Improving the Health and Well-Being of Inner-City Families (1998)

Cornell Cooperative Extension offers a variety of nutrition and health programs to residents of limited-resource communities in New York City - with strikingly successful results. In years past, for many inner-city families corn, tomatoes, and lettuce were about the range of vegetables offered at the dinner table. Many never savored - nor knew how to prepare - freshly grown salad greens, squash, peppers, onions, broccoli, and eggplant, all readily available to families living near farms outside the city. No more. In more than 40 sites scattered across Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, fresh summer fruits and vegetables are sold to city residents in market booths stocked and operated by farmers from Rockland, Sullivan, and Orange Counties as well as from New Jersey. In the fall pumpkins, apples, sweet potatoes, leeks, and other later-maturing fruits and vegetables are sold. Making fresh produce available in limited-resource communities, and encouraging shoppers to buy these goods, has been the goal of the Farmers Market Nutrition Program, a federal and state nutrition and economic development program operated in New York by the New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets in collaboration with the New York State Department of Health, the New York State Office for the Aging, and Cornell Cooperative Extension. program was established to encourage families to broaden their choices of fresh fruits and vegetables to meet the five-servings-a-day recommendation of the USDA. people who live in the city have never seen, let alone tasted, vegetables like zucchini and turnips, so they're not likely to buy them, explains Nilda Tirado, the Cornell Cooperative Extension leader in charge of New York City's 14 nutrition and health programs. entice shoppers to purchase these fresh foods, our nutrition educators, working at 11 sites in the city, talk to shoppers about nutritional value, put on food preparation demonstrations for low-fat meals and snacks, encourage them to have a taste, and then give them recipes so they know how to use them in everyday cooking. Unfamiliarity isn't the only barrier to taking advantage of the bounty produced on New York farms. Often it's money. To offer low-income families with young children the chance to buy the fresh fruits and vegetables sold at the markets, the New York State Department of Health gives $20 worth of federally funded Farmers Market Nutrition coupons to participants in the Women, Infants, and Children's (WIC) program. Extension community educators, both at the WIC clinics where the coupons are distributed and at the market, help young mothers decide how to use the coupons, a few dollars at time, to try new foods, thereby exposing their children to healthful eating habits. Gabrielle Finley '00, a human biology, health, and society major, spent last summer as an intern working with the Farmers Market Nutrition Program. One of the most successful teaching devices provided for the program's community educators, Finley says, was the game Wheel of Health, similar to the TV game show Wheel of Fortune. Designed by Winna Rivera, extension associate, and Jennifer Wilkins, senior extension associate, both in the Division of Nutritional Sciences, the wheel of health is a question-and-answer game that teaches nutrition facts. It was one of an array of materials provided for the educators to use. The wheel drew crowds and crowds of people, says Finley, surprised at the success of the teaching aid. Some people couldn't read, others spoke only Creole or Spanish. But there was so much interest that someone would step forward spontaneously and translate a question and the answer for the crowd. The game was successful because it allowed us to teach people of different socioeconomic backgrounds, different ethnic backgrounds, different native languages the same thing. For example, the fact that green peppers have more vitamin C than oranges is not something they would have learned by going to a grocery store. …