In this L.A. neighborhood, food is not taken for granted. Four potatoes and a chicken become dinner for 17. Stores are scarce. And transporting groceries can be a trial. : Living Close to the Edge

For a few minutes each week, Anna Aprecio gets a small taste of what it’s like to be pampered. Earlier on this Tuesday afternoon, she left the Crenshaw area apartment she shares with another woman and four children. For 1 1/2 hours, she rumbled across the smoggy cityscape on RTD buses.

Now she stands on the sidewalk as a clerk loads her $100 worth of meat, cheese, milk, tortillas, corn flakes and Huggies into a shuttle bus painted the same pale shades of green and mauve as the sparkling clean, mural-covered Numero Uno supermarket where she spends her welfare check.

For Aprecio and others, Uno’s eight shuttles, which provide free rides home to customers who purchase at least $30 in goods, are more than a luxury. They are a manageable way to carry large quantities of groceries.

So the shuttle will carry her home, traveling through an area of South-Central Los Angeles where, according to a recent survey, more than a quarter of the population (27%) lacks the money to buy food an average of five days a month. Even when there is money, according to the study by UCLA’s School of Architecture and Urban Design, hunting and gathering groceries is a much more problematic daily concern here than in more affluent neighborhoods.

From a helicopter, this two-square-mile swatch of the city near USC is much like any other--all red rooftops, lawns, palm trees and kids shooting hoops on asphalt playgrounds.

But at sidewalk level, it is a livelier and more troubling realm, visibly better than a few parts of the city, worse than most and actively struggling with whether it will decompose or regenerate as some residents grapple daily with whether they will have enough to eat.

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A few blocks from Uno, grandmother Essie Wilson offers a simple assessment of her extended family’s condition: “We keep fed.”

The matriarch stands on the front steps of her home as three generations of women arrange clothes and household odds and ends on a lawn she mows herself.

The yard sale is a fund-raiser for a new lawn mower, to replace one stolen a few days earlier.

One of Wilson’s teen-age granddaughters thinks she knows who took it--one of the homeless people who parade endlessly past the home, jabbering and bickering on their way to a busy recycling center down the street.

If there are folks who go hungry in the area, she says, it’s the homeless. Then, looking away with a mist in her eyes, she adds:

“My dad’s hungry. He’s hungry ‘cause he smokes drugs. . . . He be begging from his kids for money all the time.”

Just around the corner, one of the men who trooped by Wilson’s yard sale continues up the street, struggling with a shopping cart on which an old chest of drawers wobbles.

The shipyard laid him off from a while back, says the weary-looking, middle-aged man named George. Not long after, he started living “outdoors.” With no steady income, he usually eats at one of the few soup kitchens in the area.

But he’s hoping the dresser will bring in an extra $2 or $3, he says, squeezing past another shopping cart on the bustling sidewalk, from which 14-year-old Guillermina Hara and her grandmother conduct business.

Guillermina is the oldest of seven children, she says, jabbing a chopstick into a steaming ear of corn. Her father washes parking lots for a living. Her mother takes care of her siblings.

She slathers the pale yellow corn with margarine, sprinkles it with red chili powder and hands it to a young fabric cutter who calls her “corn girl.”

She smiles. On a good day, Guillermina and her grandma sell all 40 ears at $1 apiece, bringing in enough extra cash to help with the careful grocery shopping the family does at the Jon’s supermarket a few blocks from their home.

For some Angelenos, “food security,” means an assurance of fresh goat cheese at Spago.

But the UCLA study uses the term to mean something else. It found that many people in the study area live so close to the financial edge that even the slightest downturn in fortunes creates crisis.

Such a turn has brought Rubio Leobardo and his family to Holy Cross Center, a relief agency a few blocks outside the study area.

Just four years in the United States from Durango, Mexico, Leobardo, 39, had been doing OK. He earned $7 an hour fueling buses and spent about $80 a week on food, just barely enough for the family of four to get by.

Then a congenital bone problem in his feet forced a painful operation, he says, pointing to scars. For now, he can’t work, so the family’s living on a tax refund and awaiting a disability check.

Today, with his 3-month-old son, Omar, in a baby carrier and 8-year-old Rubio Jr. beside him, Leobardo accepts bags filled with diapers, Cheerios, stuffed potatoes, canned pork, beans, sardines, M & M’s and a bag of marshmallows.

Asked how the country might make it easier to feed families such as his, or what the new mayor might do to create “food security,” Leobardo gives a resigned smile and shrugs.

It would help if his wife, Elizabeth, had a job, he says. But finding work is hard, she says, since she can’t speak English and must care for their children.

Her remark elicits an impassioned commentary from Sister Snyder, a driving force at Holy Cross, about what she sees as the city’s inadequate child-care system.

But Leobardo says that he would not allow his children to be cared for by someone outside the family.

Sister Snyder shrugs.

All People’s Christian Center on 20th Street is another of the more than 700 pantries and food banks in Los Angeles County that offers groceries to people who can’t scrape up the money to buy food.

Getting food has never been as cheap or easy as it is in more affluent parts of the city, says executive director Saundra Bryant, who has lived in the neighborhood much of her life.

The process got tougher still as major supermarket chains retreated. And in April, 1992, rioters burned some remaining markets, large and small.

With a car and income, Bryant has ways of stretching her food budget--buying bulk at Fedco or Price Club, for instance--that simply aren’t available to the homeless, the undocumented and the working poor without cars who come to her center monthly for food.

For many, the problem of finding enough to eat spans generations.

Minnie Marshall, for example, has raised four sets of children, most in her Dorsey Street home of 25 years.

In 1966, when her sister died in an auto accident, Marshall took in her sister’s children and raised them along with her children, who range in age now from 33 to 45.

She also raised some of their children, she says, and now she’s raising the four children of a daughter who is having an affair with rock cocaine.

Like many neighborhoods in this study area, beautifully restored Victorians and boarded-up hovels stand side by side. With gangsters hanging out on one graffiti-scarred end of this seemingly quiet street, drug dealers selling openly on the other, and folks from a rehab center cheerfully peddling watermelons around the corner, the neighborhood doesn’t seem to know whether it’s coming or going.

Marshall gets by on Social Security, which just about covers her $500 rent, and on Aid to Families With Dependent Children and food stamps.

Feeding the family was never all that easy, she says. But now, “Times are different. Rents are sky-high, lights and gas is sky-high, water is high.”

When there’s enough money, Marshall likes to whip up her specialties: Grits and bacon and eggs for breakfast. Black beans with neck bone or pigs’ feet or ham hocks for dinner.

But when the money runs low, as it often does, “We make out with what we got. . . . My kids are not choicy.”

Neither are the children of 43-year-old Amalia Hurtado.

All but one of her 12 children live with her in a small Adams Avenue triplex apartment. One daughter, Hurtado says, is a heroin addict, and when she found the girl living in Tijuana, she went there and brought back her daughter’s two children. Add 16-year-old daughter Maria’s two sons and the total number of people Hurtado feeds grows again.

How does she keep so many mouths fed? “A lot of sacrifice.”

Hurtado’s husband has a kidney disorder, she says, and is too ill to work. For 16 years, she has packed boxes at a plating company, and her wage has climbed to $4.75 an hour.

With the monthly help of food stamps, Aid to Families With Dependent Children and additional Women, Infants and Children payments, she’s been able to piece together enough food to keep her large family healthy, if not full.

Now, though, she is pregnant with twins and can’t work. The family’s budget has edged even closer to bare survival.

So the monthly bags of groceries Hurtado hauls home from All People’s are particularly welcome, daughter Maria agrees, as she cheerfully gives a tour of the family’s clean, two-bedroom apartment.

Above the door of her room, Maria has pinned up two photographs of her sons’ father. In one, he’s displaying his gang tattoos. The other shows him at his current address, posing with some friends in a prison yard.

Maria has a big role in keeping the family functioning, helping find the secondhand clothes the kids wear and giving the boys their close-cropped haircuts.

And on those increasingly frequent occasions when food runs a bit short, she ignores her growling stomach while the younger children eat.

As Maria chats, her younger siblings begin arriving home from school. Aide, 8, and Alba Rosa, 10, troop in together, and the older girl immediately takes off her black tennis shoes and hands them to Maria.

“She wore my shoes to school, because she didn’t have any,” Maria explains.

These children don’t carp about the food in the school cafeteria. As they snack on the orange Jell-O with banana slices that Maria has prepared, they talk about the free breakfasts and lunches they receive. Their eyes light up and their faces brighten: Pizza! Hot dogs! Hamburgers!

And, Aide says with a big grin: “Kiwis! Kiwis! Kiwis!”

Alba’s kindergarten diploma hangs over the front window, through which, in the distance, downtown’s skyscrapers are visible in the smog.

After quickly fixing a bottle for 6-month-old Jesus, the girls plop down on the couch and dig in on their homework, undisturbed by the horseplay between Esteban, 1, Elizabeth, 1 1/2, Javier Jr., 2, and Jose, 4.

Aide, who wants to be a teacher, opens her English book and reads.

Alba works on social studies. Smiling sweetly, she writes answers in pencil to questions about Chapter 4, which focuses on commerce and growth in the Golden State.

The chapter is all about how, in the 19th Century, oranges and agriculture and the railroads changed the Southern California economy.

“In 1887 alone, 200,000 people traveled to Southern California,” the text reads. “Thousands stayed.”

Bold-faced “key terms” include industry, competition, and boom.

From the kitchen, Hurtado watches her daughters, and listens, not understanding, as they explain in English their own big dreams for life in Los Angeles.

As she talks about wanting to be a teacher or a doctor, Alba closes her book, marking her place with her fingers.

Clearly, she sees nothing but a loving home in her surroundings, nothing but promise in her future, and nothing poignant in the title that angles across the book’s cheerfully colored cover: “Oh, California.”