Inner-City Families Face Nutrition Crisis

Dark and dirty except for the spray paint, this hardscrabble corner of West Philly was ditched by all but two die-hard grocers. Both were hard-working and well-liked, and both were gunned down over their counters late last year.

The murders of Milton Wilks and Won Joo Choi represent more than personal tragedies. With their deaths, neighbors must travel at least a mile to buy anything outside the Ding Dong, Fritos and Hawaiian Punch family.

In yet another part of Philadelphia, residents must struggle to find food for their table. And the consequences are grave.

Health experts say inner-city neighborhoods are suffering a serious nutrition crisis. And the lack of healthful foods, they say, is aggravating many other social ills: crime rates, health costs, poor school performances and morbid obesity, a health- and esteem-depleting condition that nutritionists are calling the epidemic of the ‘90s.

Philadelphia is not alone. Researchers for the National Cancer Institute have made nutrition profiles of Atlanta, St. Paul, Minn., and Birmingham, Ala., and the findings there are equally bleak.

“People in hard-hit neighborhoods are clearly not eating enough fruit and vegetables,” said Dr. Tom Baranowski of the University of Texas, who led the NCI study. “And study after study has shown that such foods are irreplaceable as protective factors against cancer and heart disease.”

Baranowski’s team found last year that lower-income families eat more processed foods than middle and upper-income families, meaning that while the poor pay more to eat, they get less back in nutritional content.

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Other problems can be far more insidious and less visible, such as lead poisoning. Even mild lead buildup in a child’s bloodstream will increase irritability and aggressiveness--symptoms that make for poor school performance, said Dr. Ray Yip of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

However, there’s an easy, low-cost solution to lead poisoning: a diet high in iron. “The same receptor in the body which absorbs lead also absorbs iron. If that receptor is already saturated with iron, it blocks out the lead,” Yip said.

But the best sources of iron are precisely those that are hardest to find in food-stamp zones: raw spinach, kale and escarole.

Inner-city youngsters, therefore, run up against a double whammy. They run the greatest risk of lead consumption, from old paint in the aged buildings where they live, and have the highest rate of iron deficiency. Up to 5% of urban children younger than 2 years old are iron poor, Yip said.

The same children also are prone to morbid obesity.

“Obesity increases as you go down the economic scale,” said Dr. Francis Johnston, a University of Pennsylvania cultural biologist.

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While African Americans tend to be more obese than whites, the unifying factor appears to be income, Johnston said.

He was shocked to find a 23% obesity rate among youngsters at a West Philadelphia school, the highest rate he had seen among any Americans except Samoans in Salt Lake City.

Besides suffering from high blood pressure and heart disease, heavy people are statistically more prone to be underachievers and are more vulnerable to depression and generally weak health, Johnston said.

“Forget about the five-a-day helping of fruit and vegetables the National Institute of Health recommends,” Johnston said. “These kids are lucky to get one, and it’s usually orange juice.”

An examination of Ida Mills’ shopping basket bears that out.

In her North Philadelphia neighborhood, women chat on stoops, holding infants and watching girls skip and bounce over whirling ropes.

But the streets empty at 5:30 p.m. when the sun goes down and working mothers are trying to get dinner on the table.

“If it’s not in my pantry, I’m not the fool to go out there and get it,” said Mills, who lives 10 blocks from the closest convenience store and three miles from a supermarket.

Mills, who receives food stamps to supplement her salary, usually relies on nonperishable goods for her three children. Her shopping basket one day recently was half-filled with baked beans, creamed corn, dry spaghetti and her “day-and-night special,” pancake batter. The single fruit was lemons.

“Anyone who sees a single woman on the street at night, heading toward a market, knows she must have some money on her,” Mills said. “I’m no sitting duck.”

A grocery store in Mills’ neighborhood would have a captive market, but the crime risk makes it a “loco” business proposition, said Santo Del Valle, who has experienced trouble enough running his corner convenience store, the American and Tropical Food Mart.

Del Valle, 66, has been robbed seven times, the last leaving him unconscious and bleeding from a gun butt to the head.

He’s sticking it out, he said in Spanish, because “it’s an honest income, and the good people around here need me.”

But because poor customers are unpredictable shoppers, he stocks nothing fresh except bananas, which he can sell either fresh or aged for frying.

Wilks and Choi tried to serve their neighborhoods. Wilks, known as the “gentleman grocer” to his two- and three-item shoppers, was shot by a young man who pedaled off on a 10-speed.

Choi, called “Mr. Toys” because he liked to play with children on his stoop, was killed by a 13-year-old with a .45-caliber pistol.

Community organizer Paula Taylor said the only answer is to lure more supermarkets with security guards to poor neighborhoods and to establish kiosks in secure areas, such as schools and common markets.

“People are crying for healthy meals,” Taylor said.

Her survey of North Philadelphia families showed more than 50% have problems with lead poisoning, and they list it among their primary concerns, behind crime and the lack of supermarkets.

Johnston calls the food crisis “a truly sticky, intractable problem. How do you attract merchants to a place where they run a high risk for little return?”