Hunger, High Food Costs Found in Inner-City Area

A yearlong UCLA study on hunger in inner cities found that 27% of residents in one South-Central Los Angeles neighborhood said they do not have enough money to buy food, and that their families go hungry an average of five days each month.

Yet the Los Angeles emergency food system is so overwhelmed, the study said, that food pantries and soup kitchens--which have seen demand jump 38% between 1991 and 1992--are being forced to cut the amount of groceries given out and turn away one of four who come to their doors.

The study--which UCLA reports is the first to address hunger by looking at the nation’s food system from the field to the consumer--tackles both the causes and long-term solutions to what it calls a dearth of affordable, quality food in America’s inner cities, areas historically abandoned by supermarket chains.

“The failure is due to inadequate planning, not only inadequate resources,” the study says in calling for a Los Angeles council to coordinate plans for food production and distribution.

Among the study’s major recommendations are greater federal food assistance programs, fewer restrictions on street vendors peddling food and empowering newly formed city food councils to condemn inner city land for new supermarkets. The total cost of the federal food assistance programs is estimated at $12 billion over five years.

Such a strategy has been adopted in recent years in Toronto and Hartford, Conn. In Hartford, where the city food commission does everything from launching urban gardening programs and food cooperatives to providing incentives for supermarkets to build in inner cities, “access to food has significantly increased,” and hunger has been reduced, said Ellen Haas, assistant secretary for food and consumer services at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, who praised the approach.

“We can’t address hunger on an individual level; we must do so as a community issue,” said Robert Gottlieb, a lecturer at UCLA’s Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning who helped oversee six researchers working on the more than 400-page study, to be released next week. “Food is a right, just as health care is considered a right.”

But the study’s conclusions have drawn criticism from conservatives who also have raised questions about the big-ticket cost of implementing its recommendations.

“There is no evidence of poverty-related malnutrition in the U.S.,” said Robert Rector, senior policy analyst for welfare issues for the conservative Heritage Foundation. He lambasted the premise of the report, saying that government studies have shown that the only nutrient poor children do not receive in recommended amounts is iron. “The average poor child reaching age 18 is one inch taller and 10 pounds heavier than the GIs who stormed the beaches of Normandy,” he said.

Rector said the study’s proposal of boosting federal spending on food programs by $12 billion over five years is unlikely to be implemented as President Clinton wields his scissors in Washington.

Hunger in America persists--and increased markedly in the 1980s--despite overflowing grain silos and fields laden with rotting produce, the study said. Among the reasons: a restructuring of the national economy toward low-paying service sector jobs and cutbacks in welfare and food assistance programs. The average market value of non-cash benefits such as food stamps, Medicaid and housing subsidies received by poor families was cut to $4,088 in 1986 from $4,221 in 1979, the study said.

Declining real wages also have taken a toll. The percentage of full-time workers earning wages below the poverty level for a family of four jumped to 18% in 1990 from 12.1% in 1979. The federal government’s 14 programs to alleviate hunger have been woefully funded, the study said, and have focused more on protecting agricultural interests than feeding the poor. Current California food stamp benefit levels average about 66 cents per meal, but the USDA reports that the price of a nutritionally adequate meal totals $1.20.

The study homed in on one community encompassing two square miles of South-Central Los Angeles near USC--a predominantly Latino area with three large independent markets and many smaller general produce and meat markets and liquor stores. The median household income is $15,825, less than half the county level. One-third of the households do not own a car, and many must take two buses to get to a supermarket, the study found in the survey of 150 residents.

The researchers compared prices of 75 items in 23 chain and independent supermarkets with the prices of similar items sold in the Los Angeles suburbs of Lakewood and Montebello. They found that it costs nearly $300 more per year for a family living in the study area to buy the minimum food requirements recommended by the federal government than for the same family to make the purchases in middle-class Montebello.

The South-Central family spends 36% of its annual income on food, while a family in Lakewood or Montebello suburbs of Los Angeles spends 12% and 17% on food respectively.

In addition to the higher cost of food in the inner city, the study found that access to food was more difficult with financial and structural changes in the supermarket industry sparking a move to larger stores and an exodus from the urban core.

Los Angeles’ inner city saw a decline to 30 supermarkets in 1988 from 55 in 1965; South-Central was left with 25% fewer supermarkets per capita than other areas of the county, the study said. Vons Grocery Co., among others, announced plans to open additional stores in Los Angeles’ inner city following last spring’s riots.

Trips to outlying stores are made difficult by a Los Angeles transportation system that is geared to commuter routes, not intra-neighborhood paths that facilitate food shopping. Limited access to food has forced a reliance on smaller stores with poorer quality produce and has contributed to disproportionate rates of diet-related diseases among minorities, such as certain forms of cancer, obesity, heart disease and hypertension, the study found.

“Kids that are hungry can’t learn. And we know what happens next: They can’t become productive members of society,” said Carolyn Olney, associate director of the Southern California Interfaith Hunger Coalition, an advocacy group that commissioned UCLA’s study.

Hunger Study

UCLA’s hunger study took an in-depth look at one South-Central Los Angeles neighborhood, a mostly Latino area with three independent supermarkets and a host of smaller stores. One in four residents surveyed in the study area, which encompasses two square miles, experienced hunger each month.