SEATTLE — Seattle is teeming with healthy food, sold from farmers markets and high-end grocery stores. But not in Robert Jeffrey’s neighborhood.
Crime and housing foreclosures abound in the city’s Central District, and the best-known eating spot is a fried chicken joint. Jeffrey, a pastor and longtime community leader, spearheaded an effort to bring locally grown vegetables to the historically African-American neighborhood, but things haven’t gone as planned.
“It’s very hard to fund the things we need to fund,” Jeffrey said. “We’re at our last penny. We’re busted. But we’re determined to do it.”
Even as nutritional experts link poor eating habits in low-income neighborhoods to myriad health problems, people trying to break that cycle are running into a number of roadblocks.
Farmers markets are growing more popular, with their numbers rising 18 percent to more than 4,300 between 2004 and 2006, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Organizers, however, say many low-income people stay away for reasons including perception, price, location and problems such as the inability of some markets to accept electronic food-stamp cards.
Jeffrey figured the best way to cut the price of fresh produce was for the community to grow it itself — an approach he hoped also would create jobs and increase community involvement.
His organization, Black Dollar Days Task Force, leased 22 acres of land and planted greens, intending to sell its crops and those of some Eastern Washington farmers at the parking lot of Jeffrey’s church.
Lack of farming knowledge among the organization’s members, however, nearly led to the death of the entire inaugural crop. The former pasture land the group leased needed to be tilled several times in preparation for planting. It wasn’t, and the soil dried too fast.
“We know that the ultimate end of this thing is to create self-sufficiency,” Jeffrey said. “We found that self-sufficiency has to start from the ground, literally from the ground.”
Jeffrey’s group is pressing on in an area where others have failed; a farmers market in a low-income area south of Seattle closed about two years ago.
The need for encouraging better food choices in such areas is clear from a 2007 survey by Adam Drewnowski, director of the Center for Public Health Nutrition at the University of Washington. He found that obesity rates in high-income Seattle-area ZIP codes were as low as 6 percent, while those in low-income areas was as high as 30 percent. Drewnowski’s study used data from 8,000 respondents of a survey in King County, which includes Seattle.
“Obesity rates in Seattle are very different depending on where you live,” Drewnoswki said.
In east Oakland, Calif. — a low-income, often violent area of the Bay Area city — David Roach started a farmers market run by some of the state’s black farmers. It has grown from six farmers to more than 30, but the operation is struggling.
“Our model still hasn’t worked yet — financially speaking,” Roach said. We’re “trying to create something that hasn’t been there, trying to make people to come out where they haven’t felt safe to come out before.”
It can be a challenge to change people’s eating habits, said Gabrielle Langholtz, a spokeswoman for Greenmarkets Farmers Markets in New York City. The nonprofit organization, founded in 1976, runs about 45 markets in the city, including some in low-income neighborhoods.
“Sometimes when people talk about obesity and poverty, they say the demand doesn’t exist, but we have found that the demand is very high, but not in every neighborhood,” Langholtz said.
Another problem is the shift from paper food stamps to food-stamp cards.
Paper stamps were easily redeemed at farmers markets in the past, but many farmers balked at expensive card-reading devices, Langholtz said. Greenmarkets now uses a card service that serves all farmers, but redemptions remain lower than they were when paper stamps were accepted, Langholtz said.
Jeffrey hasn’t lost hope. His group is going back to the fields, and he wants to have a market ready by the fall.
Even with the organization’s struggles, community members have not lost interest — dozens showed up to help transfer the crops that almost died to a temporary field last month and a local university has stepped in to revise the market’s business plan.
“We’re just taking it slow and steady,” Jeffrey said. “Farmers are going to be technical advisers and giving equipment. We believe it’s going to work.”
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