Food deserts parch Roanoke residents of nutrition, money - Roanoke Times

Photos by Stephanie Klein-Davis | The Roanoke Times

Shoppers line up in the grass along Valley View Boulevard near Walmart. Many residents of so-called food deserts must rely on public transportation for grocery shopping. According to federal figures, almost 30 percent of Roanoke residents have low access to supermarkets.

Tara Detwiler, Rebekah Detwiler, Angelo Anderson and Laneka Hughes walk to the Community Shop In on Burrell Street to get some cash and quick snacks. Corner stores help fill the void in neighborhoods that lack supermarkets, but prices are higher and selection limited.

Laneka Hughes, Angelo Anderson, Rebekah Detwiler and Tara Detwiler load a month's worth of groceries into a taxi at the Valley View Walmart. The family's northwest Roanoke neighborhood is considered a "food desert," where residents are low-income, lack transportation and have no supermarkets close to their homes.

Tara Detwiler (from left), Rebekah Detwiler, Angelo Anderson and Laneka Hughes sit on their front porch at the Villages at Lincoln waiting for a cab to take them to Walmart for their monthly grocery shopping trip. Rebekah Detwiler, who doesn't have a car and lives several miles from the nearest supermarket, spends at least $20 to get to Walmart and back.

Shopping day for Rebekah Detwiler and her family began with a wait.

She'd called the cab 45 minutes earlier, and it was getting hot on her front porch on the first day of July at the Villages at Lincoln in northwest Roanoke. So she called the cab again, only to learn the driver had called back to confirm he was still needed, but she'd missed the call while she was outside waiting.

It would be a while longer before Detwiler, 41, and her children would pile into the back seat for the $10 ride to the Valley View Walmart.

This is how shopping gets done in Detwiler's house. At midnight on the first of every month, $290 in federal Supplementary Nutritional Assistance Program benefits are deposited into her account, and the next morning, she calls a cab. The cab rides alone add at least $20 to the grocery bill. Not to mention the additional time it takes to shop.

When you get to the supermarket just once a month, it changes how you shop, and therefore how you eat -- and usually not to the benefit of your health.

But that's the way it goes when you live in a "food desert," an area where residents are poor, lack transportation and have no supermarkets nearby to supply healthy food choices.

So food desert denizens pile up transportation costs, or pay higher prices for food from corner markets, convenience stores and pharmacies. They also suffer from higher rates of diet-related disease.

Food deserts can be urban, suburban or rural, researchers say. But new data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture show that few food deserts in Virginia are more barren than the one where Detwiler lives.

Shopping on the fringe

From Detwiler's house to the Walmart, it's more than 3 miles by road. It's more than 2 miles to the independent Food Giant store on 24th Street Northwest.

According to the USDA data, Detwiler and every person in her census tract, which runs from the Gainsboro neighborhood north through the Lincoln Terrace area, has low access to a supermarket. That means the nearest supermarket is more than a mile away. While the USDA identified nearly 200 tracts in Virginia as food deserts, just 29 of them were noted for having 100 percent of residents with low access to a supermarket.

Including Detwiler's, four of those 29 are in Roanoke, spreading like a fan from Lincoln Terrace east around downtown to southeast Roanoke.

Moreover, according to the USDA, nearly 40 percent of households in Detwiler's neighborhood don't own a vehicle. Just two tracts in the state, in Norfolk and Lynchburg, have a higher percentage.

Among Virginia's urban centers, only Petersburg has a higher percentage than Roanoke of total residents with low access to a supermarket, the USDA data show. Nearly 30 percent of Roanokers have poor food access. Lynchburg is a distant third place with 16 percent.

The USDA released the data in May as part of its interactive online Food Desert Locator map.

Mari Gallagher, a Chicago-based researcher and food desert expert, believes the USDA data may underestimate the problem in some places by applying one set of standards across the nation without looking at the problem on the ground.

"There's not a perfect distance to a grocery store," she said.

Depending on topography and other factors, a mile in one place can seem a lot farther than a mile in another, she said.

Plus, the data only consider what food sources aren't in an area. Gallagher, who popularized the term "food deserts" with a landmark 2006 study of food access issues in Chicago, said it's just as important to consider where people are left to shop when they don't have a supermarket: corner stores, convenience stores, gas stations, fast food restaurants.

Gallagher calls those fringe food sources.

And she says they're a key source of poor health in food deserts. Her 2006 study drew a line from food access issues to obesity, diabetes and other diet-related health issues.

Her latest research, she said, is finding that those health issues aren't as linked to fast food as is commonly believed. They're connected more to what consumers buy at the corner store.

'Stuff that will last'

The first thing to land in Detwiler's cart at the Walmart was a watermelon.

But when you shop once a month, produce is a challenge. It only keeps so long, and that's often a deterrent to buying it at all and relying instead on canned fruits and vegetables, which means more sodium or sugars.

But Detwiler, who was raised in Pennsylvania farm country, is fond of fresh produce.

She was born in Roanoke, one of 12 children, but in 1976 she and six of her siblings were adopted by a Mennonite family from Harrisburg, Pa., after authorities here found them living in deep neglect.

She's back in touch with her mother and moved back to Roanoke two years ago.

But she's disabled from depression and lives on public assistance, including the $290 in food benefits she was out to spend.

From the produce section it was on to the meat department. Detwiler pored over the meat choices, adding frozen shrimp and tuna, stew meat, small steaks, an 80-ounce roll of ground beef, 24 hot dogs, a large tray of chicken wings and a bag of boneless chicken breasts to her cart. Thanks to her freezer, she can stretch the meats out over the month.

While she went to the deli for sandwich meats, the kids -- daughter Tara, 16, son Angelo, 3, and grand-niece Laneka Hughes, 18 -- took a separate cart and a list to troll for other items.

All around Detwiler, the store was crowded with other first-of-the-month shoppers loading up on items in large quantities.

Detwiler was doing what Kate Jones, a registered dietitian for Carilion Clinic, recommends to her patients -- shopping the perimeter of the grocery store, because that's where the healthiest food is: produce, fresh meat, breads. It's in the interior of the store where shelves are stocked with packaged and canned foods that are less nutritious and tend to be higher in salt, fat and sugars.

But they're also more filling, and therefore more attractive to someone trying to stretch her food benefits.

"We get, like, rice and noodles and stuff that will last," Detwiler said.

When she met up with her kids again, their cart was stocked with 30 packages of ramen noodles, several boxes of pasta and cans of Chef Boyardee ravioli.

'Rich, filling and cheap'

Jones is familiar with the approach to shopping Detwiler takes from the low-income patients she sees.

"Often, the diet is quite limited," she said. "They're going to be going with what's rich and filling and cheap."

It's not a recipe for good health.

Jones said the increased instance of type 2 diabetes in low-income populations is well-documented. Gallagher took the analysis several steps deeper.

In her 2006 study of Chicago's food deserts, she found that "as grocery store access decreases, obesity increases."

Her findings pointed to one conclusion, she wrote: "Communities that have no or distant grocery stores, or have an imbalance of healthy food options, will likely have increased premature death and chronic health conditions."

Jones sees the phenomenon in action on a regular basis in Roanoke.

Indigent diabetes patients often live in circumstances that prohibit them from taking in the kind of diet that will control their disease, she said.

A patient will be discharged with a diet plan that's "not always feasible" for them, because they are left to eat "whatever is available in their neighborhood," Jones said.

"You just try to meet people where they are," she said. "Often, the advice becomes, 'Just eat regularly.' "

The cost of convenience

But eating regularly gets tougher as the month wears on for residents of food deserts.

Mike Gambrell, 26, and his wife Samantha, 27, live on Kirk Avenue Southeast, in the heart of another of Virginia's "driest" food deserts. They do their big shopping at a grocery store in Vinton when they can get Samantha's mom, who owns a car, to drive them there.

But on a hot day in mid-July, the couple walked with Samantha's daughter, Keanna, 9, to Star City Food Center three blocks away when they needed sandwich bags and some soft drinks. With no car, they hit the nearby convenience stores and corner markets they can get to on foot, Samantha Gambrell said, "and spend outrageous money."

But the owners of those stores say they can't buy in enough volume to offer prices that compete with big chain stores.

"It costs us more, so we have to sell it for more," said Jamil Srour, owner of Star City Food Center at the corner of 13th Street and Tazewell Avenue. Cliff Baker, owner of Saleeba Grocery at Tazewell and 10th Street, said the same.

These small stores are just not designed to supply people with all their groceries, their owners say.

They do next to no grocery business in the first week or two of the month, when families on public assistance are still eating from their first-of-the-month supermarket shopping.

But about the 10th of the month, sales start to pick up, Baker said. It's mostly fill-in shopping, he said, people buying for one meal to fix that night.

Srour waved a hand at the limited supply of milk, eggs and bologna in one of his coolers. "You see the sale of this stuff go up the last two weeks of the month," he said.

Baker long ago gave up stocking fresh produce. It didn't sell.

"The diet down here is just horrendous, not health-conscious at all," said Baker, who grew up in the neighborhood.

Srour had some lemons and onions on a shelf, and sometimes has some tomatoes, he said. His business is mostly soft drinks and cigarettes, he said. But he keeps the groceries for customers who need them.

"It's not that we make a lot of money on this," he said. "But it's necessary."

Filling the voids

Where did the grocery stores go?

Kroger once operated stores at 19th Street and Melrose Avenue in northwest Roanoke and Ninth Street and Bullitt Avenue Southeast, in Roanoke's two most intense food deserts.

But those stores, which were small compared with modern supermarkets, closed decades ago. Other chains like IGA and Galaxy occupied those same spaces, but all of them gave up by the late 1990s.

That's typical of how chain stores have vacated inner-city neighborhoods, Gallagher said.

Today's chain grocery stores are typically 65,000 square feet, roughly five times the size of those old stores, and are located amidst vast parking lots along major arteries in suburbs.

Neither Kroger nor Food Lion responded to requests for interviews or questions submitted by email about how they choose store locations and what their role might be in addressing food access issues.

And given their current model, they wouldn't likely come to the areas where they're needed in Roanoke anyway.

Those sections of the city lack the large spaces on major roads that chains look for, said Brian Townsend, assistant Roanoke city manager for community development.

Some smaller stores have sprung up in recent years in the gaps left by the major chains.

Rett Ward, owner of Tinnell's Finer Foods in south Roanoke, opened a franchise Save-A-Lot store in the old Roanoke-Salem Plaza at Melrose Avenue and Peters Creek Road in 2008.

"We felt that this area was really underserved," he said. And the Save-A-Lot business model seemed to fit the community.

It's a small, "hard-discount, limited-assortment store," Ward said. It's in a 15,000-square-foot space once occupied by a Winn-Dixie store. Where his boutique Tinnell's store carries 15,000 different items, and a large chain store carries tens of thousands, his Save-A-Lot stocks just 1,500 items. It's not about variety, he said, it's about cost. It has a produce section, a meat department and a full dairy section. Whatever you find in a large store, you can find it at Save-A-Lot, Ward said. It's just that there's probably only one private label brand of it.

The store itself is spare, with most products displayed in boxes designed to stack and serve as their own shelving, which allows a smaller stocking crew that can work fast -- and saves money.

Ward figures 75 percent of his customers come from within a mile of the store. Many walk there, he said.

Despite a slow start, the store has been a success, he said. He's had 10 percent growth in the last year, and he's pondering opening another Save-A-Lot somewhere else in Roanoke.

If Roanoke is going to be able to "backfill the voids" for supermarkets, Townsend said, it's going to take a model like Save-A-Lot.

Government can only do so much to help, he said. The issue has been on the city's radar for years, Townsend and other city officials noted. It's covered in neighborhood plans dating back nearly 10 years.

The city certainly can make the ground fertile for grocers with planning and zoning, and incentives such as lower-tax enterprise zones.

City leaders also point to other small successes such as community gardens in southeast Roanoke and the Hurt Park neighborhood, and the rise of small farmers markets around the city.

Gallagher said those things help, but they don't amount to mainstream food sources.

"They're good additions, and they count, but we need to do that and so much more," she said. "There's never one single problem and one single solution."

Still, Gallagher said, "We shouldn't just sit around and wait for the big grocers to come."

In Nashville, Tenn., a faith-based nonprofit is attacking that city's food deserts on multiple levels.

Re/Storing Nashville was founded in 2008. The group is raising awareness of food access issues, but also working with local government on changes in zoning to accommodate new grocery stores and changes to bus routes to make it easier for people to shop, said Miriam Leibowitz, program coordinator for Re/Storing Nashville.

The group also has a grant for its Healthy Corner Store Initiative, to get neighborhood stores to stock healthier foods, Leibowitz said. She works with store owners to find sources for produce, whole-grain breads and low-fat dairy products, and uses the grant funds to buy shelving and coolers for the stores.

It's not hard to convince the store owners, Leibowitz said. "They already know it's good for business."

But like Gallagher, Leibowitz said the solution will be many small solutions. Food access issues are connected to the overall health and safety of neighborhoods.

"The difficulty with addressing food and access," she said, "is that it's not just about food and access."

A month's supply

The two carts were both full by the time Detwiler got in line to check out at the Walmart.

Angelo had been patient throughout the long shopping trip but was beginning to nag for candy while they waited in line.

It took several minutes for the clerk to run everything past the scanner. Laneka and Tara watched the total bill climb, wondering aloud if it would be more than their SNAP benefits.

It was: $312.75. Detwiler laid out the difference in cash and called a cab while the kids pushed the two carts to the sidewalk outside to wait. At the far end of the parking lot, several people with several bags clutched in each hand waited at the bus stop.

The cab arrived within a few minutes this time. The cabbie popped the trunk without getting out of the car, and Detwiler and the kids loaded the bags in -- all except the eggs.

Those rode up front with Laneka. Their cargo would have to last the month until more benefits came. If not, Detwiler would be filling the gap with what she could get from the corner stores that bookend Villages at Lincoln.

They were home a few minutes later. It had been three hours since they made that first call for a cab.