Just south of West Kentucky Avenue sits a patch of dirt that has given a couple dozen middle schoolers a taste of such exotic items as radishes, eggplant and what they call spicy lettuce — something most grown-ups know as mustard greens.
Across the street sits Kentucky Market, where shoppers can find Cheetos, lottery tickets, jars of mole, frozen pizzas and even lamps. But the store’s produce, tucked into a dim corner at the end of a row of refrigerator cases full of Gatorade and Mountain Dew, consists of a few limes, a couple of lemons, onions, green chiles and a potato or two.
In the middle sits Kepner Middle School.
Kepner students, about 96 percent of whom come from low-income families and get free or reduced-price school lunches, are growing up in a “food desert.” It is a wasteland awash in Twinkies and Cokes, and for many residents, fruits and vegetables or fresh fish or chicken are out of reach.
In Colorado and across the country, the problem of food deserts in low-income neighborhoods is a serious one, and one that has been festering for decades. Now, it is getting increased attention from a coalition of urban gardeners, soldiers in the fresh-food movement, public health officials and garden-variety social activists.
Their work is going on in neighborhoods like Westwood, where Kepner sits, where poverty is widespread, obesity is rampant and fruits and vegetables are scarce. And in Colorado, they have their work cut out for them.
The state ranks 37th in the nation in the number of supermarkets per person, according to industry trade data.
“In low-income areas, you can go for miles without being able to find a fresh apple or a piece of broccoli,” Yael Lehmann, executive director of the Philadelphia-based Food Trust, one of the first groups to tackle the problem, told a recent gathering.
As a 2009 Food Trust study that plotted Colorado’s 533 supermarkets shows, the stores this state does have are clustered mostly along the Front Range. Large swaths of eastern, western and southern Colorado as well as several Denver neighborhoods, mostly in northeast and west-central Denver, are left with few choices.
The problem isn’t new, and solutions aren’t easy. They are complicated by a dizzying array of factors: land-use policies, economics, politics, cultural customs and education.
Fixing the disparities is not a job for government alone, said Jennifer Wieczorek, who works with Denver Public Health’s Healthy Eating Project. Nor is it a job for health providers or hospitals, or nonprofits, or schools. It’s a job for all those groups, she said.
In Globeville, for example, the nonprofit Operation Frontline offers a six-week course where families learn to plan healthy menus. The course includes a field trip to a faraway grocery store.
In 2007, the Healthy Eating Project started courting corner stores, trying to persuade them to stock fresh produce.
Attracting a new supermarket would be wonderful, Wieczorek said. But that would take big tracts of land and even bigger investment. In the meantime, more than a quarter of Westwood families do their food shopping in convenience stores, said Rachel Cleaves, head of LiveWell Westwood, a partner in the Healthy Eating Project.
This year, three convenience stores are participating.
Producing change
Store owner Hong Kim hasn’t exactly got himself a mini Whole Foods. But by the standards of urban corner stores, his Perry Market, at Perry Street against the frontage road to the West Sixth Avenue freeway, is a veritable Eden.
Avocados, tomatoes, lettuce and even bunches of fresh cilantro sit in a bright refrigerator case next to the door. Since he bought the store two years ago, Kim has brightened it up, and its clean shelves hold tidy rows of canned tuna, corn, zucchini, even asparagus. His spice section, with everything from chile to eucalyptus leaves, rivals that of most supermarkets.
But it’s not easy being green. Produce that hangs around more than a week has to be tossed, Kim said.
That is one major hurdle in the pro-produce program.
“What’s the profit on a pack of cigarettes versus a tomato? A pack of cigarettes is never going to go bad,” Wieczorek said.
In addition, many distributors aren’t interested in selling the small quantities of produce that neighborhood stores need.
One distributor that did has left the state, said Rocio Perez, owner of 5280 Definitive Marketing.
So Perez, who lends marketing expertise to the project, searches for another and tries to help out the store owners in the meantime.
Even when produce is available, a lot of families can’t afford it, Cleaves said.
When a head of lettuce and a box of macaroni and cheese mix that will feed four are about the same price, it isn’t hard to predict which one low-income families are going to pick.
That’s where urban gardens, like the one at Kepner, can make a difference. The garden began as a school project, the brainchild of special education teacher Tamar Rosenberg and art teacher Pamela Rojas.
Then LiveWell Westwood heard about it and chipped in $5,000. Denver Urban Gardens helped, and so did Revision International, which promotes locally grown food and backyard gardening.
By summer, that once-rocky soil yielded up peppers and melons, tomatoes and onions, all of it free to the kids who worked on it.
Saturday, a couple hundred Kepner kids, their families and neighbors showed up to celebrate the garden at the Spring Festival.
As a band played and little kids got their faces painted and clouds the color of bruises started to spit rain, community members planted an apple tree alongside the neat rows of vegetables.
There are two school gardens in Westwood now, and seven in backyards, Cleaves said. LiveWell’s goal this year is 28 more backyard plots.
A group effort
LiveWell Colorado got its start in 2006, when the state health department, the Colorado Health Foundation and Kaiser Permanente pooled funds they were already spending to promote healthy living.
It became a separate entity, and this year, backed by $3.7 million, LiveWell groups are in 22 communities.
The goal is to help residents figure out how to make healthy living possible, said Maren Stewart, who heads the nonprofit LiveWell Colorado.
“A lot of people have asked me in the last couple of months, ‘Isn’t this about individual responsibility and people being accountable?’ ” Stewart said. “The answer is a resounding yes. But it’s also about the issue of access.”
Any lingering doubts about the existence in Colorado of food deserts should have been crushed by a report released late last year called “Healthy Food Healthy Coloradans: The Need for More Supermarkets in Colorado.”
The report, by the Food Trust and Colorado Health Foundation, states that, nationwide, poor neighborhoods have 30 percent fewer supermarkets than affluent ones do.
“A key goal of this report,” it said on the first page, “is to stimulate the development of supermarkets in lower- and moderate-income urban and rural neighborhoods across the state.”
That hasn’t happened yet.
“We haven’t had any stores call us,” said Khanh Nguyen of the Colorado Health Foundation.
The foundation did call the stores, back in 2008, when it gathered leaders from King Soopers, Safeway, Wal- Mart, Sav-A-Lot, and other brand- name supermarkets to a summit. Most were receptive, Nguyen said. But they reminded the foundation that to build, they need lots of people and lots of land.
In Philadelphia, the Food Trust found a valuable ally in a powerful state assemblyman and the result was a sizeable pot of money that, together with private funds, helped bring 80 new food stores to the state. Most of those are still running, said Allison Karpyn, Food Trust director of research and evaluation.
There is a growing movement in Europe and Canada, now spreading to states like California, to insert health considerations into community planning policy.
That would include “access to healthy foods, access to parks and to trails,” said Dr. Sandy Stenmark, a pediatrician who is part of Kaiser Permanente’s healthy lifestyles effort.
“These policies are important because it’s so lasting. You can say, ‘Eat fruits and vegetables and be physically active,’ but if you can’t walk or bike to school and there are no fruits or vegetables in the community, it’s easier said than done,” Stenmark said.
In 2009, the number of obese people in the United States was about 60 million, or 34 percent of adults, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Until about 1980, the rate hovered around 15 percent.
With only 19 percent of residents obese in 2008, Colorado clings to its title as the country’s leanest state, but waistlines here are expanding.
“There is that national perception that Colorado is very thin and very active and everyone in this state is out enjoying the mountains every weekend,” Wieczorek said. “We need to increase the awareness that we have many pockets of people who can’t access the mountains, and there are disparities here that require attention.”
It may seem counterintuitive for obese people to be malnourished, but some are starving for nutrients.
“It seems contradictory, but if food sources are high in fat and low in quality, it can happen,” said Deborah Thomas, an associate professor of geography and environmental sciences at the University of Colorado Denver.
Planting healthy seeds
It’s too soon to tell whether tomatoes in corner stores or gardens in west Denver are helping people lose weight.
The Food Trust doesn’t know if obesity dropped in Philadelphia neighborhoods where it helped stores open.
It does know, though, that consumption of fresh fruit went up 30 percent when a store that offered it moved into a neighborhood.
Even without hordes of newly skinny people walking the streets of Denver, Wieczorek is convinced such programs will be beneficial.
“I think overall people are interested in their health, and we are really working to make the healthy choice the easy choice.”
Pam Rojas is convinced that even if all the other groups who helped create it left tomorrow, the Kepner garden would still flourish.
“The roots are here,” Rojas said. “Transformation does occur.”
As she spoke, rain beat down harder and colder on the 100 or so people still persevering at the festival. Across the schoolyard, Aztec dancers in bright costumes held incense over the garden’s staked rows.
And one of them, Manuel Cabral, prayed: “for the young people, the youth, to learn to grow healthy food.”
Karen Auge: 303-954-1733 or kauge@denverpost.com
