This two-hour market two minutes from the city's shopping centre offers the cheapest fresh fruit and vegetables in the area – and the chance to chat to neighbours. One of two such co-ops in Southampton, it's part of the city council's drive to convince its citizens to eat more healthily. This also includes healthy cookery lessons for tenants, workshops for the Asian community and before school healthy breakfast clubs.
The projects are a response to the UK's growing weight problem. Obesity has tripled in the past 20 years and is increasing particularly among children. The issue has become a hot topic, especially since last month's Wanless report for the Treasury urged local authorities to raise awareness of the links between unhealthy lifestyles and cancer, strokes and coronary disease.
Getting the healthy diet message across at the Holyrood co-op is not much of a struggle. It sees a regular turn-out of people attracted by the proximity – half of Holyrood's residents are retired and otherwise rely on Asda, 15 minutes' walk away – and because there is a wide range of fresh fruit and veg piled onto the tables at about two-thirds of the price they'd be in a supermarket.
Retired chauffeur George Ayres, 73, comes every week. Today he is buying vegetables to go with a roast chicken and showing Lynda Walton, who is weighing the produce, his newly trimmed eyebrows. His haul – two bags full of potatoes, parsnips, carrots, onions, sprouts, apples, oranges, bananas and tomatoes – cost just £4.78. Before the co-op, he went to Asda. "I've been coming here since the day it opened," he says. "It saves me carting up to town and I think it's great."
Ann Pearl, 39, is another regular, and used to work for the co-op. "It has a real community feel," she says. "I've overheard elderly people say it's a godsend."
The co-op was set up in 2001 by the council, the local primary care trust and local charity the Environment Centre with £7000 from the Southampton Regeneration Partnership. Joyce Cunningham, community projects officer at the Environment Centre, says: "The profile of North Holyrood is characterised by low car ownership, low income, high unemployment and poor access to supermarkets, which all added up to 'food poverty' – basically, not being able to afford key items like fruit and vegetables."
The co-op gets its food from a local wholesaler and adds a 30% markup to the selling price. Its prices end up an average of around 30% less than supermarkets: bananas, for example, are 39p a bunch compared to 69p in the supermarket and swedes are 14p per pound, rather than 26p. Unfortunately, though, the prices mean the co-op, which pays its three workers, must rely on council and charitable grants to survive.
But for all its success, both shoppers and staff admit the co-op hasn't really changed their eating habits. Most shoppers are older and already following the traditional diet of meat and two veg; as co-op coordinator Clare Chapman says:"They probably would have been eating healthily anyway."
A growing project
Nick Murphy, executive director of housing, communications and regeneration at Southampton council, admits there's a lot still to do on the healthy eating drive. Coronary heart disease is the biggest cause of death in the city, at 21%, and according to primary care trust figures, the number of men under 65 dying from it is declining more slowly than in the rest of England.
We can improve their homes so they’re warm and so on, but we need to go beyond that
Nick Murphy
The city's relatively high incidence of coronaries and cancer puts it more in line with deprived Northern cities than the rest of the South-east.
Murphy says indicators such as the number of people with decayed teeth have linked poor diets with deprived neighbourhoods. This means, he says, that improving health is part of regeneration: "The links between health and housing are pretty well established," he says. "We can provide the right sort of housing for people, improve their homes so they're warm and so on, but we need to go beyond that."
The issue of healthy eating has also crept into the housing brief with the introduction of cookery workshops for tenants.
When 148 council properties in the Albion Towers block on the Golden Grove estate near the city centre had their kitchens replaced last year for the first time since the block was built in 1965, the workshops were an integral part of the regeneration, says Murphy. "It wasn't enough to put in new kitchens, it was linked to advice on how to make the best use of them."
The six meetings were held in a vacant seventh-floor, two-bedroom flat in Albion Towers in April last year. Now, 11 months on, NHS community dietician Lisa Szymanski and a small group of tenants are discussing the success of the classes.
"I've thrown out my chipper!" announces 50-year-old Chris Morris to a small round of applause. She lists the healthy food gadgets she has bought since the workshops finished: a juicer, steamer and bread maker are among them. "Before, it was easier to go to the chip shop than cook, but I go to the chip shop less now and use the market and vegetable shop on the corner," she says.
The council's housing directorate started the workshops after winning £625,000 from the Neighbourhood Renewal Fund to help Albion Towers' tenants live healthier lifestyles. Most of this went towards the new kitchens, but some was reserved for employing Szymanski and about £900 spent on cooking utensils, a cooker and a fridge for the workshops.
After putting up posters, Szymanski started with two taster sessions where she cooked big pots of meat chilli and vegetable stir fry and sounded residents out to see if cookery lessons would take off. She went on to run classes, where the tenants chose the dishes: the most popular was a healthy-style roast dinner. "This isn't a terrible meal to begin with," she says. "But by the time it's basted and sitting in a pool of oil, it is – and that's what the residents were doing before." Instead, she taught them to remove the chicken skin, use new potatoes – which have more fibre – and a few squirts of spray oil for the roast potatoes and vegetables.
She tried not to teach the residents a whole new range of foods. "People wouldn't change anyway. A lot of it is learning techniques instead of changing the actual food. If they have done a roast dinner with me, when they go to cook something else they'll think about the amount of oil in it," she says.
A workshop often draws in people already interested in healthy eating. It’s difficult to attract people who need it
Lisa Szymanski
At today's meeting, Szymanski demonstrates a fruit salad, recommending that a range of different-coloured fruits will indicate different vitamins. As she chops up some fresh fruit, she explains the easiest way to improve your diet. "If you eat more fruit and vegetables, you eat less of everything else," she points out. Other tips to cut down on sugar and fat include cooking apples for a crumble in low-sugar lemonade and using fully skimmed milk in trifle custard.
Joan Lancaster, 73, says: "It was enjoyable, and nice to mingle with other people here. I hadn't cooked for about 30 years, because my husband did all the cooking, so I did learn a few things too."
But while the classes were a hit with those who attended, most of residents didn't even make it through the flat's front door: the regular group was only about seven of the block's 370 council tenants. Szymanski says there was money available to run more groups, but no demand. "One of the downsides of workshops is that you often get people who are already quite interested in healthy eating. It's difficult to attract people who need it," she says.
Soon the show flat will be returned to normal use, although the tenants did secure a new kitchen for their communal room, where Chris Morris has been passing on the basics that she learned. But, she says, her neighbours resisted the initiative: "They have the feeling that just because they have had new kitchens it doesn't mean they don't know how to cook."
The experience has not been a waste, however: the council will be rolling out a similar scheme in the 246,000-home Thornhill estate in the east of the city, where 2000 new kitchens are about to be put in with the help of £22m of New Deal for Communities funding, and will alter its approach based on what it learned in Albion Towers. Housing services project officer Bill Bickers-Jones, who is involved in both projects, says: "We will go in harder and earlier and use more high-profile methods of attracting attention. We'll use tenants' newsletters and speak to every resident before they have new kitchens put in." They also plan to organise public events like barbecues to grab residents' attention – this may be one way of attracting young men, a group that seems particularly hard to target.
Not one 19-24 year old man interviewed for the 2000/1 National Diet and Nutrition survey by the Office for National Statistics ate five or more portions of fruit or veg per day, and the 2002 Health Survey for England and Wales revealed that 66% of men are overweight, compared to 57% of women.
"There's a growing awareness of the need to look at men's health and how that needs a different approach," says Jenny Davies, Southampton primary care trust's chief community development dietician. "The way they see their diet is different; women are a little bit more body conscious, while a higher body weight is acceptable to men."
What price convenience?
Because eating convenience foods is one of the biggest reasons for poor diets, the council is looking at the regeneration of derelict shopping parades as a potential solution. One way to do this is to entice supermarkets to open up in empty spaces, Nick Murphy says. This has worked before – there is a Tesco Express on one of the city's estates, while a Safeway that opened near another saw a huge demand from tenants because it was cheaper than local shops.
"Supermarkets can provide cheaper and better quality food than local shops," says Murphy. "We are doing a stocktake on what we have at the moment – there are a lot of empty units that were built at a time when people went to butchers and grocers, but the world's moved on since then and we need to respond to that."
Source
Housing Today
No comments yet