The Vegetable Crisis

The latest scoop from the New York Times is of a "food crisis" it says has struck the residents of the Ingersoll Houses, a project in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, where the Times uncovered a "lack of easily available fresh food." The "local supermarket," quoth the Times, has been razed. A resident of the housing project is quoted as saying, supermarket-wise, "we have nothing around here now." "The dearth of nearby supermarkets is most severe in minority and poor neighborhoods already beset by obesity," the Times article reports.

At the Times Web site, a "multimedia presentation" accompanying the news article is headlined "Thousands of Shoppers, No Store," and quotes a man it identifies as Darrell Dembo, a resident of the Ingersoll Houses, speaking of an elderly neighbor for whom grocery shopping is a four- or five-hour expedition. So, curious about this apparent failure of capitalism, where supply has not risen to meet demand, an editor of The New York Sun set out yesterday afternoon for the Ingersoll Houses.

We took the subway to the Atlantic Avenue stop, where we visited the Atlantic Terminal Mall, built by developer Bruce Ratner after the September 11, 2001, attacks with $114 million in tax exempt Liberty Bonds. We rode the escalator up to Target, which was selling half-gallons of Tropicana Pure Premium orange juice for $2.99. You could buy the "Healthy Heart with Omega 3" variety of orange juice or the "healthy kids" variety, or you could visit the next aisle, where bags of frozen peas, corn, broccoli florets, and green beans were stacked high. An aisle down were containers of Del Monte diced peaches, mandarin oranges, Sun-Maid raisins, and cans of Goya mango and guava juice.

Searching for fresh fruits and vegetables, we set off across the Atlantic Terminal Mall's skybridge to another Ratner project, the old Atlantic Center Mall, which opened in 1996 with more than $18.5 million in city subsidies and a 23-year tax abatement. There was a Pathmark supermarket with a vast produce section worthy of any wealthy suburb, complete with an automated misting system to keep the shelves of lettuce fresh.

We then set off in the direction of the Ingersoll Houses and passed, on Lafayette Avenue between Fulton Street and South Elliott Street, the Gourmet Food Market, with its display of kiwis, grapes, shallots, and grapefruit. Then, passing by the Whitman Houses, we arrived at the Bravo supermarket on Myrtle Avenue, with its ample supplies of plantains, kale, and mangos. Walking down Myrtle from Bravo to the Ingersoll Houses — a four minute journey — we turned on Ashland Place and found Bob Deli Grocery, offering grapes and other fresh fruit and vegetables for sale, also four minutes from the Ingersoll Houses. Completing our circuit, we found ourselves back at Pathmark, eight minutes from the Ingersoll Houses.

On a Saturday we might have encountered the farmer's market in Fort Greene Park, which is open year-round between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. and accepts food stamps. It is operated by the New York Council on the Environment, which gets about 15% of its annual budget, or $616,000 a year, in government contracts. Fresh Direct also will deliver to the Ingersoll Houses, according to the Web site of that online grocer.

Anyone who has difficulty getting from the New York City Housing Authority-owned Ingersoll Houses to a nearby supermarket can take a New York City Transit-subsidized bus. Or, if physically disabled, they may qualify for a Medicaid-funded electric scooter of the sort being advertised on Fox News Channel "at no out of pocket cost to you." New York State's Medicaid will pay for a home-health aide to do food shopping for the disabled. New York City Transit also provides Access-a-Ride paratransit vans for those who need help getting around.

New York City Meals on Wheels, with $2.3 million a year in taxpayer funding, will deliver a meal to the homes of shut-ins. For the elderly, the City's Department for the Aging served 6.8 million senior center lunches and 3.6 million home delivered meals in 2007, virtually all of which included fruits and vegetables. For children, the City of New York provides fruit-and vegetable-laden school lunch and school breakfast programs, which even operate during the summer when there is no school.

If this were just a classic, New York Times-style, "Planet Destroyed; Poor, Minorities Hardest Hit," story, we wouldn't make much of it. The Times's scoop is that the city's policymakers — led by Mayor Bloomberg and his planning commissioner, Amanda Burden — are fretting about, as Ms. Burden puts it in the Times, a "health crisis in the city" and claiming, "Stimulating the investment of supermarket owners in these communities is essential to the future of the city." Another city political figure is quoted in the story as threatening to bar a private property owner from leasing to anything but a supermarket.

Well, there may in fact be a shortage of fresh fruits and vegetables at some parts of New York City, but reporting finds there is not one in the Ingersoll Houses. What happened in Fort Greene is that the city and state and federal governments lavished subsidies on a nearby Target and Pathmark that put an un-subsidized supermarket nearby out of business, while the above-cited raft of government programs failed to solve the fruit and vegetable crisis. So the city is preparing to abridge the rights of property owners to lease their property to the highest bidder and instead to mandate leasing to supermarkets. Are Mr. Bloomberg and Ms. Burden themselves to ride through the city deciding the sites of supermarkets by fiat?

Where is their comprehension that the free market and the natural dynamism of capitalism are the most remarkable methods ever devised for feeding individuals? Without a whole lot of government intervention, in the past few years a Fairway has opened near a vast housing project in Red Hook, Brooklyn, and Whole Foods has opened in Manhattan near housing projects on the Lower East Side and near Columbus Circle. Rather than invent a crisis of obesity caused by a lack of supermarkets, Mr. Bloomberg and Ms. Burden could benefit by walking around the city. Somehow people have a way of finding what to eat without a whole lot of meddling by the politicians.