Food Deserts Aren’t the Problem
A dozen recently and currently incarcerated women gathered in a classroom across the street from their San Francisco jail and considered a bulb of fennel. Crowded around a few small tables, the students peppered their teacher, Vera Pittman, with questions.
“Is that a vegetable?”
“Do we have to eat the hair?”
“It’s fronds, not hair,” said Pittman, walking the fennel to each table so everyone could inhale its licorice-like smell.
The fennel 101 lesson was part of a cooking class called Soul Food, a program started by a local chef and aimed at teaching low-income women how to cook and eat fresh and local foods. Many women in the class are from the Bay Area’s poorest neighborhoods, places where people suffer more often from illnesses that better diets may delay or prevent, including high blood pressure, diabetes and cardiovascular disease. They will die, on average, years earlier than wealthier Americans.
Article Credit
“Food Deserts Aren’t the Problem.” The Dallas Morning News. The Dallas Morning News
By Heather T. Gilligan
17 Mar. 2014. Web. 10 July 2014.