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The Urban Agriculturalist is a series on the ways city and suburb dwellers use their land as a food resource.
Toronto-based Food Share is an organization that I really admire. They take a wholistic approach to improving inner-city nutrition, employing principles of locavorism, co-op structure, and progressive, action-based learning.
I was browsing their site the other day and happened upon an initiative of theirs, which focuses on incorporating food studies into the required curriculum in Toronto’s public schools. Food studies and school gardens are nothing new for private, well-funded schools and highly-publicized individual programs, but an integrated curriculum in mainstream schools is a new phenomenon and a hopeful one that is inclusive of everyone.
I must say, I am rather proud of my hometown this morning. In municipal legislation that combats basically every negative impact on the food chain reaction, the City Council has voted in a measure to distribute 1,000 new permits for street vendors who sell produce in underserved communities.
The measure was proposed in December by Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Council Speaker Christine Quinn as a way to help assuage the obesity problem in a city where street food usually involves the saturated fat and perplexing, mysterious animal origins of hot dogs, gyros and the like.
Public health records indicate - unsurprisingly - that obesity rates are higher in low-income areas where cheap fast food is more readily available and accessible than fresh food. These neighborhoods also suffer from a scarcity of supermarkets. Residents tend to buy their groceries at the small bodegas and markets that do not have the kind of turnover that supports a large produce section. As a result, there are simply fewer fruits and vegetables available to the urban poor. A survey conducted by the municipal health food department in 2006 found that only 20-40% of the bodegas in neighborhoods like Bedford Stuyvesant, Bushwick and Harlem carried apples, oranges and bananas. Only 2-6% carried leafy greens.
According to Reuters, nearly half of adult New Yorkers are overweight or obese and 700,000 of the 8.25 million residents have diabetes.
