Tasty Morning Bytes – River History, Impoverished Children and Addressing Food Deserts
Anacostia River: From then till now “Prince George’s County was home to huge slave plantations before the Civil War, and after the war, many of those freed slaves remained. A major refugee center was set up on the eastern banks of the river. The Freedmen’s Bureau bought 375 acres and sold small lots to the former slaves. And so it was that the area just across the Anacostia became home to many blacks (including Douglass). More affluent whites gradually settled along the Potomac, particularly the high bluffs overlooking the river.” (The Washington Post)
Promise Neighborhoods: DC Grant Winners Share Their Trials and Triumphs “We can’t just narrowly focus on what resources a student has in class. We’ve been there, done that, and it doesn’t work. So let’s try something different. President Obama has invested federal funding to spur creativity and innovation at the neighborhood level and is letting that work its way up.” (The Root)
Record Number Of Hispanic Children Living In Poverty “The study finds that besides high unemployment, Hispanics also suffered the greatest loss of wealth of all ethnic groups, primarily due to foreclosures. As the Latino birth rate continues to outpace that of whites and blacks, the number of poor Latino children could grow even more.” (wamu.org)
D.C.’s ‘food deserts’ sprout fresh fruits and vegetables “In a Brookland convenience store loaded with beer, wine and prepackaged pastries, Aneika Muhammad slides a heaping bowl of fresh, foot-long carrots onto a refrigerator shelf. It’s part of a new program by D.C. Central Kitchen to get fresh produce — and in some cases, refrigeration units — into ‘food deserts’ around the District.” (The Washington Post)
Mayor Vincent C. Gray Restores Sunday Hours at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library “The library will receive $316,000 for Sunday hours, ensuring that residents continue to have library service seven days a week. The funding also ensures that the library remains open on Sundays, as it has continuously since 1972, the year it opened.” (dclibrary.org)
Unity Market Shuts Down After Contentious Three-Year Run “For Pablo Lazaro, who has run Viva Mexico: Cocina Mexicana for the last three years, the loss isn’t just on vendors, but for the community too…Though he admitted that restaurants had complained and put pressure on vendors to leave, Lazaro argued that they catered to a different consumer — local workers that couldn’t afford restaurants.” (DCist)