Listen to this story profiling The Food Trust’s healthy corner store work in Philadelphia. The idea of improving access to healthy foods to people living in food deserts has gotten a lot of attention lately. But community food activists understand ”it takes a combination of access, innovation, and education to change peoples’ habits for the better.” The Food Trust has helped bring supermarkets to underserved areas, and is working with hundreds of corner stores to stock and promote healthy choices:

“On several store racks, there are signs that rate products green, yellow, or red, based on how nutritious they are. And there are flashy little cards with recipes for how to use some of the most nutritious ingredients. Each of these meals should feed a family of four and cost about five dollars.”

The story highlights the complexity of changing food habits.

Program works to put fruit, veggies in small stores to encourage better habits

The Columbian, April 30, 2012.

Clark County Public Health’s Healthy Neighborhood Store program in Vancouver, Washington, helps small stores sell fresh produce, to encourage people to eat healthier. One participating store owner wasn’t sure the program would work at first, but says customers are now starting to buy the fresh fruits and vegetables, and that his stock rarely spoils before it’s sold.

Now that the pilot project is over, Clark County has seven more stores lined up to participate. The program is funded by Kaiser Permanente and the Centers for Disease Control. Stores will receive tips, signs, and posters, but are in charge of purchasing and selling the foods on their own. The program is being designed so that store owners can customize the program to best fit the needs of their own customers.

 The Food Trust in Philadelphia organizes the citywide Healthy Corner Store Initiative. Participating stores receive a $100 bonus when they join, baskets and refrigerators for displaying and storing fresh produce, and technical assistance. The Food Trust also introduces store owners to suppliers. This article profiles one store that has participated in the program for the past year. The store owner says people have been buying more produce and she “felt like it was a good investment.” Before the program started, the store carried only bananas and plantains; now it stocks a variety of other fruits and vegetables.

On April 18, 2012, The New York Times published an article raising questions about the link between food deserts and obesity. Citing two new studies (more info. here and here), the article questions the effectiveness of fighting obesity by improving access to healthy foods and challenges the idea that poor neighborhoods are often food deserts. See the full article here: Studies Question the Pairing of Food Deserts and Obesity.

Mari Gallagher’s Research and Consulting Group, which has been researching healthy food access issues for years and helped popularize the term “food desert,” issued a response to the article the same day. Gallagher argues the NYT article was misleading in many ways, including that it “fails to note the large number of studies that have identified food deserts and the subsequent large number of studies that have found a link between living in underserved areas and poor health outcomes. The article fails to note the shortcomings of the two studies it touts, even though the authors of those studies themselves go to great lengths to describe those deficiencies.”

Gallagher argues the article also misrepresents the work of healthy food advocates by giving the impression that improving access to healthy foods is the only solution being pursued: “To my knowledge, no one of any credibility has ever suggested that access was the entire solution or that anything involving the complicated relationship between diet and health is simple.”

Gallagher continues: “Our issue is not with the two new studies; we thank the authors for their valuable contributions. Our issue is the reporter’’s sloppy job of getting the facts straight. Some of this could have been settled by some simple Google searches. She muddied the water at best, misled at worst, and left the inaccurate impression that food access and the concept of food deserts does not matter.”

Read the full response here:  Response to New York Times Article on Food Deserts & Obesity.

Read another response to the NYT article, this one by Mike Curtin, CEO of D.C. Central Kitchen. “No Simple Answers for a Complex Problem,” Huffington Post, April 23, 2012. Curtin discusses his experience working to improve food access for people living in underserved neighborhoods in Washington D.C. One of D.C. Central Kitchen’s strategies is to “distribute fresh fruits and vegetables to corner stores that would not otherwise sell them for reasons of cost and capacity.”

After discussing research from D.C. about food deserts, poor people, and obesity, he goes on: “Food access is a complicated issue. It involves distribution, storage, education, employment, economics, cultural norms, and policies designed and implemented at local, state, and federal levels. While this web is as vexing as it is complex, it will not become less troublesome, tragic, or costly if we do nothing. “

New York City’s Green Carts Initiative is part of the city’s strategy–along with its Healthy Bodegas Initiative–to improve access to fresh fruits and vegetables in underserved areas. “Since 2008, the city has made provisions to authorize 1,000 new permits for street vendors who can sell only raw fruits and vegetables in areas of the city that have been designated as in need of them.” A new film, The Apple Pushers, explores the challenges these vendors face. Becoming a vendor of a mobile cart is less expensive than the start up costs for opening a brick and mortar store, and vendors can access low interest loans. Successful vendors tend to be resourceful, able to secure a good location, and build relationships with their customers. Other cities across the country are considering starting similar programs. The article goes on to describe other strategies for improving access to healthy foods in underserved areas.

Rural Grocery Summit III: Strengthening Our Stores. Strengthening Our Communities
June 5-6, 2012
Manhattan, Kansas
Access to healthy food options is not just an urban issue.  Small towns across America are loosing their only grocery store, forcing them to drive 100s of miles for food.  That is why our friends at the The Rural Grocery Initiative will host their third national Rural Grocery Summit in Manhattan, Kansas on June 5-6, 2012. The agenda looks great, packed with “how to” sessions to help your small town out.  Don’t miss this event if you are interested in the “triple bottom line” of rural grocery benefits – economic development, improving health, and community sustainability.

Specifically, the rural grocery summit will:

• highlight the latest and best thinking about rural grocery stores and rural community sustainability;
• emphasize the nutrition, economic development, and community benefits rural grocery stores provide;
• offer rural grocery store owners and rural grocery stakeholders the opportunity to talk about possible solutions to shared problems;
• provide a discussion of rural grocery best practices, and
• chart a path for sustainable rural grocery stores.

Questions concerning conference content? Contact

Dr. David Procter, Director
Center for Engagement and Community Development
Kansas State University
cecd@k-state.edu

Newly-elected Washington D.C. councilman Marion Barry recently criticized Asian-owned corner stores in D.C., saying the shops are “dirty.” Later he said they should sell healthier products and improve their stores. The councilman is being criticized for the negative remarks he made about Asian store owners, and the incident has people talking about the sometimes tense relationship between the Asian and black communities in D.C.

This article describes some of the challenges small stores face in selling healthier products, and includes an interview with an Asian store owner who participates in DC Central Kitchen’s Healthy Corners Program. The program–funded with a $300,000 grant from the city–includes the launch of an affordable wholesale delivery service that store owners can use to order healthy foods. The store owner interviewed in the article points out that not all Asian store owners have bad relationships with their customers, and suggests that communication can be difficult not only for “Asian retailers, but pretty much all immigrants in the community…The immigrants have the same issue where there’s a language barrier, and also the cultural differences they haven’t quite grasped. It’s just a process they go through. I don’t know how to close that gap real quickly.” He also suggests that customers ask their local store to carry healthier options or specific products they are interested in.

• $135,000 in multiple small loans to local businesses from fellow community members
• A $400,000 loan to the Chatham Marketplace, a local food co-op. In this case, Bringing it Home Chatham, LLC — an initiative the Slow Money North Carolina founders established — brought together 16 individual investors to help the Co-op refinance a balloon loan, locking in a lower interest rate and reducing monthly payments by a third for the Co-op while providing lenders a better return on their investment than they could get through a savings account or a CD.

It didn’t take all that long to line up 16 lenders. The folks who had helped start the Marketplace met and suggested names. It was a community effort and one-by-one people agreed to participate. The loan was attractive to investors who wanted to make their money work in their home community. Many of them had already made micro-loans through Slow Money NC and they felt confident their funds would be repaid. And, they would be getting a better return on the Marketplace loan than they would from a savings account or CD.

The loan was also a very good deal for Chatham Marketplace. It locked in a much lower interest rate, reducing the grocery’s monthly payment by 1/3. That means a savings of about $2500 a month – no small change for any food enterprise in these times.

Join us to experience Slow Money North Carolina’s passion for facilitating peer-to-peer local investments, including more details on how they made the Chatham Marketplace loan work, and additional loans that have connected local investors with local businesses.

Elementary and high school students in Chicago marched together to ask corner store owners to begin carrying healthier products. Teachers are supporting the effort: “It provides a healthy future for them and helps to provide the kind of community we want to live in. We know economics drives what people purchase in any community. These young people are saying they will purchase these healthy items if they become available, and they won’t buy the junk food,” said one teacher.

The Bronzeville Alliance, the neighborhood group working on the campaign, suggested healthier food options that stores could carry, including baked chips, individual fruit cups, string cheese, fruit, and granola bars. The group is creating a community garden network, as well as working on its “corner store campaign.”

The Long Beach Neighborhood Store Partnership is hosting food demonstrations at corner stores in North Long Beach. The project, which started in 2009, works with five corner stores in the area to encourage the availability of healthy products, as well as labeling that makes it easy for customers to find healthier items. Customers learn to make healthy meals and snacks using food available from each market. They’ll also get free tastes and recipe books. Students from a nearby high school will assist with the demonstration.