Picture your local convenience store. It might be the 7-Eleven around the block or that one bodega with the best drip coffee. The image that comes to mind is likely filled with shimmery, plastic-wrapped candy bars, brightly colored lotto tickets and, well, unhealthy food.
While bodegas and corner stores often aren’t known for healthy snack options, they are known to foster community. Bodegas, most commonly found in New York City, have a deep history. Puerto Rican and Dominican business owners coined the term in the 1960s, and over the decades they’ve become places to share stories, celebrate cultural identities and strengthen neighborhood ties.
Since they’ve become centerpieces in their communities, bodegas often become a point of outreach and information sharing for nonprofits and other organizations. For bodegas located in low-income neighborhoods, where knowledge about nutrition is lacking and healthy food is expensive and often inaccessible, messages around healthy eating become even more important.t
That’s why LaRayia Gaston decided to fuse the low costs of bodegas with the health of Whole Foods. She launched LaRayia’s Bodega, a healthy take on the traditional convenience store.
Step inside and you won’t find Twix Bars or cans of Pringles, but crystals and candles in the entryway and a counter teeming with healthy granola bars, jars of organic pasta sauce and natural juice boxes.
And while most of the products have “all-natural” or “organic” written before its name, every item in the Westlake, California, store costs $5 or less.
“The price point is the activism, the price point is the focus,” Gaston, the bodega’s founder, told The New York Times.
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Beyond packaged food, the convenience store, which opened in August, also has a café offering homemade meals. Everything, from the salad to soups, is vegan. It’s all priced under $5, with options ranging from Caribbean-style potato coconut soup to jackfruit tacos.
“This is about giving people a chance to have fresh foods,” Gaston said. “There are people who want salads that don’t have the means. I have war vets that are 60 years old that are like, ‘Give me arugula today, baby.’”
The store is part of Love Without Reason, a nonprofit started by Gaston about four years ago. Outside of the bodega, the nonprofit also provides vegan meals to people experiencing homelessness on Skid Row, a 50-block area with over 4,750 homeless individuals. Gaston and volunteers gather food from grocery stores and restaurants that would have otherwise been thrown away and turn it into meals. The nonprofit delivers about 10,000 meals each month to people in need.
Similar to the meal program, the bodega receives misshapen fruit for free and many of its packaged snacks are donated, offsetting some of the café’s costs.
Eventually, the bodega aims to also support veterans, at-risk youth and people experiencing homelessness with jobs and job training.
“We want to address everything — food injustice, food waste, homelessness, giving people a second chance. I wanted to kill multiple birds with one stone,” Gaston told L.A. Times.
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Besides the goal of offering affordable, healthy meals, Gaston aims to make the bodega a space to celebrate neighbors and strengthen community. Whether it’s a weekend birthday party or an open mic night, Gaston wants to foster relationships inside the little store.
That’s why she settled on the term bodega. In Los Angeles, the term “bodega” isn’t often used — “tienditas” is much more common — but Gaston grew up in New York and was raised by Puerto Rican Caribbean parents. Calling her store a bodega is a way of reflecting her roots.
“A bodega is personal,” Gaston told L.A. Taco. “It’s knowing people on your block.”
More: Kids Are Learning to Read in a Place You’d Never Expect: The Laundromat
Tag: healthy food
This Startup Uses Urban Relics to Serve Up Local Food
As more and more people get their news online, it’s not just newspapers and magazines that are going out of business. So is the ubiquitous newsstand.
But instead of bulldozing these small spaces or allowing them to become derelict, Chicago is allowing e.a.t. (which stands for education, agriculture and technology), an Illinois nonprofit dedicated to innovating local food systems, to convert its defunct newsstands into food kiosks.
The very first “e.a.t. spot” is a 45-square-foot healthy food option that opened this week in Chicago’s downtown Loop neighborhood — bringing local produce and grains to residents and workers in the Windy City five days a week. Partnering with the food delivery service Irv & Shelley’s Fresh Picks delivering food and Streetwise, a workforce development agency, four more healthy food stands are set to open in downtown Chicago before year’s end.
Chicago issued its very first Emerging Business License to the initiative, whose menu includes a tofu scramble wrap and an Asian kale salad with shitake mushrooms. The founder of e.a.t., Ken Waagner, says that the menu will probably change quarterly, and that he doesn’t “want too boutiquey food stands. We want it to be for everybody.”
Waagner also stressed the effort’s focus on sustainability. “We want to make it sustainable. Before we say we’re going to open eight, we want to make four work.”
And the good of these “e.a.t. spots” doesn’t end with serving healthy meals. According to DNAinfo, the kiosks are staffed with workers at risk of being homeless.
“It’s a neat social enterprise-meets-social experiment,” says Waagner. “That’s what it ultimately is, so we’ll see.”
In our opinion, bringing healthy food and jobs to those in need sounds like recipe for success.
How One Man Is Reducing Food Waste and Cutting Grocery Bills at the Same Time
Doug Rauch, the former president of Trader Joe’s, is at work on a new venture that hopes to extract value from the food that grocery stores throw out.
In June, Rauch opened a new venture in Dorchester, Mass. called The Daily Table, a store that sells discounted food that’s slightly past its sell-by date.
According to Lindsay Abrams of Salon, 40 percent of the food produced each year in America is wasted, in part because supermarkets must throw it out if its sell-by date — a number that a report from the Natural Resources Defense Council and Harvard Law School found is nearly arbitrary — has passed.
Rauch and others argue that there’s nothing wrong with this food and that it could be used to solve the problems of hunger and food insecurity that many Americans face. Rauch further believes this unnecessary food waste can be turned into a profitable business venture.
Offering affordable, healthy food to the working poor — it’s a crazy enough idea that’s likely to work.
MORE: How 40 Pounds of Leftover Broccoli Sparked A Farm-Friendly Innovation
Does Taxing Soda Actually Improve Americans’ Health?
Obesity in America is an expensive problem—one analysis calculated the costs of obesity-related medical expenses at $147 billion in 2008. For years politicians have debated whether a tax on unhealthy items would help to turn the obesity rates around, and some cities have gone forward with proposing taxes on soda, including San Francisco, which will ask voters to decide on a soda tax on the November ballot.
But a new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests that taxing any one food product often results in consumers switching to an equally unhealthy item. The report, entitled “The Effect of Prices on Nutrition: Comparing the Impact of Product- and Nutrient-Specific Taxes,” suggests that the better way to go would be to tax the precise ingredients that are detrimental to health—sugar, salt, and fat—as increases in these taxes do result in lowering the overall consumption of junk food.
The study, which analyzed 123 million food purchases, found that a 20% tax on sugar would result in a 16.41% drop in sugar consumption, while a 20% tax on soda would reduce soda purchases by about 4%, but might send soda lovers scurrying to other unhealthy options. The study’s authors conclude, “nutrient-specific taxes on sugar, fat or salt have much larger effects on nutrition than product-specific taxes on soda drinks or packaged food.”
MORE: Can a Simple Lesson Really Persuade Kids to Finish Their Broccoli?
Meet the Chef Who Believes Everyone Deserves a Five-Star Meal
Deanna Turner trained at the prestigious Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts in San Francisco, and worked at a chef at the upscale Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs before deciding that there were people who needed her culinary artistry more. The 57-year-old Turner, known as Mama Dee to the many who love her, runs the kitchen at the Comitis Crisis Center in Aurora, Colo., serving homeless veterans, runaway teens, and others living in poverty, providing shelter for them in a barracks once used by Fitzsimmons Army Hospital.
Mama Dee marinates and seasons the food with the same care she took when she cooked for paying customers, and pays attention to the presentation of the food on the plate. She remembers the food preferences of each child she serves, making them feel special. “The minute you start to treat a kid like an institutional kid, they start to think of themselves as an institutional kid, and they start to act like an institutional kid,” James Gillespie, the development director of the crisis center told Joey Bunch of the Denver Post.
Mama Dee told Bunch, “Some of these people don’t get a meal for two or three days, so when they get here, I want to make sure it’s good. No matter what they’ve been through, when they get here they’re eating five-star. I can do that for them.” For her work, her town has honored her with the “Amazing Auroran” award.
MORE: How 40 Pounds of Leftover Broccoli Sparked A Farm-Friendly Innovation
How to Turn a Vending Machine into a Farmers’ Market
Ready for a healthy meal? Hit the vending machine. Luke Saunders put up the first Farmer’s Fridge at Garvey Food Court in the Chicago Loop, and the smart idea is already expanding. It’s a high-tech, low-cost spin on vending machines: The automated, refrigerated kiosk dispenses fresh, healthy salads for as little as $6.99. In addition to gourmet salads, Farmer’s Fridges serve healthy breakfasts and snacks, with local, nutrient-dense ingredients. The team makes everything fresh each weekday morning, seals the items in recyclable plastic jars, and delivers them daily by 10 a.m., keeping internal costs low enough to offer low prices to rushed workers and hurried shoppers. They cut no corners on health, sourcing and preparing each meal carefully, and partnering with New York-based SPE Certified for independent validation of their products’ nutritional values. Customers are flocking to their smart balances of whole grains, veggies and lean protein, and if any items are left at the end of the day, Farmer’s Fridge donates the food to local charities. Look out, Chicagoans, a new kiosk might be in your neighborhood soon.
The Company That’s Keeping Junk Out of School Cafeterias
Word association. I say, “school lunch,” you say…. “Gross.” “Junk food.” “Mystery meat.” It doesn’t have to be that way, and a young Chicago couple is proving it. They didn’t like the choices available at their son’s preschool, so they started Gourmet Gorilla.* Four years later, the company delivers 10,000 better meals and snacks to 90 elementary and preschools each school day. They source about 70% of their ingredients locally and from organic suppliers. Now, I’m fully aware that money is the elephant in the room for school lunch choices, especially in cash-strapped urban public school systems. But there’s always a way to do a bit better. Our kids deserve it.
*I’m betting this is a play on the irresistible kid’s book Goodnight Gorilla.