10828: Toy Deserts R Us…?

From The New York Times…

The Great Divide, Now in the Toy Aisle

By Ginia Bellafante

Earlier this year, at the 109th Annual American International Toy Fair, held at the Javits Convention Center as one of the culture’s most convincing cases for childlessness, a former investment banker named Jill Todd displayed “The Tuneables,” an interactive DVD series she had created through her company, the Music Intelligence Project. The daughter of two musicologists, Ms. Todd developed the project in conjunction with her parents as an instructional system in melody, rhythm and tone — the fundamentals of music leveraged as a means to enhance cognitive function. Nearby, but easily obscured by the acres of primary-color plastic, was a booth for a company called Fat Brain Toys, whose games and puzzles in logic and sequencing came with an impressive lineage, some of them designed by the celebrated inventor Ivan Moscovich, a Holocaust survivor.

Walking into one of the three branches of Toys “R” Us now in the Bronx, you would find nothing from either of these ventures. Just as we are unlikely to unearth dilled artisanal long beans from the farms of northern Vermont, we are unlikely to find these sorts of diversions — small-batch toys aimed at the parent for whom it is never too early to begin LSAT drills — in large retail chains. Instead, they are the provenance of independent toy stores that maintain a presence almost exclusively in the city’s most affluent neighborhoods.

In the 1970s, the receipt of a Fisher Price farm set on Christmas Day would have conferred nothing terribly distinctive about class, having come from a department store and having appeared just as probably under the tree of a white-shoe lawyer as it would have under the tree of a brick layer. But toys, like lettuces or chocolate, have long since become another manifestation of difference. (And this is even before we arrive at an absurdity like the $1,499.99 Etch-a-Sketch encased in Swarovski crystals, currently at F. A. O. Schwarz, something that would appear to have been created as an engagement offering for an 8-year-old Trump to give a 6 ½-year-old Kardashian.)

What finds its way off the shelves of the chains is not what disappears from stores like Boomerang in TriBeCa, or Mary Arnold, the 81-year-old toy store on the Upper East Side. At those stores, the best-selling product of recent years has been something called Magna-Tiles, geometrically shaped magnetic tiles that allow children to imaginatively build virtually anything but what, in my experience, often turns out looking like the Crystal Cathedral in Southern California. Last Christmas, a flood near the factory where the tiles are made in Asia caused a shortage and a rise in price, with boxes of tiles, which usually retail for roughly $1 a tile, going for hundreds of dollars on eBay. By Dec. 12 last year, Ezra Ishayik, the owner of Mary Arnold, told me, he’d sold $20,000 worth of tiles and had run out.

Magna-Tiles are not sold at Toys “R” Us. Uninterested in sharing company with licensed products rendered in offensive colors, manufacturers like these resist the taint of the mass market, selling instead in museum gift shops and small, aesthetically palatable shops that draw from a narrow slice of our demographics. At the same time, as Sean McGowan, a toy industry analyst at the investment bank Needham & Company explained it, the market for educational toys is never quite as big as we would like it to be. While a company like Toys “R” Us carries educational toys, over time its commitment to promoting them has eroded, he said.

In many parts of the city, though, beyond Manhattan and the various precincts of brownstone Brooklyn, something like Toys “R” Us is really all that exists. As I learned when I phoned recently, Castle Hill Toys and Games in the Bronx, for instance, doesn’t consider itself much of a toy store at all anymore, having transitioned into a focus on bikes and bike repairs when Toys “R” Us came to be common in the borough.

In the way that we have considered food deserts — those parts of the city in which stores seem to stock primarily the food groups Doritos and Pepsi — we might begin to think, in essence, about toy deserts and the implications of a commercial system in which the least-privileged children are choked off from the recreations most explicitly geared toward creativity and achievement.

It was precisely with this notion in mind that Dawn Harris-Martine — a former New York City schoolteacher who sent two daughters to Hunter College Elementary School, and one of them on to Wharton — expanded her Harlem bookstore six years ago to include toys geared in obvious ways toward intellectual development. Called Grandma’s Place, it originated as a literacy center, with Ms. Harris-Martine teaching both parents and children to read. What she realized, she said, was that many parents didn’t know that play served as a major component of early learning. “As a parent, I had never bought a toy in a five-and-dime,” she said.

The obvious counterpoint to these arguments is that there is no clear proof that toys intended to bolster cognitive abilities actually do so. At the very least, though, they signal to a child a parental investment in ambition and accomplishment, in active absorption over passive observation. It would take a very expansive view of the iCarly Truth or Dare Bear to believe it might do the same thing.

10016: New Facts On Food Deserts.

From The New York Times…

Studies Question the Pairing of Food Deserts and Obesity

By Gina Kolota

It has become an article of faith among some policy makers and advocates, including Michelle Obama, that poor urban neighborhoods are food deserts, bereft of fresh fruits and vegetables.

But two new studies have found something unexpected. Such neighborhoods not only have more fast food restaurants and convenience stores than more affluent ones, but more grocery stores, supermarkets and full-service restaurants, too. And there is no relationship between the type of food being sold in a neighborhood and obesity among its children and adolescents.

Within a couple of miles of almost any urban neighborhood, “you can get basically any type of food,” said Roland Sturm of the RAND Corporation, lead author of one of the studies. “Maybe we should call it a food swamp rather than a desert,” he said.

Some experts say these new findings raise questions about the effectiveness of efforts to combat the obesity epidemic simply by improving access to healthy foods. Despite campaigns to get Americans to exercise more and eat healthier foods, obesity rates have not budged over the past decade, according to recently released federal data.

“It is always easy to advocate for more grocery stores,” said Kelly D. Brownell, director of Yale University’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, who was not involved in the studies. “But if you are looking for what you hope will change obesity, healthy food access is probably just wishful thinking.”

Advocates have long called for more supermarkets in poor neighborhoods and questioned the quality of the food that is available. And Mrs. Obama has made elimination of food deserts an element of her broader campaign against childhood obesity, Let’s Move, winning praise from Democrats and even some Republicans, and denunciations from conservative commentators and bloggers who have cited it as yet another example of the nanny state.

Speaking in October on the South Side of Chicago, she said that in too many neighborhoods “if people want to buy a head of lettuce or salad or some fruit for their kid’s lunch, they have to take two or three buses, maybe pay for a taxicab, in order to do it.”

Mrs. Obama has also advocated getting schools to serve healthier lunches and communities to build more playgrounds.

Her office referred questions about the food deserts issue to the Department of Agriculture. A spokesman there, Justin DeJong, said by e-mail that fighting obesity requires “a comprehensive response.” The federal effort, he added, includes not just improving access to healthy foods but also improving food in schools, increasing physical education time, and educating people on the importance of healthy diets.

Some researchers and advocates say that further investigation is still needed on whether grocery stores and chain supermarkets in poor neighborhoods are selling produce that is too costly and of poor quality. “Not all grocery stores are equal,” said John Weidman, deputy executive director of the Food Trust, an advocacy group in Philadelphia.

Read the full story here.

9032: Food Deserts Need Marketing Too.

From The Chicago Sun-Times…

Food deserts need more than groceries.

It shouldn’t come as a huge surprise that adding a super­market or two in a poor neighborhood that has long gone without doesn’t radically alter the eating habits of folks who live in those communities.

That’s the finding of a new study of several cities, including Chicago. Over 15 years, researchers looked at the impact of greater supermarket availability and found no real difference in the quality of people’s diets or how often they ate fruits and vegetables.

But that doesn’t mean Chicago and other cities should walk away from their food deserts, as we call large and isolated areas that lack a grocery store.

Chicago should instead redouble its efforts to eradicate food deserts — as Mayor Rahm Emanuel has pledged to do — and help make it easier and more economical for Chicagoans to choose healthy food.

Food deserts, it turns out, are killing us. In Chicago, the Mari Gallagher Research & Consulting group found that food desert residents are more likely to die or suffer prematurely from diet-related diseases, most notably diabetes.

But the answer is not simply to plop down a lone grocery store amid a sea of junk-food options.

“It’s simplistic thinking that if you put fruits and vegetables there, they’ll buy it,” said Barry Popkin, a professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the senior author of the new study, published last week in the Archives of Internal Medicine. “You have to encourage it, you need advertising, you need support. It’s working with supermarkets to market healthy food rather than junk food.”

It’s important to note that other studies have found a positive correlation between access to grocery stores and good health. A 2006 Chicago study by Gallagher, who has long worked on the food desert issue, found obesity goes down as distance to mainstream grocers is reduced. Another study in 2005 found the greatest improvement in the consumption of fruits and vegetables among shoppers who adopted a new supermarket as their main food store.

But everyone knows it’s hard for a single grocery store to compete with a slew of fast-food restaurants, corner stores and gas stations selling junk food.

Not surprisingly, Popkin’s research found a strong correlation between fast-food consumption and fast-food availability for low-income men.

We’re not comfortable limiting the number of fast-food restaurants in poor neighborhoods or overly restricting what people on food stamps can buy. Just because you’re poor doesn’t mean the government should dictate what you eat.

7870: Bringing Freshness To Food Deserts.

From The Chicago Tribune…

Chicago partners with Walgreens to bring groceries to food deserts

By John Byrne, Tribune reporter

Mayor Richard Daley and Walgreen Co. officials touted progress Wednesday in the city’s push to wipe out “food deserts” in Chicago.

The Deerfield-based drugstore chain is adding fresh fruit and vegetables at four stores by next week, bringing to 10 the number of such outposts on the city’s South and West sides. Those impoverished areas of Chicago have been plagued by the lack of grocery stores after major chains closed some locations over the years.

On Wednesday, the mayor and company officials toured a Walgreens in the Grand Crossing neighborhood. Daley patted bags of onions and poked tomatoes that will be sold alongside greeting cards and aspirin.

“I want to thank Walgreens for its commitment to making Chicago a better place and helping Chicagoans to live healthier lives,” Daley said from a stage outside the store.

The mayor said he met with company officials last year and urged them to sell healthy food at stores in neighborhoods that lack enough grocery stores.

Food deserts have been near the top of the mayor’s agenda for months. The Pullman neighborhood on the Far South Side is one such area, which Daley pointed out frequently as the City Council was caught in a protracted debate over whether to approve a Wal-Mart there that would sell groceries.

Several aldermen who were reluctant to endorse Wal-Mart’s plans because of its labor practices said they found it difficult to oppose a project that would finally bring a grocery store to Pullman. The Wal-Mart store passed the City Council in June with unanimous support. A second store in the Chatham neighborhood was quickly approved last month, even though some aldermen said there already are grocery stores in that part of the city.

Wal-Mart has said it plans to open dozens of stores throughout the city.

The mayor’s appearance was the culmination of Walgreens’ yearlong effort to bring groceries to food deserts.

The redesigned store, at 67th Street and Stony Island Avenue, will offer more than 750 new food items, such as fresh fruits and vegetables, frozen meat and fish, pasta, rice, beans, eggs and whole-grain cereals.

Separately, Walgreens is launching a trial program with Northwestern Medicine and Near North Health Service Corp. to educate residents about diet and health.

Walgreens launched two stores with food centers last fall, four more last month, and the next four go online next week.

7069: Detroit Food Desert Not Deserted.

From CBS News…

Bringing Fresh Food to Areas that Get None

Trucks Funded by Grant Program Bring Produce to Blighted Detroit Neighborhoods with No Grocery Stores

(CBS) Apples and oranges, peaches and green vegetable: they may be ordinary items in most of America, but in some poor inner cities they’re hard to find — and sorely missed.

But one state is taking a fresh approach to the problem and, as CBS News correspondent Dean Reynolds reports, it’s bearing fruit.

Most every day Butch Robinson drives his truck filled with fresh fruit and vegetables into Detroit’s inner city.

“That definitely makes me feel good,” Robinson said. “There’s a lot of stuff that’s being brung into Detroit that’s not so good.”

Unemployed for a year before recently getting this job, Butch works for Peaches and Greens, one of three suppliers involved in a Michigan pilot program to bring healthy food to the front door. It’s a program that Detroit Mayor Dave Bing says “will make a difference in the health of our citizens here in the city of Detroit.”

Certainly the need is there.

“There’s some kids that think fruit comes from a can,” said Lisa Johanon, executive director of the Central Detroit Christian Community Development Corp.

Johanon is the founder of Peaches and Greens, which dispatches the trucks filled with locally grown produce twice a day Monday through Friday from its small store in the urban wasteland.

“There’s no rocket science to this at all,” Johanon said. “I mean it’s a very simple thing — put some produce on a truck and you drive through the neighborhood.”

These are blighted neighborhoods where liquor stores - and there are plenty of them — offer groceries as an afterthought.

What kind of food do you get at a liquor store?

“Well,” says Johanon, “you don’t get anything fresh. That’s for sure.”

It’s ironic that in the Motor City, 20 percent of the people don’t have a car. And if they want to take a bus to a full-fledged grocery in the suburbs, it’ll be about a two-hour trip - one way.

There’s plenty of produce in those suburbs. But in Detroit there’s not even one major grocery chain store.

“We have a whole generation of people who were raised on fast food,” said Kim Trent, director of the Governor’s Office for Southeast Michigan, riding in on of the produce trucks.

Johanon knows the consequences: “High blood pressure, heart attacks, diabetes. And these are things that run rampant in this city and are major causes of death in this city.”

All of which brings us back to Butch and his truck.

“This is the best service you ever want to see,” said one customer. “I depend on this truck, alright? I mean seriously I depend on this truck,” added another.

“It’s really a beautiful thing, you know, it really is,” Robinson said. And in these tough Detroit neighborhoods — a sign of hope.

Essay 4747

From The Chicago Sun-Times…

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City no place for food deserts

City needs to get serious about sating all residents’ need for decent grocery stores

Hyde Park is one of the most racially and socially diverse neighborhoods in Chicago, with a broad mix of housing. The area is home to the elite University of Chicago and part of a vibrant college community. For all its fine attributes, the South Side community also is part of a vast “food desert,” meaning it has with no mainstream grocery stores or supermarkets.

Hyde Park is just one of scores of Chicago neighborhoods -- mostly low-income African-American and Hispanic areas on the South and West Sides -- with few stores that sell the fresh meat, produce and frozen foods that are essential to a healthy lifestyle. The food store supply may dry up even more next month if the Hyde Park Co-op Market goes out of business.

“Living in a food desert can mean more obesity and other health problems, including diabetes and premature death, especially for mothers and children,” said researcher Mari Gallagher, who studied the impact of food deserts on public health in Chicago. The study, “Good Food,” was done exclusively for the Sun-Times by Mari Gallagher Research and Consulting Group.

What food deserts lack in fresh fruits and veggies, they more than compensate for with fast-food restaurants, liquor stores and gas stations that sell food -- the fatty, salty kind that contributes to premature death from diabetes, obesity and other health problems. Of 325 food stamp retailers in Chicago’s food deserts, 44 are liquor stores. Only 16 are classified as mainstream groceries, but there are lots of fringe stores -- gas stations, bakeries, dollar stores and the like -- that sell food.

To preserve their constituents’ health, the aldermen in those food deserts need to mount a strong push to attract major grocers. And instead of pushing anti-business legislation such as the tax-heavy big-box ordinance that targeted Wal-Mart, they ought to be trying to attract more stores.

Gallagher’s study found that following a doctor’s dietary guidelines would be extremely difficult for the 500,000 or more people who live in the 287 areas that mostly lack grocery stores. In the typical desert, the nearest grocery store is eight blocks or one mile away, roughly twice the distance of the nearest fast-food restaurant.

Gallagher said a perception of higher rates of crime and shoplifting makes supermarkets and other stores shy away from desert areas. Target marketing, such as was done for the “Good Food” study, can help retailers pinpoint the best profitable locations.

Consider all the major chain supermarkets that have opened downtown, which used to be a food desert. Residents in the South Loop now have a veritable smorgasbord with a new Jewel Food Store, Dominick’s and Whole Foods -- all along the bustling Roosevelt Road business corridor. Could one of those food giants also be headed for Hyde Park? The University of Chicago says it’s negotiating for a “high-quality” store to replace the food co-op if it agrees to vacate its space at 1526 E. 55th St. in the Hyde Park Shopping Center.

Maybe it won’t be a major supermarket, though. “Stores don’t want to be first” to take a chance, Gallagher said. But after one store moves in and makes a profit, others jump in, as evidenced by the big-name and specialty stores in the Clybourn Corridor.

The city must attract supermarkets and other businesses to these food and commercial deserts. Tax Increment Financing districts were created to address just such shortcomings, so Mayor Daley and city planners -- with more prodding from aldermen -- must pour more funds into these needy areas like they did in the less-needy La Salle Street financial district.