No Fresh Here, Thank You: Board Gives Thumbs Down to City Initiative

clipped from www.nypost.com No Fresh Here, Thank You: Board Gives Thumbs Down to City Initiative By Helen Klein Courier-Life While Community Board 17 may have had concerns about the city’s proposal to create financial and zoning incentives to attract supermarkets to open in New York’s food deserts, the City Planning Commission (CPC) did not. Just days after the community board turned down the idea, during a contentious vote, the commission voted unanimously to approve it, sending it to the City Council for action. The proposal, known as FRESH (Food Retail Expansion to Support Health), was developed as a way of providing under-served neighborhoods — which typically have higher incidences of such conditions as obesity, diabetes and high blood pressure — with access to fresh fruits and vegetables, to counterbalance the clearly easy access in such neighborhoods to fast food and snacks that may be high in calories, and contain unhealthy levels of sodium, sugar and cholesterol.