The City Spurs Grocery Stores to Underserved
The Bloomberg administration, which has already cut down on trans fats and distributed fruit vendors to produce-anemic neighborhoods, is now seeking to provide incentives for grocery stores to open in areas where most families spend their food budget at bodegas and drug stores. The City Planning Commission unanimously approved the proposal on Wednesday, reports The…
The Bloomberg administration, which has already cut down on trans fats and distributed fruit vendors to produce-anemic neighborhoods, is now seeking to provide incentives for grocery stores to open in areas where most families spend their food budget at bodegas and drug stores. The City Planning Commission unanimously approved the proposal on Wednesday, reports The New York Times, which would grant zoning and tax incentives to grocery stores, with set requirements about how much produce and other foods they sell. The city is eying northern Manhattan, central Brooklyn, the South Bronx, and downtown Jamaica in Queens. Many city officials, food experts, and grocery store executives approve of the plan, meant to spur economic growth in addition to encouraging health (and fighting the rising rates of obesity and diabetes), but the Times mentions a recent report to Congress by the Department of Agriculture that shows an uncertain correlation between obesity and access to healthy, fresh foods. Avi Kaner, a supermarket operator, said education is the main solution. If you force distribution of product to a population that’s not interested in it, or not educated in it, and the grocery stores can’t make a profit, he told the Times, they’ll eventually leave. Check out the Times article for more details about the program, similar programs across the country, and a finer breakdown of the pros and cons.
A Plan to Add Supermarkets to Poor Areas [NY Times]
FRESH Food Store Program Overview [DOCP]
NYC’s Neighborhood Grocery Store and Supermarket Shortage [DOCP]
Photo by Royce Bair
Rob, most people are getting more not less since societal mores against sex outside of marriage are pretty much gone. Ask dibs 🙂
“People generally overestimate the calories they are burning with exercise, and they may reward themselves by eating more. Additionally, many studies have found was that diet plus aerobic exercise provides only a very marginal benefit (in terms of weight loss) when compared to diet alone.”
It isn’t about ‘doing exercise’ for an hour or so a day. It’s about general levels of physical activity throughout the day. Walking everywhere vs. driving or taking cabs, doing the dishes by hand and chopping vegetables vs. a dishwasher and cuisinart, raking and shoveling vs. using a leafblower or hiring some illegals, stairs vs. elevator. These are little things, but over the course of a day, repeated day after day after day, they make a difference. Go a generation or so further back, and most people worked in agriculture, where they were on their feet from sunrise to sunset.
Humans evolved in an environment of calorie scarcity and constant migration, and our bodies’ metabolism hasn’t caught up to cheap food and ubiquitous labor-saving devices.
oh, ok
Pete – groceries are more expensive now due to pesky child labor laws which weren’t in play when we were young’uns
so what’s all this have to do with price of potatos?
If anything in NYC – kids are now SAFER than we were 30 years ago – remember 30yrs ago was 1979!
“Warriors come out and plaaaayyy”
And as for the publicity of pedophilia/ crimes against children – it might have been a bit late in childhood for some but I vividly recall the Eton Patz case and eating my cereal b/4 school staring at some missing kid & my mother checking my Halloween candy for razors…..
If anything in my observation (compared to my childhood) the reason that we wanted to go out and play all day (and could) was because there were TONS of kids in our neighborhood, all of the same age – in many neighborhoods in NYC and the suburbs, you no longer have that – so it tends to diminish the packs of kids we remember. It will be interesting to see what happens in a few years when the toddlers in places like Lower Park Slope grow up. Because that is an area where it seems everyone (the gentrifiers) moved in around the same time and thus have kids around the same age
that’s terrible dittoburg 🙁
*rob*
When I was young we lived in a shoe-box in the middle of the road, me parents beat us to death every night, and I had to wake up and go to school two hours before I went to bed.
Apologies to Monty Python.
obesity could be the result of people having a lot less sex these days as well too. i know i was much thinner when i was getting it 🙁
*rob*