Healthy Food

One in an occasional series on the demand for locally grown food and its impact on our region. What started as an effort to bring a farmers market to Strawberry Mansion instead became a socially conscious food-distribution business bringing freshly picked, locally grown produce to schools, hospitals, and workplaces. And now Common Market, launched in 2008, has received the largest grant of its young life - $1.1 million from the Kellogg Foundation. The not-for-profit, which started with five customers, among them Cooper University Hospital, now has 60-plus customers and works with more than 100 farmers, earning a reputation for treating growers fairly and paying them promptly.

Corner stores are a staple in poor neighborhoods, where large supermarkets find it economically unfeasible to flourish. The problem has long been that small groceries aren't known for fresh fruits and vegetables. That has left an impoverished population bereft of good food, compelled to live in so-called food deserts. But Philadelphia's Food Trust, a nationally recognized nonprofit dedicated to ensuring that everyone has access to nutritious food, has been working to change that.

FIRST LADY Michelle Obama's visit to Philadelphia on Friday will focus on a critical component of her campaign against obesity - access to healthy food. And that has more to do with income than it should: millions of low-income and minority families live in what have been tagged "food deserts," areas that lack supermarkets or other places to buy fresh, healthy food. Which is why Mrs. Obama is headed our way. She will visit supermarkets here to highlight the success of the Pennsylvania Fresh Food Financing Initiative - which is the model for President Obama's plan to spend $400 million to leverage private money for grants to build or renovate supermarkets in underserved locations.

For more than a decade, Chester City has been without a supermarket, leading to its designation by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as a "food desert. " That will soon change, and with a unique nonprofit twist. Friday afternoon, Philabundance, best known for collecting and distributing emergency food aid throughout the Philadelphia area, announced that it had purchased a mostly vacant building on Ninth Street in Chester's West End. That building housed the last supermarket in the city to close, in 2001.

Just out of college and giving the entertainment business a go, Aaron Matzkin, owner of Center City's Rotisseur, found himself starring in a familiar L.A. story. He needed affordable food, and fast - but wasn't willing to sacrifice taste or his health. The answer? "I ate a lot of rotisserie chicken," Matzkin said. "It's everywhere in L.A. It's part of the fast-food culture. " On jaunts back home to Philly, searches for his beloved diet staple were fruitless. "All Philly had was supermarket chicken.

Emily Teel's introduction to the local food industry was as a volunteer. She worked at Reading Terminal Market's Fair Food Farmstand while it was still only a folding table. After a year, she wrote herself a job description and told her employer, "You need to hire me. " In 2005, she became the stand's first manager. "Food became an event," said Teel, now director of public programming for Greener Partners, an organization that supports and raises awareness of local food growers.

Johnathan Russell is the kind of teenager who doesn't just eat his vegetables. He grows them, markets them, and gets other kids to eat them, too. None of this he could have imagined four years ago when he entered University City High School and started working in the school's half-acre garden. Now 18, Russell is helping the school's nutrition program move in a new direction. Literally. He's helped create a new mobile organic store - from writing the business plan to painting the truck a cheerful green - that will sell low-cost kale, tomatoes, chard and herbs in several West Philadelphia neighborhoods.

WE NEED to be careful about declaring national metaphorical war - the war on drugs is a costly black hole, the war on poverty a mixed bag. But the war on hunger? That's one we can win. And did win, back in the '60s and '70s. We wiped the floor with hunger. The battle began in 1968, not long after CBS aired a documentary, "Hunger in America," that shocked the population into awareness and action - prodded by the public outrage, Congress funded national school-lunch programs and food stamps, and within a decade the problem was licked.

NEW YORK - Before Mardy Fish transformed himself into the player he is today, he compiled a record of 5-8 in his first eight visits to the U.S. Open, never making it past the second round from 2000 to 2007. Before changing his eating and workout habits, Fish didn't make it easy to put together a deep run in Grand Slam tournaments. Not only that, but he didn't necessarily believe he was capable of doing it. Now? Here's how Fish talks about his chances in the hard-court U.S. Open, which is scheduled to start Monday: "I'll certainly feel like I can beat anyone, especially on that surface, at that tournament.