Initiative establishes healthful food stores

Diet-related diseases and obesity are high in inner-city neighborhoods.
WASHINGTON POST
PHILADELPHIA -- When Larry Lawrence drops into ShopRite, he steers his shopping cart to the towering mounds of produce. "It is like I am being drawn," he said, "by the peaches and the plums and the bananas."
Lawrence, 57, has been eating more fruits and vegetables, and fresh fish, too, since the sprawling store opened five blocks from his house in Eastwick, an industrial swath of southwest Philadelphia that was chosen in the 1950s as the nation's largest urban renewal project. Now, Eastwick is one of the first sites of a new strategy for social change: a government campaign to bring supermarkets stocked with healthful food into neglected inner-city neighborhoods to improve public health.
The Pennsylvania Fresh Food Financing Initiative, leveraging 30 million in state money with 90 million in private funds, is the most ambitious of a spate of state and local projects around the country. They represent a different model for public nutrition programs, which have relied since the 1960s on federal subsidies, such as food stamps and WIC.
Healthful food is scarce in many inner-city neighborhoods, where much of the food comes from corner markets and greasy takeout places. Instead of subsidizing shoppers, the projects shift the emphasis to the private sector, offering coaching and financial inducements for grocers to go into areas they shunned for decades.
What research shows
These initiatives grow out of new research exploring the relationship among proximity to fresh food, the nation's obesity epidemic and diseases such as diabetes that are affected by diet. "We tried to make the connection between grocery stores and public health," said R. Duane Perry, executive director of the Food Trust, a nonprofit group that, in a pioneering 2002 study, produced maps showing that low-income neighborhoods of Philadelphia with few or no supermarkets had high death rates from diet-related diseases.
A study in Chicago, released earlier this year, measured the distance from every city block to the nearest grocery store and fast-food restaurant. It found that people in what it called Chicago's "food deserts" died early in greater numbers and had more diabetes, obesity and high blood pressure.
Other efforts
Baltimore created a Supermarket Initiative in 2002 that has used city economic development funds to attract 19 stores so far. The California Legislature passed a bill last month that would give low-income residents discounts to buy fruits and vegetables -- and help mom-and-pop stores carry more fresh food.
Chicago's planning department held a "grocers' expo" in February for executives from supermarket chains across the Midwest, who were handed a book touting 50 spots in Chicago where stores are needed, plus financial incentives the city could offer. And the National Conference of State Legislators just brought lawmakers to Philadelphia from Louisiana, New Mexico and Michigan to learn how they might replicate the food-financing initiative.
Here in Philadelphia, the initiative's first two years have yielded a central lesson: Despite the fervor of politicians, civic groups, bankers and several grocers, creating successful supermarkets in poor city neighborhoods is hard. It is daunting to train workers, maintain security -- even to acquire enough land.