Los Angeles, CA, 6/26/2007

BY MARY LEE, Guest Columnist
Article Last Updated: 06/24/2007

AS Southern California braces for another potential grocery-store strike, we're all starting to formulate our contingency plans. Where will I get my fruit? Will my kids have to eat from the hot-dog machine at 7-Eleven?

Wherever your sympathies rest in the labor struggle, there's no doubt a strike would wreak havoc on what you eat for at least a little while. But what if you lived with that kind of havoc every day? For low-income residents in my South L.A. neighborhood and countless other poor communities like it, getting fresh produce and meat is a constant struggle.

Full-service supermarkets have long since fled these neighborhoods, forcing residents to rely on canned, expensive foods from nearby corner stores or to trek as much as an hour away to get halfway-decent produce at a mega-grocery store.

The rising epidemics of diabetes and obesity have given an added urgency to the problem of these "food deserts" - the countless vast, poor communities without ready access to fresh food. Finding fresh food has been a decades-long struggle for millions of low-income Americans. Thankfully, there seems to be some momentum building behind the healthy food access movement.

In Sacramento, Senate Bill 107 would create the Healthy Food Retail Innovation Fund to spur dramatic improvements in access to fresh produce and meat in low-income communities and communities of color. The program would give corner-store owners, grocery chains and farmers markets the help they need to make providing fresh food profitable and sustainable.

Grocery stores would be eligible for low-interest loans or grants to help with the initial financing, making it affordable to take a risk on a new store in an industry where 1 percent to 2 percent profit margins are the norm. Corner-store owners also could receive support to purchase refrigeration units - a significant up-front cost that is often prohibitively expensive for shopkeepers who want to offer more fresh foods.

The California bill builds off the ongoing successes of a similar program in Pennsylvania. In the four-year history of Pennsylvania's Fresh Food Financing Initiative, 14 historically underserved communities have welcomed new grocery stores - and the 2,200 new jobs that came with them.

There are also new private-sector players in underserved communities.

UK supermarket juggernaut Tesco says it will build dozens of mid-size Fresh & Easy grocery stores in South L.A., opening the first one this fall. Tesco realizes there's money to be made in offering fresh food in low-income communities.

Getting healthy food into poor neighborhoods is a complex problem that requires a number of different angles of attack. But judging by the varied ways that legislators and the private sector have started to address food access, we may finally be marshaling the diverse approaches we need to make a real difference.
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Los Angeles resident Mary Lee is a community development expert for PolicyLink, a national public policy advocacy organization based in Oakland.