Food deserts draw a lot of attention from health officials, but Alisha Wenger has another nutritional nemesis: food swamps.
“In Mesa County, we have five times as many fast food outlets as healthy food restaurants, and that's a real problem,” Wenger, executive director of the Community Food Bank of Grand Junction, said. “ We talk a lot about food deserts and we don't talk a lot about food swamps where the only available food is super-processed fast food or convenience store food, and there's a number of areas around town that have that.”
The food bank, which distributed more than 800,000 pounds of food last year alone, has ventured further into the issue by opening the 7th St. Community Cafe. The cafe took over the location of the 7th Street Deli, a Grand Junction staple that had been in operation for nearly two decades. The year-old subsidiary of the food bank is meant to buttress the organization’s mission while planting new dietary options in that food swamp.
The cafe doesn’t use food intended for the food bank, Wenger said, and won’t pull from free supplemental nutrition. A fundraising campaign brought in $300,000 to get the idea off the ground and Wegner said the goal is for restaurant sales and donations at the register to become a new funding stream for food bank operations.
“I think our board took a very calculated risk in doing this. It isn't just for fun. It was absolutely seeing some of the writing on the wall with other funding avenues that were drying up, grants that were going away,” Wegner said.
The cafe is staffed by students from CMU Tech, a division of Colorado Mesa University that offers vocational education, including culinary work. Kaye Davis is the chef and food systems director at the 7th St. Community Cafe. She’s worked with dozens of farms across the state to source food and uses those connections to source as much food locally as possible for the cafe’s menu.
“Some of the staples we use in the restaurant we can't source locally, of course, avocados, citrus, but fortunately, we're able to source just about everything else locally,” Davis said, adding that the restaurant can gussy up raw ingredients.
“Certainly, all of the value-added production that we're doing in the cafe right now is all sourced locally. A lot of it are seconds and thirds that would otherwise hit the ground at the farm. Instead, we're taking that in and turning it into something that we can sell at our higher costs than we could just the raw product.”
Prepared foods can also feed food bank clients.
Restaurants require time to become profitable and the community cafe will be no different, Wegner said. They’re indeed optimistic that the cafe’s social enterprise model and manageable overhead will help it become a contributor to the food bank’s bottom line. Similar models have been deployed elsewhere, including at a nearby restaurant affiliated with Hospice.
The cafe comes as food insecurity threatens to increase in the region. Looming federal cuts to social programs are likely to exacerbate hunger in Mesa County, Wegner said.
“What will absolutely affect us is benefits cuts now with SNAP and then as the Medicaid cuts come in,” she said. “That's going to be a really big stressor for our entire community and we are really responding. That's what we are. So what's going on in the community is reflected in what's happening at the community food bank.”
