Posted on 05/14/2010 4:19:46 PM PDT by Libloather
First lady’s plan targets ‘food deserts’
posted by Landon Hall
May 13th, 2010, 7:42 am
No, not food “desserts.” That’s the way I first read it, too. Michelle Obama isn’t trying to take away our pie and ice cream.
We’re talking “deserts,” places across America where people don’t have easy access to basic, healthy foods like fresh vegetables. The first lady’s Childhood Obesity Task Force report, released earlier this week, says 23 million people live in low-income urban or rural areas that are more than a mile from a supermarket.
As a county somewhere in between urban and rural, O.C. doesn’t have this problem to the extent that surrounding counties have, but it does exist, says Dr. Patricia Riba, founder and medical director of the Children’s Wellness Program with the Coalition of Community Clinics. One such place is the Oak View neighborhood of Huntington Beach, a diverse one-square-mile area where Riba and her friends are trying to get a farmer’s market going.
Riba says she drove the neighborhood looking for healthy-food purveyors and found surprisingly few. There were plenty of food trucks, however, selling mostly junk food. “Some of these trucks do sell healthy foods, like peppers, but you have to dig for it,” Riba said. It’s easy to see, she says, how a mother with no car trying to keep track of three or four kids would rely these mobile vendors as the first option for meals or snacks.
A key element of the first lady’s “road map” to drastically reducing childhood obesity is a program called the Healthy Food Financing Initiative. Under the Obama administration’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2011, $400 million would be spent on providing “innovative financing” to grocery stores to expand into low-income areas. The money also would be used to help smaller stores like bodegas and convenience stores stock healthier foods, as well as bring more farmer’s markets to underserved areas.
Some seed money is just what the people in Oak View are trying to round up to start their farmer’s market. Iosefa Alofaituli, community director of the Oak View Renewal Partnershp, says $35,000 has been raised and another $15K is needed to get a weekly market going at Ocean View High School.
Yesterday I went to the weekly market in downtown San Juan Capistrano and got a lot for about $20. You know how puny the green onions are at the store? I got a massive bundle for one whole dollar. But this market is only open from 3 to 7 p.m. on Wednesdays. Here’s a list of certified farmer’s markets around the state, and here’s a more navigable local list.
About 17 percent of children in the U.S. are obese, and the overall rate has remained steady the past decade. But here’s a troubling trend among that stack of data: More than 10 percent of kids age 2-5 are obese. This is a demographic that doesn’t shop for its own food.
Mrs. Obama’s “Let’s Move!” initiative seeks to bring the overall childhood obesity rate back to 5 percent by 2030, which is where it was in the 1970s.
Who wants to build a grocery store in “dessert” gangland USA. A fine point the first horsey doesn’t seem to get.
But as I recall, our first horsey didn’t mind chasing the poor off from her hospital. And for that no-show job she was paid handsomely.
What hypocrites both these delusional Marxists are. Didn’t I read that first horsey would use taxpayer money to build 2000 new grocery stores in gangland USA. Maybe we will rebuild Soviet Union style mega-tenament USA next.
Don’t forget, in 1918 the Soviets banned private ownership of houses. Now that the government owns 96% of all mortgages, we’re close.
They did that at our local Petsmart parking lot and it didn’t cost any $50k.
Farmer’s markets implies there are farmers nearby. Don’t be surprised if there aren’t any farmer’s markets for the inner city po’folk.
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