For Immediate Release
Contact: Gina Palencar (323) 533-3516
Danny Feingold (213) 675-8960

Health and Food Crisis Seen On Bus Tour Through East L.A. Community

Community, Faith and Health Leaders Make Urgent Call for City Leaders To Bring Stores with Quality Food and Good Jobs to “Food Deserts”

Los Angeles – On a community bus tour through East Los Angeles yesterday, faith leaders, health care providers, educators, students, and residents joined the Alliance for Healthy and Responsible Grocery Stores in calling upon elected leaders to adopt a city-wide policy for ending the grocery divide between communities in Los Angeles.

The tour featured stops at a local high school, a health center, a church and the location of a former major supermarket which was the only one of its kind in the community before the chain closed its doors over a year ago, displacing workers and leaving residents with very little options for buying food and other necessities.

Olga Peres, resident of Ramona Gardens Housing Project for over 30 years, spoke of the impact on herself and her neighbors. “This is truly a crisis for those of us who live here not to have access to good food and other basic necessities. We have so few options available to us. We work hard to support our families, and we want the best for them like anyone else wants for their family.”

In 2008, A Blue Ribbon Commission, convened by the Alliance for Healthy and Responsible Grocery Stores, released a report urging City leaders to take charge in remedying a growing divide in how the grocery industry treats underserved and affluent communities. The Commission, comprised of leaders from the political, development, health and faith communities, gleaned its findings from public testimony taken at an earlier hearing, where community residents, industry experts, academics, workers and clergy described a looming grocery crisis in Los Angeles. The full report can be read at: http://74.10.59.52/goodgrocery/.

The Commission offers several recommendations to city and grocery industry leaders, including a direct challenge to generate a policy creating uniform standards for grocery operations in Los Angeles.

The Commission based its recommendations on findings showing that underserved communities are suffering the consequences of how the grocery industry does business in the city on myriad levels. For example, testimony showed that not only are underserved neighborhoods becoming “food deserts’” (a term often used to describe neighborhoods that have no full-service grocery stores within a half square-mile of their center), but that even in those low-income communities where major chains have opened, the quality and depth of their food and services is discernibly lower than in stores in more affluent neighborhoods. The cumulative effect, according to the report, is that residents, families and kids in those communities suffer from disproportionately high rates of diet-related health problems.

On one stop of the tour, Dr. Cheryl Resnik of the USC Fit Families Program described the health impact of food deserts. “Children in low-income, ‘food desert’ communities don’t have enough healthy food options – and it’s hurting them in a very dramatic way,” stated Dr. Resnik. Many of the children who receive care in the program are diagnosed with or at high risk for diabetes and other chronic conditions.

The Blue Ribbon report also found that because most stores in “food desert” communities are independently owned and non-union, their workers are paid less and afforded less training. Consequently, according to the findings, those communities end up suffering not only from limited access to quality, full-service stores, but also from the absence of what has historically been a stimulus industry for neighborhoods and the diminished professional standards that come with non-union stores. “These findings truly illustrate a tale of two cities,” says Elliott Petty, Retail Analyst for the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE), a member organization of the Alliance. Nothing illustrates this more than employment data from the state of California which shows that grocery workers in East L.A. earn an average of $7,000 less per year than grocery workers at stores in West. L.A.”

The Alliance for Healthy and Responsible Grocery Stores, a city-wide coalition of 25 community, faith-based, labor, and environmental organizations, first convened the Blue Ribbon Commission in early 2007 to study the Los Angeles food divide and the impact on local communities. The Alliance plans to follow up with the City Council this fall on the recommendations made by the Commission.

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