The TastyKake truck comes three times a week to the corner store on North Mount Street, rumbling past drug dealers and piles of trash to fill the racks with cupcakes and cream-filled chocolate bars. The Utz man comes twice to deliver little bags of chips, each one containing about 20 percent of the recommended daily intake of fat.
But if the owner of Blooming Sun Market, Grace Lyo, wants to sell fruits or vegetables, "I have to go to Sam's Club and get them myself."
As public health researchers grapple with the alarmingly high rates of diabetes, obesity and heart disease in poor urban neighborhoods, they are turning their attention to corner stores. Places like Lyo's market in West Baltimore, which does a brisk business in soda, whole milk, chips and cigarettes, supply much of the food for their community's residents.
A Johns Hopkins University project to get better food into the stores - and, ultimately, improve the health of urban residents - is expanding this fall from 17 stores to 35, scattered across the city. Store owners who agree to stock the healthful foods receive promotional materials, shelf labels and posters. Hopkins researchers offer samples to customers and do cooking demonstrations to introduce new foods. They sometimes provide stores with bananas and whole wheat bread on a trial basis.
But the healthful foods don't always sell.
"I'm not a big fan of whole-wheat bread. I like white bread," said Nytearia Bradshaw, 16, who was standing outside the New Sandtown Market on North Calhoun Street after buying white bread, potato chips and soda for the children she was baby-sitting. "We teenagers, we live it up. We like to eat junk food."
African-Americans make up the bulk of the poor in the city, and nearly a third of black adults are obese, studies have found, an epidemic that leads to substantially higher rates of diabetes and heart disease compared with other races. Researchers say the "food environment" in black neighborhoods - the corner stores, carryout stores and fast-food restaurants - is a contributing factor. Supermarkets are scarce and hard to reach.
"If you have a lot of healthy foods available close by, either in corner stores or supermarkets, then people's diets are better and the rates of chronic disease are lower," said Joel Gittelsohn, director of the Hopkins Healthy Stores Project. "We see our role as priming the pump a little bit, to say to these stores: If you agree to stock this food, we will promote it. You provide the supply, and we'll work to provide the demand."
