Fighting to ensure everyone in Chattanooga has access to a healthy diet
Bingo’s Market, a mere four-and-a-half months old, is in full start-up phase. Just ask Tara Williams, manager at the market. When new customers come in the market on the first floor of Patton Towers, an affordable housing space in the downtown, she’ll ask if they are familiar with what the market is trying to accomplish and if they have any suggestions on what they would like to find nestled in among its shelves.
By the cash register, the store keeps a running list of those suggestions. And in a quiet moment when guests are not shopping for Gatorade, Georgia-grown pinto beans and Tylenol, she glances through it.
Two round tables sit in the center of the store. A refrigeration unit hums while a sage and citrus Yankee Candle burns by the register. One person suggested Ginger Ale. Williams strikes it out. It’s a no-no. The store doesn’t sell items with high fructose corn syrup.
Like a bodega corner store that you might find in New York City, Bingo’s Market tries to offer a little bit for everybody. It offers cans of La Croix for workers in the nearby Edney Innovation Center, for example. But there are some notable differences. Gone are the offerings of beer, so is the quintessential bodega cat.
The primary goal of the market—which was established by the YMCA with help from Causeway, the Lyndhurst Foundation and The Enterprise Center—is to bring healthy food options to the residents of Patton Towers. Without Bingo’s, many would have to hop on a CARTA bus to the closest Food City stores, either on Brainerd Road or Tennessee Avenue. Without the market, poverty plus the distance to healthy, affordable food options would mean the residents of Patton Towers would be living in a food desert.
The market’s customers include Melissa Yother, who before Bingo’s, would sometimes take a buggy and walk to Publix on the Northshore, she said, taking breaks and enjoying the walk. Being a diabetic, she shops at Bingo’s often for their selection of fruits and veggies. Verna Stone, on the other hand, got her groceries at Buehler’s Market until it closed in April. She usually catches the elevator from her apartment above and walks through the market’s door once maybe twice a day, often to get a bottle of peach iced tea.
“The people is nice in here,” Stone said. “They treat you with respect.”Part of William’s job is explaining healthy foods, just what is organic foods and why they are preferable to produce treated with pesticides, for example.
Bingo’s Market is one of the most recent efforts to shrink the food deserts in this city, to provide healthy, affordable food to low income residents who might not have the ability to drive out and get it.
Over the last few years, the city has continued to search for long-term solutions to food deserts. What seems to be working at the moment isn’t attracting supermarkets, but smaller initiatives, like corner stores.
In the coming months, Bingo’s market is working on becoming self-sustaining, attracting a reliable stream of customers so it can continue to open its doors. “We need the support of the community if this is to continue,” Williams said.
By the numbers
It’s not just Chattanooga. The USDA’s Economic Research Service estimated about 19 million Americans live in food deserts. Essentially, the USDA defines a food desert as a census tract where 20 percent of the residents live below the poverty line and at least 33 percent live more than a mile away from a grocery store if in an urban area. If that census tract is rural, then 33 percent of the residents have to live more than 10 miles from a grocery store.
Furthermore, a significant number of households in food deserts don’t have vehicles to travel the distance to the store.
According to the Food Access Research Atlas produced with data collected by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 2015, the food deserts in the City of Chattanooga include many of the familiar names that often are mentioned when it comes to issues surrounding poverty: Alton Park, East Lake, and the Chattanooga neighborhoods to the east that include Gaylon Heights and Eastdale.
Chattanooga’s food deserts are the same places that face significant health problems due to unhealthy diets. According to data recently published by the Centers for Disease Control through their 500 Cities project, these are often the same census tracts that face increased numbers of people with diabetes and obesity, which can exacerbate health problems.
Interestingly enough, neighborhoods like North Chattanooga and Riverview suffer the highest numbers of binge drinkers. The places where food deserts reign show the lowest instances of that “unhealthy behavior,” according to the CDC.
Band-Aids
Bill Rush, project manager at the Chattanooga YMCA, remembers a time when access to affordable, healthy food wasn’t as big a concern in Chattanooga.
“I lived in East Chattanooga, I grew up in Chattanooga, and we had a grocery store,” Rush recalled. “It was called Red Food, five blocks from the house. Now that store is empty and it’s been empty for years.”
Like any other business, Rush said, grocery stories need steady traffic in order to be sustainable.
Six years ago, Food Lion announced that it was closing six of its stores in the Chattanooga area, exacerbating the city’s access to food.
In the meantime, several organizations have started community gardens, for example. The Brainerd Farmer’s Market, which is held near the edge of a food desert boundary, accepts SNAP (the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program) and EBT card purchases, according to its website, and it even got a grant that matched those purchases, effectively doubling the purchasing power to buy produce at that market.
Besides Bingo’s Market, the YMCA offers the Mobile Market, which rides a circuit to the Emma Wheeler Homes, Gateway Towers and College Hill Courts, for example. It is a trailer that stops, and opens up essentially a one-aisle store.
According to Rush, it was only meant to be a temporary solution until something more permanent could be found.
“The real story isn’t whether it’s going to be around for the next 100 years, the real story is, is it helping someone now?” Rush said speaking about the Mobile Market. “We know people have changed their diet, we know people lower their blood pressure medicine because of their diet. So, there are things beyond measurement.”
The Mobile Market first started making 12 stops. Now it makes nine. That was because a few community corner stores started offering more fresh fruits and veggies, and other healthy options, Rush said.
Meanwhile, Laura Kilpatrick, director of agency and government relations at The Chattanooga Area Food Bank, said the organization distributed 16.3 million pounds of food across the Chattanooga area and surrounding counties last year. “Chances are if a church or nonprofit is doing hunger relief, they are getting their food from us,” Kilpatrick said.
CAFB hands food out to school children who might not have guarantees of meals on the weekends. It assists filling the coolers of community kitchens. It helps compile and distribute food boxes that weigh over 50 pounds.
All this though, is intended for short-term or emergency assistance. CAFB has someone who helps people apply for SNAP – a longer-term solution that is “the most successful program of getting people out of poverty,” Kilpatrick said. “There’s been great strides to kinda put Band-Aids on some of these issues, and we all know that it’s Band-Aids,” Kilpatrick said.
Searching for long-term solutions
At first glance, the solution to all of this seems simple: open grocery stores in the food deserts. But it’s not that simple, Kilpatrick said.
“Location of a grocery store may not be the barrier,” she said. “It may be the cost of food that’s an issue for some families. Getting there might not be the problem, it might be paying for it and that’s one of the things we assist with.”
Ultimately, Kilpatrick doesn’t see a solution to food deserts in food policy or attracting the right kind of program or business to an area.
“I think that really what solves food deserts is just a better economy where people can actually afford to get to a store,” Kilpatrick said.
Meanwhile, in the next few months, Congress will deliberate to reauthorize the Farm Bill, which includes funding to the SNAP program.
In September, Jimmy Wright of the National Grocers Association testified before Congress about a SNAP Online Purchasing Pilot that could have the potential to wipe out much of America’s food deserts. Wright, who owns Wright’s Market, a grocery store three hours away in Opelika, Alabama, tested the program by allowing users of SNAP to purchase groceries online. Wright’s Market then delivered the groceries to residents who lived in rural food deserts, eliminating the distance between them and healthy, affordable food.
Moving forward, the National Grocers Association opposes some proposed changes to the SNAP program, such as adding tax on retailers.
In a statement, Greg Ferrara, executive vice president of advocacy, public relations and member services for the NGA said, “Independent retail supermarkets and the wholesalers that supply them play a vital role in the communities they serve through access to food items and as a contributor to the local economy.”
Rush said there are neighborhoods in Chattanooga working to attract smaller grocery stores to their area. “There’s a lot of moving parts and we didn’t get here overnight. We’re not going to get out of it overnight,” Rush said. “We call these marathon races, not sprints.”