Will Philadelphia’s experiment in eradicating ‘food deserts’ work?

Washington Post ^ | June 8, 2012 | Sarah Kliff

[grundle]

Philadelphia has the highest obesity rate and poorest population of America’s big cities. It also has an ambitious plan — launched out of 632 corner stores — to put healthy food on every table.

The $900,000 investment in better health depends on apples and oranges, chips and candy, $1,200 fridges and green plastic baskets. The results could steer the course of American food policy.

Philadelphia is trying to turn corner stores into greengrocers. For a small shop, it’s a risky business proposition. Vegetables have a limited shelf life, so a store owner must know how much will sell quickly — or watch profits rot away. He also lacks the buying power of large supermarkets and is often unable to meet the minimum orders required by the cheaper wholesalers that grocery stores use.

With shelf space at a premium, shop owners must pick and choose the products they think will sell best. Chips and candy and soda are a sure bet. Eggplant? It’s hard to know.

[Chode]

you can lead a cow to vegetables but you can't make it eat them...

[OrangeHoof]

Wait. Don’t we hear repeatedly from the mostly Eastern media that the South is the most obese and has the highest poverty? Now, it’s Philly??? That doesn’t compute unless this report is simply inventing facts to further a fraudulent agenda. That wouldn’t be the case, would it?

[scrabblehack]

Down in New Orleans they used to sell bags of fruit at traffic lights. I heard it was a front for Farrakhan.

[Nepeta]

Any day now, after the “food desert” theory flops, we’ll see proposals for Government Feeding Stations in every neighborhood, where each of us is given a carefully metered and managed amount and quality of food in return for performing certain kinds of exercise—say, stationary bicycles which would in turn be used to generate electrical power—keeping us all healthy, trim, and above all, in compliance with state goals of how we should eat, behave, and remain useful. Maybe Government Washing Stations will follow, to be certain we all wash up before bed, and brush (and floss) our teeth. It would all be for our own good. And how good we would be.

[LadyDoc]

as others have commented: we used to have corner grocery stores, but they closed partly because of the larger stores nearby but also because of robberies and shoplifting.

They are now replaced by 711 type stores, often run by Pakistanis or Koreans.

[kearnyirish2]

“Down in New Orleans they used to sell bags of fruit at traffic lights. I heard it was a front for Farrakhan.”

They do the same on Broadway in Newark; it looks completely unregulated, and is completely Hispanic. The residents of the North Newark Food Desert don’t seem interested as they pass on the sidewalk, though; I guess the government will have to require them to buy the fruit (possibly in conjunction with the mandated ObamaCare insurance).

[kearnyirish2]

We already have “cooling centers” in NYC during summer power outages, where the “community” can gather in air conditioning. Self-reliance is a thing of the past...