Issues: Good nutrition can be tasty

Healthy food at a nutrition education class in the Bronx. Photo: Yudith Fleary.

Yudith Fleary has struggled with her weight her whole life, and takes daily medication for high blood pressure. The 51-year-old single mother is unemployed, and depends on help from her daughter and on SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) benefits to pay for food. But Fleary is making changes. She plans to open her own business, a daycare center – and as she studied for her childcare certification and began transforming her Bronx home into a child-friendly haven, she realized that she needed to learn how to make healthy food for the children she would soon be caring for.

She enrolled in a nutrition education class for SNAP recipients, which ended up benefitting her as much as it would the children. She hadn’t realized the impact that her high-salt and high-sugar diet was having on her health until she participated in Spanish-language nutrition education classes run by Cornell University’s New York City Cooperative Extension. But the nine-week program showed her that changing her diet could improve her health. “We started learning about health issues, how to reduce this, how to avoid that, or how to combine food according to the website MyPlate.gov,” she said.

Almost 1.8 million New Yorkers receive SNAP benefits, which makes them eligible for similar classes at community centers and food pantries around the city. To qualify, a household’s gross monthly income must be at or below 130 percent of the poverty level. SNAP recipients often experience some degree of food insecurity, meaning that they have inadequate or uncertain access to food. According to the New York City Coalition Against Hunger (NYCCA), 1.4 million New Yorkers experienced food insecurity in 2014.

“The causes of food insecurity are myriad,” said Lisa Irving, the statewide coordinator for SNAP Nutrition Education and Outreach at the state Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance, which provides funding for nutrition education programs, like the one Fleary attended, as part of its Eat Smart New York program. Access is a big obstacle, she said: Low-income neighborhoods often lack supermarkets, leaving residents with only bodegas and fast food restaurants, and it isn’t easy to travel to get better groceries. “You may be a working mom, and dependent on a bus route, and maybe the healthy food doesn’t fall on that route,” she said.

“People are not visually seeing healthy food options,” said Eboni Banks, Founder and Executive Director of Resident.Connect.Care, a community organization in Brownsville, Brooklyn. “There’s just an overwhelming [number] of fast, fried options. The quality of the fruits and vegetables is horrible,” she said. “The fruit is often overripe, but it’s sold at full price.” This lack of good quality produce pushes residents to make unhealthy choices such as canned fruit, which often has added sugar, or they end up avoiding fruit altogether.

Fleary, an effusive woman with a slight Venezuelan accent, complains that she has to leave her Mott Haven neighborhood to find what she needs. “There’s nothing healthy around here,” said Fleary, who finds the produce at her local supermarket to be of low quality, and priced too high. But she is determined to maintain her new habits. “Since I am changing all my eating habits, I lost 10 pounds and I feel much better,” she said. “I reduced one size pants. What I’ve noticed now is that I don’t feel my high blood pressure. Before, I used to get headaches, and I realized that it was because of the intake of excessive sodium, because I was not reading the labels properly. Now that I’ve learned how to read the labels, I know how to measure, what to buy, and what not to buy. I don’t remember having a headache for the past, god knows, one month or so.”

Before attending the classes, a typical meal for Fleary consisted of rice, beans and chicken, red meat or fish, with a side of fried plantains and a green salad. “I learned that meat and beans cannot be combined together, because it’s two proteins,” she said. “Yesterday, I did bulgur, I did it plain, no salt, no anything, I just put herbs in it, I put scallions, I put red onions, and I put basil. I did a chicken cutlet with mushrooms and a green salad. Everyone ate that.”

Fleary’s eldest daughter, Kassandra, found it hard at first to adjust to her mother’s new way of eating. “I was at school for two years upstate, I was eating very unhealthily, and I gained a lot of weight,” she said. “So when I came home, and I was already used to eating the salty food, and eating the fried food, and then my mom is like, ‘all that’s cut out, so if you’re going to eat here, you’re going to eat what I make or you’re not going to eat at all.’”

The 21-year-old student works at a Le Pain Quotidien in Manhattan, where she has access to healthy options during her lunch breaks. She finds that her body doesn’t tolerate fast food as well as it used to. “The other day I was grabbing something quick before work, and I was eating a french fry and I wanted to throw it up,” she said. Her younger sister, four-year-old Vivianne, is growing up in this new environment, where eating vegetables is normal. “I still haven’t been able to stomach broccoli, and certain other vegetables,” said Kassandra, “so I’m eating, and she looks at my plate, like, ‘you don’t eat broccoli?’”

Josefa Perez, a short, motherly woman with 13 years of experience, taught the class that inspired these changes. At the last class of the course, eight women and two men gathered in the hallway of a childcare center at the Patterson Houses public housing in Mott Haven. They are all Hispanic, some in their late 20s, and others closer in age to Fleary. None of them are seriously overweight, but all of them are parents. The lack of a classroom doesn’t dampen their enthusiasm as they ask questions and encourage one another.

“Muy bueno,” says Perez, as a woman tells her what makes up an ideal healthy plate. Each member of the class is handed a card with a letter on it. They stand up one by one and say something related to that letter and nutrition. The letter s is “baja en sodio,” or low sodium. When they get it right, some of the women dance together, playing music from their cellphones.

Positive reinforcement such as this is key to changing eating habits, according to Sara Bartels, a registered dietitian and psychologist who manages the nutrition education programs at New York Common Pantry, a food pantry in East Harlem. With the Internet, anyone can look up a healthy recipe, said Bartels, but what nutrition education programs can provide is the motivation to make a change.

Fleary has even volunteered to help Perez with her other classes. She admits that there are times when she struggles with her new lifestyle. “I’m not going to tell you that when I’m out on the street, and I pass by a cinnamon bun [I’m not tempted], these are bad habits that we have,” she said.

“I’m not going to tell you that from one day to another they’re going to change, but I’m trying to. No more McDonald’s in my life. My daughter was so used to, ‘can you buy me a happy meal?’ so that’s a no-no. No more pizzas, unless I make them. Josefa taught us how to make a very healthy pizza.”

Sophia Morris