Food deserts, areas where residents have limited or no access to affordable and nutritious food, are rife with a host of health problems such as obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.
Atlantic City is one of these places. In what may be a shocking statistic, the gambling capital of the East Coast, where $5 billion worth of in-person and online gambling gets done each year, has not one supermarket to service its population.
“People come here to have fun, they go to the casinos,” said JoAnn Melton, 42, who is forced to shop at a corner store where she has to dodge loiterers and drunks from a nearby liquor store. “But what about those that actually live here? We’re just trying our best to live and raise a family.”
Now Governor Phil Murphy is trying to remedy the situation.
New Jersey’s Economic Development Authority (NJEDA) has identified 50 food deserts in the state, based on factors such as income, distance to supermarkets, and availability of public transportation. Among these, Atlantic City/Ventnor is ranked as the second-most-acute food desert community, with 41,000 residents facing difficulties obtaining fresh and healthy foods.
People who live in Atlantic City must either drive off the island to a mainland store, take public transportation — whose cost eats away at the amount left for food — or shop in pricey, poorly stocked corner stores in their own city. A much-touted, heavily subsidized plan to build what would have been the city’s first supermarket in nearly 20 years fell apart earlier this year.
To address this issue, Governor Murphy has committed over $5.5 million to strengthen food access in Atlantic City through innovative programs such as mobile markets, urban farms, and grocery delivery services. Now, the state and a hospital system are sending a converted school bus laden with fresh food available for purchase into the city as a temporary solution.
Virtua Health brought a modified transit bus to a poor neighborhood in Atlantic City on Friday as part of its “Eat Well” program, funded by the New Jersey Economic Development Authority.
Delorese Butley-Whaley, 62, was delighted to board the bus to buy a half gallon of milk and a loaf of bread for a total of $3.
She usually walks 30 to 45 minutes to a local corner food store, straining her bad knees, or takes the bus there in bad weather. Sometimes she ventures to a full-fledged supermarket on the mainland in Absecon, a $10 cab ride in each direction. But that leaves less money available to buy food.
Last week, in her first trip to the bus, she bought salmon. “Salmon!” she said. “Imagine that!”
April Schetler, who runs the program for Virtua Health, said it is designed to fill part of the void in communities without a real supermarket like Atlantic City and Camden. All its food is sold at 30% to 50% below normal retail prices.
“We come right to them, in their neighborhoods,” she said. “It can be a $25 cab ride just to get you and your groceries home.”
The Virtua food bus is one of two similar efforts paid for by the state with the $5.5 million in funding. AtlanticCare, another southern New Jersey hospital system, is adding a mobile grocery to its food pantry program that also will include classes on health education, cooking classes and incentives to buy healthy foods.
“We really need this,” Delorese said. “This is good for us.”
