Vanessa Santiago, 18 years old, giggles as she peers at the object of her glee: a garbanzo bean.
City Limits Magazine
"This has a lot of sugar," says Ronny Segura, 14, shaking his head disparagingly at a jar of sun-dried tomatoes. Segura and the other young chefs slowly move through the pile of food on the table. Is the food good? How can they tell? How much sugar is in it, and how much salt? Where did it come from--another state, country? Is it in season? Is it in keeping with "ancestral tradition?" Does everyone remember what "organic" means?
Once they've trudged through their ingredients, the group springs into action. Ronny, a fan of Emeril on the Food Network, brandishes a knife, dicing onions. Vanessa eagerly minces garlic. Jimmy, a big kid from Chinatown, squeezes thawed spinach over the sink.
As the prep work drags on, kids begin to wander in and out, heading downstairs to the lobby of the youth services organization housing the project. Chris Williams strides into the kitchen with an Otis Spunkmeyer danish. The sugary smell catches Vanessa's attention; when she finishes chopping, she slips out and returns with two cookies, two Pop-Tarts, a cupcake and a handful of M&Ms. The two teachers exchange looks as the sugar count mounts, but say nothing.
That teenagers are devouring fat and sugar isn't shocking, but here it has a special irony. These teenagers aren't simply learning to cook. They're training to spread the word that healthy living--and healthy food in particular--isn't too expensive or too difficult. These kids are being primed to solve the obesity and health crisis among young people.
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We possess far more information about the symptoms of the American obesity epidemic than we do working ideas for how to stop it. Obesity is, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, rapidly gaining on tobacco as the country's number-one cause of death. Its correlation with heart disease and diabetes is well known; those two combined killed 26,000 New Yorkers in 2002. Obesity is also linked to several cancers and asthma. And its impact on kids has been perhaps the most chilling: Already, one in three born in 2000 is at risk of developing type 2 diabetes, according to the CDC. In New York City public elementary schools, one in four children is obese, and nearly as many are overweight.
The situation is most severe in poorer urban communities that share grim common denominators. There's an overabundance of fast food. Supermarkets are sparsely located and many stock mediocre and expensive produce. Public recreational space is not only scarce but shrinking; schoolchildren have lost significant playground real estate to portable classrooms. Physical education is mandatory in New York State public schools, but precious little class time is actually spent engaged in physical activity. Where there are parks, many are still not safe to ramble in.
