The Big Bite
by Gary Phillips
Food, or rather types of food, and its availability is probably not something anyone reading this post worries about. Nor does it seem the poor and low-income residents in the Southland are starving per se, yet these are communities in what are called food deserts. The Alliance for Healthy and Responsible Grocery Stores released a report this past July, Hungry for Change, looking at this problem. Understand this grouping is primarily a stalking horse for the United Food and Commercial Workers union looking to organize unorganized workers—particularly the UK-based Fresh and Easy chain owned by Tesco opening stories over here (full disclosure, the grassroots organization of which I’m the president of the board, Coalition L.A., is part of this grouping). But, as they said on Seinfeld, not that there’s anything wrong with that, the organizing, and their stats are accurate insofar as they relate to what the wrong foods are doing to underserved, mostly minority households.
In South L.A. (or South Central as I still refer to my old ’hood), according to the UCLA Center for Health Policy Advocacy cited in Hungry for Change, one third of teenagers there are obese, nearly twice the county average; diabetes afflicts one out of ten people; and rates of high blood pressure and high cholesterol among residents are nearly ten percentage points higher than the county average. Tellingly, in West L.A. (and I’m not sure where the boundary is determined in this data) there are twice as many grocery stores. There’s a correlation to full service stores and matters like obesity, where South Central youth are eight times more likely to be obese than teens on the west side.
You have to unpack a lot of variables from that kind of projection. It’s not like there aren’t fast food outlets and corner liquor stores selling overpriced loaves of bread in West L.A. Also, it’s not like there aren’t low income people living in West L.A., though you can generalize that those on the west side average a larger income than in South Central, and have access to other resources like gym memberships, nutrition classes for their overweight kids, and so on. You can go into your local Jack in the Box and get the two regular tacos for ninety-nine cents plus a few pennies in tax. A bunch of asparagus at my local Von’s costs, well, I don’t know what it costs right off the top of my head, but I know it costs more than a buck.
I like braised asparagus and I likes me some dollar tacos as well. I certainly don’t enjoy them on the same plate but do reflect more, particularly as yet another birthday approaches (and being past the half century mark these damn occasions keep happening way too closer together), about my food choices. Good food takes time to shop for, the money to do so, and preparation to make. Just ask Oprah. Here’s a woman who has more money than Galactus, can afford and did have a live-in chef, and yet also lost the battle of the bulge. She got thin at one point yet now is back to 200 pounds she admits, and has proclaimed she’s off dieting and will concentrate on exercise and healthy eating.
Oprah certainly has the wherewithal to make those choices. Conversely, in a 2009 Christian Science Monitor article linked from the Alliance site, reporter Daniel B. Wood offers a vignette about Olga Perez, who lives in East L.A. He writes about the single mother who lives with her two daughters and a grandchild in their two bedroom apartment. She works as a dental assistant. Not having a car, she has to take a bus and transfer to another to reach a good-sized market about eight miles away, at the cost of $5 for a round trip. She’s limited to what she can carry home by hand. This does beg the question of what her daughters are doing, given the assumption that at least one of them is of a certain age as she’s had a child of her own. The article doesn’t address this, but even if the mother had a helping hand, having to take groceries home on the bus isn’t convenient.
More telling in Wood’s article is the glimpse at Dr. Cheryl Resnik, an assistant professor of clinical physical therapy at USC, who runs a clinic in Perez’s neighborhood. She had to buy a scale that went to 500 pounds, replacing their 250 pound capacity one, when heavier teens started coming in for check-ups. “Children in these low-income ‘food desert’ communities don’t have enough healthy options and it’s hurting them in a dramatic way,” Resnik said.
Arguably you can walk into a Kentucky Fried Chicken and eschewing the deadly double down sandwich, get their so-called grilled chicken instead of the more fatty and sodium-high regular fare with that thick breaded coating. This grilled product is chicken baked in an oven; then the uniform grill marks are added in some kind of crisping process, I gather. Though El Pollo Loco, which brags about its flame grilled chicken, also uses baking at some of its stores, but all its chicken winds up on a grill over an open flame, and is less greasy that what KFC offers in either format.
You can also go into your local McDonald’s or Wendy’s and get the plastic boxed salad, even one with grilled chicken mixed in. I never have because that’s not why me and countless others go into these joints. We go there for our fix of sweet and salt, those fries, specifically those McDonald’s frites, fried in oil laced with beef tallow that gives them their addicting taste. How then does a salad of mostly cold and bland lettuce you can get at a Carl’s Jr. or Burger King compete with food that is better tasting to eat? It’s hard to eat correctly.
An 11oz. bag of Lay’s potato chips on sale can go for $1.99 or less with coupons whereas the four nectarines I recently bought at Von’s cost me $3.01. The fruit is better for you, but if you’re on a limited budget, and have kids who watch TV commercials, which food are they going to want? Sure, they can be trained to eat properly, as one imagines the prototypical west side mom into yoga and pH balance making sure her kids only have baked chips and sliced fruit in their lunches. But these kids have to interact with their peers and, as much as healthy eating is reinforced, so too is the snacking goodness of Doritos sweet and spicy chili chips.
Activists and health professionals want grocery chains to not only build more outlets in urban areas (they say the costs are higher and land availability is low), but to offer the kinds of selections found on the west side, Santa Monica, etc. There’s also been a call for the boutique chains like Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods to build in those areas. But TJ’s won’t even build a store in the newly gentrified downtown L.A., so them coming further south or east, with East l.A. having one of the worst ratios of full service supermarkets to residents, isn’t likely happening any time soon. Fresh and Easy, described as a cross between a Trader Joe’s and a Ralph’s, might be trying to fill that niche, what with a store in Compton, another in Maywood and when it opened a store in South Central at Adams and Central this past February (part of a mixed-use affordable housing project) the friggin’ marching band from nearby Jefferson High was part of the opening festivities.
Obesity has actually risen in the United States at the same time when there’s a push for community gardens, farmer’s markets and healthier options and yoga studios as ubiquitous as a Starbucks. These food contradictory trends are symbolized by actress Kirstie Alley, who took the weight off on the Jenny Craig program and gained the pounds back and then more. Currently she’s doing a reality TV show, Kirstie Alley’s Big Life, as distinct from her previous show, the Fat Actress sitcom. Alley is both a victim of her weight and able to cash in on it too with the show and a product line called Organic Liaison, which sounds an eco-themed imprint of Harlequin romance books.
Unless they get on The Biggest Loser, the reality show about losing weight, the people in the food deserts of South Central and East L.A. won’t have their struggles with maintaining healthy eating chronicled in front of an audience, with sponsorship support. Instead, their struggle, as much as what all else happens in their communities, will go on, regardless of whether Kirstie or Oprah reach their personal best.
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