In many ways, Rodriquez is on the cusp of a nutritional movement: Just this week, New York City’s education department announced it would reduce the fat content in the 800,000 meals it serves daily and ban candy, soda and other unhealthy snacks from revenue-generating school vending machines. Earlier this month, New York Assemblyman Felix Ortiz proposed a 1 percent tax on junk food to generate money to fight child obesity. And lawsuits have been filed in New York–including one by the parents of two overweight teen girls–claiming that McDonald’s and other fast food restaurants misled customers by enticing them with tasty fatty foods. In major cities across the country, community activists also are working getting young Americans to adopt what some call the “food justice movement.” Their targets: teens in the poorest neighborhoods–areas where it is not uncommon to find just one supermarket for 100,000 residents.
Bryant Terry is one of those activists. The founder and executive director of b-healthy!, a one-year-old nonprofit designed help low-income youth develop and maintain good eating habits, Terry fueled Rodriquez’s desire for a healthy diet–no small feat in neighborhoods where produce is scarce and fast food is cheap. Because of Terry, Rodriquez says she feels a little healthier and a little more empowered these days. Fresh off nine months of b-healthy! workshops on nutrition and food politics with nine other inner-city teens, she’s eating better than ever. And she’s even successfully lobbied her corner bodega to stock organic milk for her toddler, Khaliq. “If I have to live in this community, I have to ask for what I want. Word of mouth is powerful,” she says. “Our youth today is too big.”
The statistics bear her out. In 1970, just 5 percent of American adolescents were obese. Today that number approaches 20 percent, according to Francine Kaufman, president of the American Diabetes Association and a pediatric endocrinologist. That American kids are getting fatter is hardly a surprise. The demise of the family meal has been met by an explosion of fast food restaurants and aggressive marketing of super-sized foods to kids. Schools began putting less of a premium on physical education in the 1980s, just as television, video games and, later, the Internet combined to ensure inertia at home. But minorities, especially kids in the inner cities, are carrying more than their share of the weight–a full 35 percent of black and Latino American teens are obese today. “The food choices are poor,” says Kaufman. “It is easier and less expensive to eat fast food and very difficult to find, in some of these neighborhoods, appropriate foods, fruits and vegetables at a reasonable price.” In the end, she says, “it will take a culture change” to reverse the trend.
That’s exactly what those like Bryant Terry are attempting to engineer. “Eating healthy is synonymous with whiteness for some of these kids,” he says. “They’ll be like, ‘Salmon? That’s white people food.’ There are ways to make it more accessible; the first part is about education.” Terry launched b-healthy! (“Build Healthy Eating and Lifestyles to Help Youth”) with a $52,000 grant from Open Society Institute. A culinary school graduate with a master’s in history, he leads workshops at a community center in Manhattan on how to cook, eat a healthy diet and think about the role food plays in urban communities. Over piles of black bean burritos and baba ghanoush, Terry forces kids to think about why they can’t get beets as easily as burgers–and how to take the initiative to change that.
On the other side of the country, similar efforts to teach teens about nutrition are underway. “I sort of think of it as the essential education,” says Alice Waters, the acclaimed Berkeley, Calif., chef-owner of Chez Panisse. Waters also runs Edible Schoolyard in collaboration with the Martin Luther King Junior Middle School, where urban public school kids grow, cook and eat their own produce. “We have to reconnect kids with nature. Whether it is a rooftop garden or whether it’s going an hour out of the city and connecting with a farm or edible landscaping going up the sides of a building in middle of a city.”
The fight against fat is a battle with major economic implications for the entire country. In 2001, then-Surgeon General David Satcher warned that the alarming obesity statistics could translate into $117 billion of healthcare costs and lost wages from obesity-related illness. Naomi Neufeld, a pediatric endocrinologist in Los Angeles, recalls that in 1986, when she had just started a non-profit weight-control program called KidShape, obesity was considered primarily a cosmetic problem that occurred infrequently among children. Today she regularly sees 40-pound two-year-olds, 90-pound seven-year-olds and 150-pound ten-year-olds. This trend has particularly calamitous effects: high blood pressure, abnormal lipid levels, breathing and sleep disorders and psychological issues take their toll on all the morbidly obese. And Type 2 diabetes is ravaging overweight adolescents, especially those in minority ethnic groups more genetically disposed to the disease.
“In the early- to mid-90s we were starting to see children not only with obesity, but diseases that I as a pediatrician was never trained to deal with,” says Neufeld. “I was never really trained to deal with Type 2 diabetes. I went to medical school to take care of kids. Kids aren’t supposed to have this disease.” Until recently this form of diabetes–which stems from the body’s inability to properly use its own insulin and can result in organ failure if left untreated–was called “adult onset diabetes” because it only occurred in people older than 45. Just this month, the Centers for Disease Control announced that one in three U.S. children born in 2000 could develop diabetes before they graduate from high school.
If the first part of the solution is education, the second is working with regional farmers to get precious produce into the cities. Accessing healthy food in Harlem is not always as easy as asking the corner bodega to stock organic milk. And the recent high-profile attempts to tackle the problem have failed to adequately address issues surrounding access. Even if wildly successful neither the “fat tax” nor Big Tobacco-style lawsuits would change the fact that the total number of farms in the Northeast decreased by more than 50 percent between 1964 and 1997, according to the Northeast Sustainable Agricultural Working Group. This translates to less availability of fresh produce and more dependence on sources that are more expensive or from farther away (or both).
A more serious approach is being offered by a movement called Community Supported Agriculture. A CSA is a partnership between a farm and a community of supporters that directly links consumers with producers. CSA supporters in major cities across the country cover a farm’s yearly operating budget by purchasing a share of the season’s harvest in advance. They support the farm throughout the season, assuming the costs, risks and rewards of growing food right along with the farmer. Members help pay for seeds, fertilizer, water, equipment maintenance and labor for a healthy supply of seasonal fresh produce throughout the growing season.
Just Food in Manhattan raises funds to help establish CSAs in some of New York’s most undernourished communities. “Oftentimes inner city area grocery stores will move out, leaving behind a bodega with low quality produce at an inflated cost,” says Just Food’s Kristy Apostolides. “It’s a matter of creating access and making it affordable for everyone in the city. And it’s about keeping the agricultural heritage [alive], particularly in the metropolitan area.” In West Oakland, Calif.–population: 30,000 people, 36 liquor marts, one grocery store–the People’s Grocery has just launched a program called “Collards and Commerce,” which will hire six high school students at $7 an hour to work with area farmers, growing and selling produce while earning school credits through cooking and business classes. (They also run a “Hoops and Hip Hop” program: a basketball league at a local YMCA that is coupled with workshops on healthy eating and fitness.)
Will these types of initiatives be enough to launch the cultural revolution necessary to slim kids down and stave off the predicted diabetes epidemic? Maybe not. But, as Bryant Terry says, it’s better than suing Burger King.
