BY KEVIN BENTLEY

In print | Published December 4, 2008 — Updated December 05, 2008 09:52

The Young Women Resource Center of Chester YWCA has hosted a nutrition workshop entitled “Tasty Tuesdays” since the beginning of June. The workshop is part of series of programs offered by the center addressing issues including financial literacy, resume-building skills, and computer fluency.

Kylah Field ’09 established the Young Women’s Resource Center, the first of its kind in Chester, in the Chester YWCA on a Lang Opportunity Scholarship and further funded by a Swat Foundation grant. The YWRC opened in May 2007.

Chester’s YWCA puts to use the expertise of Joan McMenamin, a nutritionist at Pennsylvania State University in Springfield, to teach residents inexpensive ways to bring healthy meals to the table. The workshop falls under the umbrella of the Expanded Food and Nutrition Education Program, a state-funded initiative started by the Department of Agriculture. The purpose of the EFNEP is to improve the overall nutritional well-being of low-income areas through education. Thanks to the efforts of Field and Tara Jones, the Executive Director of the Chester YWCA, these workshops have brought to the forefront the issue of nutrition in Chester and similar areas.

When Field, Jones and other members of the Chester community came together to talk about workshop ideas, they felt that nutrition was something that needed to be addressed. “Having this program is so important because there are so many issues in Chester alone,” Jones said. During the sessions, there is an emphasis on providing inexpensive yet healthy meals that could possibly be used for large groups of people. “In this type of economy, we are learning how to cook and eat healthy on a budget,” Field said. “To buy everything costs $10 or under and feeds many people.” Also, the workshop makes an effort to bring out the nutritional possibilities in common, yet unhealthy, dishes. For example, in past workshop, attendees have made tuna burgers, used cottage cheese in lasagna, and made corn flake baked chicken nuggets. “You find that stuff that you never thought about before are really good in the most odd places, like salsa” says Field.

Nutritional information presented at the “Tasty Tuesdays” workshops has been beneficial for the Chester community, but it calls into the question the importance of nutrition in urban areas, where the debate is growing on both sides. One common concern is that, in urban areas where there is a dearth of adequate grocery stores, nutritional needs are not met. Opponents of the movement tend to dismiss such statements as generalizations.

Professor Mark Wallace of Swarthmore’s Religion department, who was heavily involved in the formation of the Chester Co-Op, believes that the absence of a grocery store is a fundamental public health issue in Chester. “The nutritional crisis is endemic to urban areas,” Wallace said. He believes that due to the vast consumption of processed foods sold by corner stores, communities like Chester have higher incidences of malnutrition, diabetes and obesity. “These corner bodegas, which are horrors, have no food,” Wallace said. “People buy food [there] when they want to feel full.” Wallace believes that places such as Chester suffer from what he calls “affluenza” which occurs in first-world countries where people have the income to purchase food, but no secure means of acquiring it. “Without food security for healthy choices comes obesity and Type 2 diabetes,” he said.

While many agree with Professor Wallace’s viewpoint about the nutritional issues in Chester, some who have attended the workshops argue that the nutritional crisis is not something unique to urban areas like Chester, nor restricted to communities without access to proper grocery stores. Rather, they believe that poor nutrition is becoming a facet of American culture. “I don’t think that the public health crisis in America can be pinpointed to one single factor like access to a grocery store,“ Aubrielle Houston ’09, who has attended the nutrition workshops, said. Houston feels that the lack of access should not be viewed exclusively as a public health issue, but also as a social issue. “If you look at most public health issues such as lack of access to fresh, quality food or lack of access to healthcare, the people most affected by these issues are people from lower socioeconomic classes,” Houston said.

« RETURN TO NEWS

« PREV ARTICLE | NEXT ARTICLE »