Beets, Not Burgers

Theodora Rodriquez gets frustrated every time she goes grocery shopping near her Harlem home. "They don't really sell a lot of organic food there," she says. "McDonald's is there; Burger King is there. My family never ate organic food." But at least the 17-year-old is trying to beat the odds in her New York community by eating right.

In many ways, Rodriquez is on the cusp of a nutritional movement: Just this week, New York City's education department announced it would reduce the fat content in the 800,000 meals it serves daily and ban candy, soda and other unhealthy snacks from revenue-generating school vending machines. Earlier this month, New York Assemblyman Felix Ortiz proposed a 1 percent tax on junk food to generate money to fight child obesity. And lawsuits have been filed in New York--including one by the parents of two overweight teen girls--claiming that McDonald's and other fast food restaurants misled customers by enticing them with tasty fatty foods. In major cities across the country, community activists also are working getting young Americans to adopt what some call the "food justice movement." Their targets: teens in the poorest neighborhoods--areas where it is not uncommon to find just one supermarket for 100,000 residents.

Bryant Terry is one of those activists. The founder and executive director of b-healthy!, a one-year-old nonprofit designed help low-income youth develop and maintain good eating habits, Terry fueled Rodriquez's desire for a healthy diet--no small feat in neighborhoods where produce is scarce and fast food is cheap. Because of Terry, Rodriquez says she feels a little healthier and a little more empowered these days. Fresh off nine months of b-healthy! workshops on nutrition and food politics with nine other inner-city teens, she's eating better than ever. And she's even successfully lobbied her corner bodega to stock organic milk for her toddler, Khaliq. "If I have to live in this community, I have to ask for what I want. Word of mouth is powerful," she says. "Our youth today is too big."

The statistics bear her out. In 1970, just 5 percent of American adolescents were obese. Today that number approaches 20 percent, according to Francine Kaufman, president of the American Diabetes Association and a pediatric endocrinologist. That American kids are getting fatter is hardly a surprise. The demise of the family meal has been met by an explosion of fast food restaurants and aggressive marketing of super-sized foods to kids. Schools began putting less of a premium on physical education in the 1980s, just as television, video games and, later, the Internet combined to ensure inertia at home. But minorities, especially kids in the inner cities, are carrying more than their share of the weight--a full 35 percent of black and Latino American teens are obese today. "The food choices are poor," says Kaufman. "It is easier and less expensive to eat fast food and very difficult to find, in some of these neighborhoods, appropriate foods, fruits and vegetables at a reasonable price." In the end, she says, "it will take a culture change" to reverse the trend.

That's exactly what those like Bryant Terry are attempting to engineer. "Eating healthy is synonymous with whiteness for some of these kids," he says. "They'll be like, 'Salmon? That's white people food.' There are ways to make it more accessible; the first part is about education." Terry launched b-healthy! ("Build Healthy Eating and Lifestyles to Help Youth") with a $52,000 grant from Open Society Institute. A culinary school graduate with a master's in history, he leads workshops at a community center in Manhattan on how to cook, eat a healthy diet and think about the role food plays in urban communities. Over piles of black bean burritos and baba ghanoush, Terry forces kids to think about why they can't get beets as easily as burgers--and how to take the initiative to change that.

On the other side of the country, similar efforts to teach teens about nutrition are underway. "I sort of think of it as the essential education," says Alice Waters, the acclaimed Berkeley, Calif., chef-owner of Chez Panisse. Waters also runs Edible Schoolyard in collaboration with the Martin Luther King Junior Middle School, where urban public school kids grow, cook and eat their own produce. "We have to reconnect kids with nature. Whether it is a rooftop garden or whether it's going an hour out of the city and connecting with a farm or edible landscaping going up the sides of a building in middle of a city."