Photo by Dave Mertzig

Growing Youth members Jerrard Green and Tommy Freeman work a booth at the Alameda Farmers Market.

Growing Youth seek innovative nutrition solutions

A crowd gathered last Wednesday at Alameda Point, in the city’s poorest neighborhood on the Island’s far western end, where abandoned buildings have had their windows knocked out by vandals and their wiring gutted by thieves.

It’s an area that has been economically stagnant for years as it waits on a redevelopment process that only recently has begun to nudge forward. Alameda Point is generally thought to be stuck in a state of limbo between the departure of the Navy and the arrival of the city.

But last Wednesday presented a different scene here.

Local residents, businesspeople, activists and members of the press crammed into the community building at the Alameda Point Collaborative (APC) to feast on fresh vegetables and guacamole, blueberry cheesecake and juicy cantaloupe, and to hear the results of 10 months of research by a group of nutritionally-aware teenagers called the Growing Youth Project.

For the last 10 months, Growing Youth have been studying food issues at APC, a supportive housing community for formerly homeless, low-income families, situated amongst the former Naval housing at the Point.

The task of the Growing Youth Project was to assess how affordable and accessible food is for residents of APC, and how these factors affect residents’ diets. They surveyed residents about their eating habits, trying to determine what they eat, where they shop and why. They wanted to find out what it would take to ensure that residents ate enough and ate well.

Their conclusion was that the area is a “food desert.”

That term has little to do with the land itself; a community garden that yielded more than 200 pounds of produce this year indicates that the soil here is far from arid.

‘Food desert’ refers instead to economic aridity. Another term for it is ‘food insecurity’: the lack of access to enough food to meet basic needs.

For residents here, low-incomes and limited access to food often means that they don’t get enough healthy food, if they get enough food at all.

According to 2000 U.S. Census data, the median monthly household income at the APC is between $438 and $877. An estimated 99 percent of the residents are below the poverty line.

Of the residents surveyed by Growing Youth, 42 percent said they couldn’t afford enough food during the past year. Almost a quarter said that children in their homes were “sometimes or often hungry” in the past year because they couldn’t afford enough food.

Growing Youth found that residents tend to pass up on healthier foods because they’re too expensive, opting instead for low-cost foods with far less nutritional value.

The result is that many people here suffer from diet-related health problems. Eighty-nine percent reported health problems like obesity, diabetes, heart problems, asthma and digestive disorders.

But affording the food isn’t the only problem. Getting to the market itself can be a challenge, since residents of the APC live at the outskirts of the Island.

Research done by Growing Youth showed that, predictably, business follows money in Alameda.

The group mapped the food sources in Alameda — grocery stores, markets, liquor stores and fast food restaurants — and cross-referenced that map with maps displaying income levels, race and youth population patterns. They found that the best places to find healthy food were closest to Alameda’s wealthier neighborhoods.

A doughnut shop is the closest food source to the APC. The nearest grocery store is Albertson’s, a mile away. Fewer than half of the households at the APC own their own vehicles, so that mile is a much longer haul for residents who mostly depend on an infrequent bus line to take them there.

By the earliest estimates, the official redevelopment of Alameda Point won’t begin until 2008. So it will still be some time before the economic geography of the city begins to shift westward and the resources that can be expected in wealthier areas are more readily accessible to the residents of the APC.

In the meantime, the Growing Youth Project is working toward shortening the distance between APC residents and healthy food.

They’re looking into several projects, like starting a small cooperative grocery store using one of the APC buildings and installing a community shuttle that would help residents access better stores and farmers’ markets more easily.

The youth are working to expand the community garden to include egg-laying hens and beehives that can be harvested for honey. They’ve also been working with AUSD to improve nutrition in the schools.

And the project has already launched an outreach campaign to improve health awareness and encourage healthy lifestyles in the APC community.

Their slogan: “Nutritious is Bootylicious.”

Contact Dave Mertzig at