Health bucks are $2 coupons redeemable for fresh fruit and vegetables at participating farmers’ markets, which the customer receives for every $5 spent at the market.
Some neighborhoods in the city, most notably the south Bronx and parts of east and central Brooklyn, are known as food deserts, where residents cannot easily get fresh and healthy foods, due to high prices or lack of nearby retailers. Limited access to healthy food is one of the causes for obesity and other dietary-related illnesses, which are more prevalent in lower income areas.
“People who are impoverished are generally obese, have a horrible diet, and die very young,” said Scott Keatley, the found of Nourishing NYC, a nonprofit, offering meal services and nutrition education in low-income neighborhoods. “We are dealing with clientele that never had a blueberry before, or don’t know that there is skim milk. We teach hands-on how to make those small changes in the diet.”
As many as 1.4 million New Yorkers live in households that cannot afford an adequate supply of nutritious food, according to Food Works, a policy plan published by Speaker Christine Quinn in November 2010, laying out a vision for New York’s food system.
Many neighborhoods in the city are not healthy food environments, adds the report; they are characterized by a low concentration of fresh food retailers and an abundance of fast food chains. Three million New Yorkers lack fresh food retailers in their neighborhood.
Food deserts form for practical reasons, explained Kubi Ackerman, a project manager from the Urban Design Lab at Columbia University. Ackerman has worked on several programs relating to New York’s food system and is now working on a project to evaluate the city’s agricultural capacity, which will be published next month.
“When large grocery stores decide where to locate ... they are more likely to chose ones where income is higher, where crime is lower, [and] where they think they can make more money. You can’t blame them,” he said, but added that food insecurity is also a result of economic segregation that sometimes falls along racial lines.
The city is doing a lot in this area, he says, but there is a lot more it can be doing.
City Efforts
One of the main programs by the city to deal with this problem is the Economic Development Corporation’s FRESH program. Launched in 2009, the program provides zoning and financial incentives to grocery store operators and developers to open stores in underserved neighborhoods in the city.
Last month, Bogopa Service Corporation received a tax break to operate and expand six supermarkets in Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens. The sales tax exemptions total approximately $450,000 and will help create an additional 36,000 square feet of new supermarket space for a total of approximately 245,000 square feet of new and renovated supermarket space at the six stores after completion, according to the EDC.
Though the FRESH program makes a big difference in neighborhoods, the solution it offers is limited, said Ackerman. In many of these neighborhoods there is a large network of small retailers, corner stores, and bodegas that currently do not or cannot offer fresh produce.
“Urban agriculture can come in where big grocery stores can’t,” said Ackerman, noting one aspect of the desired food system. Food insecurity “is an economic question, [which] has to do with distribution,” said Ackerman. “Urban agriculture can help solve this problem.”
The city is planning to invest in and expand the use of urban agriculture. One of the goals laid out in Food Works is to increase the production of food within the city. According to the report, the recent federal agriculture census counted 20 farms in New York City, in addition to hundreds of community gardens that grow food.
City Council is pursuing long-term protection from development for these gardens, advocating for counting more urban farms in the national farm census, and encouraging rooftop farming on city-owned property.
The Updated PlaNYC, published in April, also dedicated a section for urban agriculture. Currently, 80 percent of the community gardens in the city grow food, more than 600 are on sites maintained by the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), and nearly 500 are registered with the city’s GreenThumb program. This is seen as a resource to enhance the city’s food production.
The city plans to increase the number of volunteers in GreenThumb by 25 percent and also plans to increase its cooperation with nonprofits such as Just Food and GrowNYC to expand urban agriculture and access to fresh produce through farmers’ markets.
Just Food’s mission is to turn food deserts to “islands of sustainability.” Like other nonprofits, Just Food works to educate communities in New York about food growing possibilities and increase neighborhood access to fresh produce—from within the city and from farm and rural areas near New York.
Next...Securing the Regional Connection
Securing the Regional Connection
It is not possible, or desirable, for the city to be completely self-sufficient, said Ackerman. Indeed, both Just Food and the City Council are working to secure regional food sources and increase the relationship with local farmers.
Currently, buying clubs are enabling many local farmers to gain access to the urban market, but medium- and large-scale farmers sometimes find it hard to break into the city, mainly because of transportation and processing challenges. Leveraging the purchasing power of city agencies enlarges the supply channels to the city. This strategy is also meant to enable a larger flow of fresh produce to the city.
Access Is not Enough
In addition to city efforts to ensure the supply of fresh produce, others try to increase the access to them.
But having the fresh produce on the store shelves does not necessarily mean people would buy that produce, said Keatley, whose organization focuses on changing life habits in order to solve the problems of nutrition in underserved communities.
“You have a bad cycle,” he said, “Businesses do not buy the good stuff because the people are not necessarily buying it, and then you do not have access to it and so you never get used to it—for the rest of your life, as a snack you buy Cheetos.”
The city-sponsored programs, said Keatley, make a little difference, but do not deal with the crux of the matter. “Even in the worst parts of Manhattan, access is not necessarily the problem. We can get a truck there. The problem is that people do not what to buy it. What we find is that people don’t want to buy things they are not familiar with,” he said.
“If I had never tried Kale before, I sure as heck wouldn’t buy it,” he added.
