborhood. 
 
 

Keeping Communities Healthy By Restocking the Corner Store

We think of corner stores as places where you can conveniently buy a bag of chips or some soda pop. But in many low-income cities around the country, the food sold at these shops isn’t just consumed at snack time — it’s served at mealtime.
In neighborhoods like the Bronx in New York City, a scarcity of grocery stores drives many residents to food shop entirely at local bodegas. Unfortunately, the absence of healthy choices in these stores can lead to poor diets—which in turn leads to poor health. In fact, the Bronx has the highest obesity rate among NYC’s five boroughs at a startling 30.5 percent. (In comparison, just 13.9 percent of Manhattanites are obese.)
“More than 1 in 6 adults in the Bronx is now overweight or obese, and has developed or is at risk of developing related illnesses like diabetes,” said city Health Commissioner Dr. Thomas Farley. “It is crucial that we address the issue of access to healthy foods in high needs areas.”
ALSO: A New Study Yields Surprising Results About Low-Income People and Food Deserts
So if residents can’t get to healthier fare, why not bring it to them?
As NY1 reports, 170 out of 200 corner shops in the Bronx neighborhoods of West Farms and Fordham are working with the City Health Department to stock up and advertise healthier fare to customers as part of the Shop Healthy NYC initiative.
“Instead of being bombarded with the usual advertisements, you can look right in the store and see baskets full of fruits. You can walk right up to some snacks, but they’re healthy snacks; they’re fruits and nuts. If you want to get a candy bar, you have to ask for them because they’re behind the counter,” City Health Commissioner Mary Bassett told the news station.
This simple plan to get more fresh produce into bellies is clearly working. Shop owners told NY1 that sales of healthier foods in these neighborhoods has increased 59 percent from 2012 to 2013, and profits are either staying the same or even increasing.
DON’T MISS: An Oasis in One of America’s Largest Food Deserts: the Local Quick Mart
“It’s a very, frequently repeated misconception that the junk in these stores is there because that’s what people want, but that’s not true,” Bassett said.
Based on the success of the Shop Healthy program, the city plans to expand it to other neighborhoods in the Bronx as well as to neighborhoods in Brooklyn.
The small changes that New York City bodegas are making aren’t difficult to implement nationwide. As you can see in the video below, shop owners make simple changes such as placing baskets of fruit by the cash register and removing sugary drinks from eye level, replacing them with water and other low-calorie beverage options.
When more than one-third of American adults and 17 percent of children are obese (costing the country $147 billion per year to treat), it makes a whole lot of sense to get the country on healthier diets.
It’s time to turn the corner on the corner store.
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MORE: Maryland’s Public Experiment to Combat Poverty and End Obesity

Feeding the Needy in Paradise: Hawaii Brings Farmers’ Markets Right to Their Door

Hawaii may be paradise for vacationers, but not all locals are living the resort life. As in the other 49 states, Hawaii has its share of residents suffering from food insecurity and relying on food stamps to survive. So, in Honolulu, the GreenWheel Food Hub is working with farmers’ markets, like the Kuhio Park Terrace market in Kalihi, to make healthy, local foods available to residents enrolled in SNAP. Like similar programs, GreenWheel allows people to use EBT cards to purchase “Green Bucks,” which can then be used at almost any vendor at the farmers’ market. It’s a great way to increase families’ access to locally grown produce, fueling bodies and communities alike, but GreenWheel doesn’t stop there. It’s also building “micro markets” to bring healthy options directly to people who can’t get to the farmers’ market themselves, like those living in low-income housing in more remote areas or people with mobility challenges residing in senior living facilities.

Why It’s Time to Forget About “Food Deserts”

Innovation is often about changing the way we think about a problem, sometimes even changing the terminology so that we can focus on a better solution. That’s what John Bare wants to do: Instead of diagnosing and pointing out the nation’s food deserts, he wants to empower a cure for the problem with a name. In creating the Food Oasis Movement, Bare shifts the attention to meeting the demand for fresh fruits and vegetables, rather than assigning blame for the lack of healthy produce. He’s identifying innovators and their creative ideas for engaging families and supporting their desire to learn about healthy cooking and choose nutritious foods. With new programs emerging in cities including Philadelphia, Chicago, and Atlanta, the oasis is certainly growing.

Will Philly Be Known for Healthy Produce Instead of Cheesesteaks?

The first food most people would associate with Philadelphia is the cheesesteak—tasty and popular, but not exactly nutritious. Philly isn’t quite known for its fruits and vegetables, but Healthy Corner Store Initiative, is the nation’s biggest city-wide effort to bring healthy foods to convenient stores. The proactive initiative requires store owners to take small, low-risk steps toward stocking healthier items, meant to protect and support the business as it transforms from a source of sugary drinks and salty snacks to an easier source of nutritious foods. Not only has the successful partnership with the city department of health and local philanthropy Food Trust helped grow the program to over 600 stores in the city—it has also reached out to nearby Norristown, Penn., and over the bridge to Camden, N.J., to consult on similar programs for cities with similar struggles.