The story of the Urban Nutrition Initiative is not just about this oasis of green, located at 36th and Filbert streets. It's also the tale of promoting healthy eating, providing exercise opportunities and advancing entrepreneurship--and then integration of all of this into the curriculums of UCHS, Drew Elementary School and Turner Middle School, as well as the surrounding communities.
It's a local approach to the national problem of poor nutrition. And in the city that was dubbed American's fattest by Men's Fitness magazine in 2000, it appears that the worst burden is borne by West Philadelphia children. In the early 1990s, Penn Professor Emeritus of Anthropology Francis Johnston decided to apply his knowledge gained in researching nutrition problems in Guatemala and Cuba to West Philadelphia. The students in his Anthropology 210 class, which deals with the relationship between anthropology and biomedical science, then began to analyze the nutrition levels of West Philadelphia middle school students. They did so on the basis of obesity, it being the easiest component of nutrition to measure. What they found surprised them: 30 percent of those 11- to 14-year-olds were obese, higher than any comparable sample in the country. Johnston deems even the 20 percent national average to be "very, very high."
He believes that this problem stems from too little exercise, a problem made worse in lower-income neighborhoods because of a lack of gyms and concerns over safety that keep people in their homes before and after work. Another culprit is eating less than the government-recommended five servings of fruits and vegetables a day--food, he says, that has "to be replaced with something, so it's replaced by foods that are lower in nutritional value, or certainly higher in fat or calories." The millions of dollars spent on advertising by the unhealthy snack food companies also don't help people eat better, Johnston adds.
The Philadelphia School District tries to provide healthy meals, but the fact of the matter is that few kids actually eat them, again because of economics. Federal funding allows the breakfasts and lunches to be dished out for free, but to the students they still come with a price--being labeled as poor taking charity. Instead, many students opt to purchase their food elsewhere or to head to the snack bar filled with such delicacies as Tastycakes, cheese fries and hot wings. For its part, the district, despite a crushing deficit, began a nutrition awareness program this year. But it only operates in four of the district's 320 schools, thus missing many children in the process.
Originally from Columbus, Ohio, UNI Co-Director Danny Gerber came to Philadelphia to attend Penn. It was his first time in a big city.
"I was just shocked to see homeless people on the streets," says Gerber, a 1996 College graduate with wavy brown hair and a wardrobe that would make J. Crew proud. "And I think that happens to a lot of Penn people. You come here and you see these bad things happening and so you start volunteering in a soup kitchen and doing something to try and make yourself feel better because you're thinking, 'Man, I can't believe there's like this much bad stuff going on in America.'
"And then I think it becomes very disempowering for Penn students if they volunteer in a soup kitchen for a while because you just see the same problems happening and getting worse."
Gerber, pictured below, sought a different course of action. Taking a course offered by Penn's Center for Community Partnerships (which now houses UNI) on "academically-based community service" filled him with thoughts of experiential learning and empowering children. Then, through working with Johnston, he met up with a fellow student, and together they decided to take the research and education component of Anthropology 210 a few steps further.
"Every year [the class] documented healthy eating habits among kids, and every year it was like, 'Oh, we're not eating healthy, we're not eating healthy,'" Gerber says. "And then, when we wanted to know what we could do to actually solve the problem, the kids were like, 'Well, we can sell healthy food after school.'"
They decided to sell fruit at cheap prices after school at Turner, located at 59th Street and Baltimore Avenue, in 1996, and in 1998 the venture was expanded to include Drew and UCHS. UNI has flourished in subsequent years. Gardens have been developed at all the schools, and what has been planted includes mustard greens, yellow carrots, kale and Swiss chard--in addition to standbys like tomatoes and spinach. The idea is to grow the crops that are not commonly sold elsewhere in the city, helping the students to create a market niche for themselves. And to increase the larger community's access to fresh produce, the gardens' bounty is sold on Saturdays at a farmers' market at 37th Street and Lancaster Avenue. For their after-school efforts, the high school students are paid minimum wage to till the soil and to man the market booth.
Research confirms the ongoing positive impact of these programs on eating habits. During the last school year, the anthropology students compared the after-school snacking patterns at Drew to a control school that lacked an after-school fruit sale. Six times as many Drew students snacked on fruit after school than at the other school, while their peers at the other school munched on potato chips four and-a-half times as often.
Not just a vehicle for nutrition education, UNI wants to help make West Philadelphia's nutrition problem a central part of the K-12 classroom experience. The idea is that students will become more committed to learning if the educational process is more relevant to their lives.
"What we are trying to do is establish an integrated curriculum throughout all of our classes, so that every class has a couple of common themes--some kind of urban agriculture, environmental ecology, health focus--to all of our classes," says Martin Galvin, an Irishman who once tended bar in New York, and who now leads the "small learning community" at UCHS dedicated to the environment and technology, dubbed EcoTech.
When EcoTech's 225 students take English, they will write about environmental issues. The graphic and Web design class will integrate them as part of an online environmental magazine it is producing along with a Web site that details the history of community gardens in West Philadelphia. The math class is working with Penn Engineering students to use interactive mapping software to research why their neighborhood has been especially hard-hit by nutrition-related illness and death, simultaneously analyzing factors like health statistics, fresh food sites and race. And Wharton freshmen are helping the agricultural science class to develop a formal business plan for their lettuce-growing business, which is housed in a greenhouse atop UCHS, and which counts the White Dog Caf‚ among its customers.
While walking through Drew and UCHS, I start to realize how UNI has fused itself into the schools' curriculum. It seems only natural to see kids hawking fruit, learning the science behind composting and making food samples for the next day's farmers' market.
"It just became a better life," says the aptly named Green, who now plans to major in botany in college. "It was something for me to do after school that was positive, and I really enjoyed it, and I want to keep on doing it."
Whatever the benefits, though, Galvin tells me that it would be wrong to say that the Urban Nutrition Initiative is doing "life-changing work" at his school.
"There's great stuff here, and UNI is building on that and helping to strengthen it," he says of UCHS. "But if UNI wasn't here, would this school be a great school? It would be a good school. It would be a really good school."
As he works to distribute new student ID cards, my suggestion that UNI alone has been a saving grace to his school seems to really frustrate him. Hard work by groups like the teachers, hospitals, faith-based institutions and the city have all had a hand in rejuvenating the school, he says.
With programs like UNI that reach into the community, Penn is treading on historically shaky ground. Any intervention in the area around Drew and UCHS is bound to bring up resentment, for some blame Penn for having a role in taking away their homes in the 1960s. Today, a visit to the high school is akin to a history lesson of those days of urban renewal. Painted on the front wall of the school is a map depicting a formerly-thriving African-American neighborhood known as Black Bottom, which once reached from 32nd to 40th streets and from Walnut Street to Lancaster Avenue. As the mural depicts with backhoes knocking down houses, Black Bottom was decimated to make way for parts of the campuses of Penn and Drexel, the University City Science Center and UCHS itself. Practically the last surviving remnant of this community is a single row of houses across the street from the high school, houses that seem strangely out of place with all of the surrounding institutional development.
Many in the neighborhood support Penn's efforts in the schools. One mother of a UNI participant told me that her daughter, a sophomore at UCHS, shows a pride in her work that she had not demonstrated before she began maintaining the garden and selling produce. But UNI has not been immune to those in the community who still regard any Penn activity in the neighborhood as tantamount to the Black Bottom days. During a Martin Luther King Jr. Day panel discussing UNI's efforts to bring people of various races together, Gerber recalls a community member deriding him as a "naive, idealistic goodwill person" from Penn.
At one of the recent farmers' markets, that sort of fear was illustrated. During the market, several of the UNI volunteers, who were African Americans, had gathered near another farmer's booth. I watched as a farmer, who was white, rushed over to ask Gerber to tell them to leave, discretely saying that they were making his girls feel uncomfortable. Nothing more was said, although glances among the remaining volunteers were exchanged.
To UCHS students like sophomore Carl Flores, programs like UNI are needed to help bridge racial divides.
Flores, who is African American, said that the biggest impact UNI has had on him was the opportunity to meet new--and different--people.
"We had these little trips up to Quakertown, and the best part about it was there were other races--it wasn't just blacks," he said, describing a visit to a nearby farm. "There were whites, Chinese, everybody--we were all together."
With the sun beginning to set, I accompany Gerber to gather wood for a new shed that UNI is planning to build in the garden. He backs the old black Suburban that was donated to the program up to a dumpster behind the high school, where, without hesitation, he begins pulling out maple wood slats that until recently had been the gym floor. As he picks and chooses, the pieces of wood bang against one another.
Described as a "cowboy farmer," Gerber has big plans for UNI. Earlier, he had talked about introducing value-added products like tomato sauce, which the kids would produce and sell from the tomatoes already being grown in order to add to their entrepreneurial skills. He talked about Penn doing even more to help the public schools in its midst, which might include starting up a college student-run farm, just like Rutgers University. And he talked about someday forming a regional agricultural cooperative with farms and other public and parochial schools that would be able to supply produce--if only apples--to their cafeterias. The ideas just seemed to flow out.
As Gerber scoops up wood with one leg dangling in the dumpster, he tells me that he frequently takes the students out in the Suburban to scour the city for usable parts for the garden, such as wood or bricks or tires. It's actually one of their favorite activities, he adds. And right now he's eyeing a pile of leftover cobblestones from the construction work on 40th Street.
He hops off the dumpster, jumps in the driver's seat, hangs his arm out the window and drives back to the garden. Eventually, the sound of hammers hitting nails will fill the air.
