Students Seek Food That’s Fresh, Not Fast

The corner of Alvarado Street and Beverly Boulevard in Los Angeles is a fast-food lover’s paradise. A Winchell’s doughnut shop shares the mini-mall there with a liquor store that also sells an array of chips and sodas, a frozen yogurt store and a Mexican takeout restaurant called El Burrito.

For a group of high school and college students on a recent Saturday, the intersection provided a vivid reminder of the limited healthful food options available around their homes and schools.

“There’s poor nutrition and not many options,” said Nancy Molina, a student at L.A. Trade Tech College. “And many people don’t have transportation. They take what’s there. It’s a matter of what we have available.”

Spurred by an interest in examining how students could push for better food in their neighborhoods, Molina participated recently in Project Cafe, a program aimed mostly at teaching Los Angeles Unified School District students about the nutritional options in their schools and communities.

In partnership with several local nonprofit groups, Project Cafe, which stands for Community Action on Food Environments, is working in three neighborhoods -- near MacArthur Park, near USC and in South Los Angeles.

Students were asked to walk the streets near their homes and schools to map out the locations of supermarkets, liquor stores and doughnut shops, and to identify vacant lots that could be resurrected as farmers markets.

Project organizers hope the activity will encourage students to push for better access to more healthful food, through farm-to-school programs; community markets and gardens; and better selections in vending machines, supermarkets and grocery stores.

Although the smell of a greasy breakfast from a taco truck tempted them, Molina and a dozen other local students fortified themselves with water, oranges and bagels with light cream cheese at a local labor center.

They then grabbed disposable cameras, colored pencils, clipboards and maps and fanned out into the area around MacArthur Park, toward specific quadrants that each group of four was asked to map.

Mayra Gonzalez’s group walked around an area near Olympic Boulevard and Alvarado. They found fast food and some Asian restaurants, but not a single source for fresh fruits and vegetables.

“People in our group ... were accustomed [to knowing] that we don’t have a lot of grocery stores,” said Mayra, 17, a senior at Belmont High School. “There are more fast-food restaurants than anything else.”

The school district has already banned the sales of soda and junk food on campuses and plans vegetable and fruit bars at all schools, but school officials say there’s still much more to do.

The soda ban, said trustee Marlene Canter, the Board of Education’s most vocal advocate for healthful food, taught school officials that much needed to be done to change long-standing practices and habits. “Raising our consciousness on a daily basis is what’s going to get us to change,” she said.

Officials are working to modernize school cafeterias, increase the number of places where students can get food on campus and consolidate food ordering to provide fresher fare and better choices.

Next month, the district plans to start weekend farmers markets at schools in each of L.A. Unified’s eight subdistricts, a project that officials hope will bring employment to students and extra revenue to schools.

In addition, the federal government is requiring that by next year, educators across the nation develop districtwide nutrition and health policies.

Although Los Angeles Unified has taken steps in the right direction, Canter said, campuses must still change their cafeteria food selections.

Even though nachos meet the federal nutrition guidelines, Canter said, “nobody is going to convince me that nachos should be a main dish for students. And they are served at every single school.”

Students who participated in the food mapping project complained that their school grub was often inedible and said that a push for better food on campus persuaded them to join Project Cafe.

Belmont High senior Erika Peraza, 18, said, “the food is really not good at all. When you get a chicken salad, the chicken is frozen. It still has ice on top.”

Another Belmont senior, Javier Mondragon, 19, said he was interested in improving school food because “that’s where I spend most of my time.”

During a morning nutrition break last week, he said, a friend was served pancakes and a strip of cheese whose expiration was four days previously. “It’s horrible,” he said.

Francesca de la Rosa of the Healthy School Food Coalition said she hoped to translate students’ enthusiasm for upgrading school food into a broader sense of purpose.

“The thing we were constantly hearing,” De la Rosa said, is “that it’s not just the school food problem. It’s a community problem, in terms of what’s available in schools and what’s available in communities.”

Near Alvarado and Beverly, Molina and her group stopped to talk to two women selling tamales and hot dogs out of a street cart.

As 15-year-old Jaycee Melendez called out the address on a map, Molina looked at a legend on her clipboard, took a yellow-green pencil out of its box and colored in a dot symbolizing “mobile food.”

As the morning went on, each group’s map became a complex grid filled with colored dots, marking liquor stores, fast-food restaurants and ice cream shops, but very few sources of fresh or healthful food.

Mayra, who does the shopping each week for her family of eight, said that fresh fruits and vegetables could be expensive and that often “the food looks like it’s spent days traveling.”

But the majority of students in Project Cafe were like Mondragon, who was surprised that “most of the stores in the area are liquor stores that have alcohol and Cheetos and sodas: all this stuff that is not healthy.”

Through the project, he said, “I’ve seen the big picture. If we get together, we can make a change.”

Said De la Rosa: “For most of these students, this is the first time they are thinking about these issues.”