School pantry is a lesson in nutrition
It’s no surprise that some Memphis youths don’t know what a fresh peach looks like.
Chances are that’s a lesson their parents can’t afford.
That’s because in a city with the nation’s second highest child poverty rate, paying close to $2 for a pound of fresh peaches - which amounts to about two large or three medium peaches - doesn’t make much economic sense when that money will buy two or three cans of diced peaches.
That reality, one that fuels the childhood obesity epidemic here, is apparently showing up in the pediatric obesity program at Le Bonheur Children’s Medical Center and University of Tennessee Health Science Center that Dr. Joan Han operates.
Han and Nichole Reed, a dietitian who works with the program, recently told a State of the State’s Health roundtable here that some kids here are so used to processed fruits and vegetables that they have trouble recognizing some of them in their natural form.
Yet Han and Reed’s experiences underscore why the Mid-South Food Bank’s newest food pantry opened in the right place for youths to learn what certain fruits and vegetables look like. A school. The food bank recently opened its first school food pantry in Shelby County at George Washington Carver College and Career Academy. The pantry, called the Healthy Food Pantry, not only will supply canned foods, but will distribute fresh produce and include a garden for growing vegetables.
Kroger will donate food to the pantry, which will be operated by youths in Project STAND, a Shelby County School juvenile justice re-entry program, and youths involved in the school’s Building Blocks Mentoring Program.
“We have fresh produce here,” said Stephon Smallwood, founder and president of the mentoring program. “We have a refrigerator here that’s state of the art...we’ll have all the pillars of the food groups.
“And we’ll be serving a whole zip code, not just the school.”
About that zip code: Nearly 45 percent of children in 38109 were living below poverty level in 2016, according to census data. Fourteen schools are also in that zip code, said Tarol Page Clements, Project STAND manager. “We have a garden with field peas and okra out there, and we have options for storing fresh fruit,” said Clements, who said the pantry, which will distribute food twice a week, should be able to help as many as 135 families.
The youths in Project STAND will also benefit from the work experience by getting a chance to earn certificates in warehouse management and customer service, Clements said.
But when you consider how poverty feeds obesity by denying many children the chance to learn what some fruits and vegetables look like, the pantry has the potential to provide something more enduring.
It can provide the kind of education that can make them more conscious about their health; the kind that their parents would love to give to them but because their income forces them to prioritize convenience over health.
While the Healthy Food Pantry at Carver won’t solve the structural issues behind Shelby County’s deep poverty, it will at least give poor parents and students access to the fresh food that they need to stop their health from becoming a casualty of that poverty.
And so that they can learn to recognize - and enjoy more types of fruits that come off a tree and not just out of a can.