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You only have to drive through the Gainsboro and Lincoln Terrace neighborhoods of Northwest Roanoke, or through Southeast along the Jamison Avenue corridor, to know they are places devoid of supermarkets.

A couple of months ago, the U.S. Department of Agriculture released data that confirmed what residents of those neighborhoods have long known. They live in what researchers have come to call “food deserts” – areas with concentrations of low income families, in many cases with no personal transportation, and no nearby supermarket. Food deserts aren’t exclusively urban, but frequently are.

And those who live in them, researchers confirm, suffer from high rates of diet-related disease – obesity and type 2 diabetes, for example — because of the ways they must shop.

The USDA identified nearly 200 census tracts in Virginia as food deserts. Just 29 of those are found to have 100 percent of residents with low access to a supermarket. And four of those 29 are in Roanoke, including the Gainsboro/Lincoln Terrace and Southeast.

Moreover, according to a Roanoke Times analysis of the data, the city of Roanoke is second only to Petersburg among Virginia’s urban areas

According to it’s documentation, the USDA first identified census tracts that it labeled low-income. Then, researchers determined what portion of the total population of each of those tracts lived more than a mile from a full-service supermarket in urban areas, and more than 10 miles in rural areas.

Some have questioned the USDA’s methodology, including Mari Gallagher, a Chicago-based researcher who first popularized the term “food desert” in 2006. In our story in The Roanoke Times, Gallagher points out that there is no perfect distance to a grocery store. You could live a quarter mile from a store, but if you have to cross a freeway on foot to get there, for many it may as well be 10 miles away.

Her sense is that the USDA data may underestimate the problem.

At a minimum, it does seem to confirm what is plain to the eye.  Grocery chains long ago began pulling out of the urban core in favor of places that accommodate their new model: megastores surrounded by seas of asphalt along main arterial roads with easy access.

What’s left behind is a hodge-podge of neighborhood food sources that charge higher prices, from fast food to old-fashioned corner groceries to convenience stores to chain pharmacies like CVS and Walgreens.

That sets up a dynamic for those who live in food deserts, which I described in an interview on pubic radio WVTF/RadioIQ: If you have to pay extra for bus fare and cab fare to grocery shop, your incentive is to shop less frequently, maybe even once a month.  If you shop once a month, your incentive is to by stuff that is filling and will keep, often high-preservative stuff in cans or dehydrated noodles. You have little incentive to buy stuff like fresh produce and dairy products that won’t last in a month’s quantity. The result is a diet which, paradoxically, produces obesity in people who have less to eat.

That’s the same stuff that’s hard to find in those neighborhood stores.

So, what’s the solution? Getting mad at chain grocery stores? Asking them to open stores in places that don’t make sense for them business-wise, when they already operate on thin profit margins?

Some cities are trying to convince those neighborhood stores to sell healthier choices, like fresh produce. What about community gardens and community farmers’ markets?

Are there transportation solutions? In Roanoke, there is bus service to supermarkets from its most challenged neighborhoods. But you can’t bring two weeks worth of groceries on a bus. Is there another option?

There are independent grocers who open stores in food deserts, and chains like Save-a-lot that specialize in smaller stores in impoverished areas. Some say they are proving that small stores on and old-fashioned scale can still be profitable in the inner city.

Does government have a role? What is it? Incentives and zoning to promote development of stores in needy areas? What else?

What do you think the solution is?

Come Dec. 1, Virginia will join a growing number of states banning smoking in restaurants (except for private clubs, outdoor seating, and designated smoking areas in a separate room from the main dining area, in Virginia’s case).

My colleague, Jenny Kincaid Boone, has a story on what the change means in the Sunday, Sept. 27, Roanoke Times.

As part of that, we decided to look at which places had the farthest to go to become smoke-free. I obtained from the Virginia Department of Health, the agency that inspects restaurants, data including the smoking status of more than 16,000 full-service and fast-service restaurants in Virginia.

And it turns out that statewide, some 70 percent of those restaurants are already non-smoking. And the Roanoke and New River Valleys are just about there, too, with about 68 percent of restaurants smoke-free.

(One caveat about the data: the smoking status is based on what was recorded during a health department inspection, and some of the dates on these status are months old, and might have changed.)

We took the data and stuck it on a map to see just where the stragglers are. Now, 16,000 restaurants is a lot of points to map, so we rolled the data up into percentages for each city and county, and that’s what you’ll find on the map. It’s a cool interactive, and you can make all sorts of changes to it, including changing which data is shown on the map. There are instructions at the bottom of the page.

It struck me that, really, there aren’t any dramatic and obvious patterns to where non-smoking restaurants are. I thought maybe rural areas would have fewer non-smoking places. But look at Craig County. It has five restaurants, and all are smoke-free. Look at the Shenendoah Valley. The whole spine of it has a high percentage of non-smoking restaurants. My best guess on that is that it’s influenced by Interstate 81, and the number of fast-food restaurants near interchanges. Fast food restaurants are routinely smoke-free these days.

Switch the map over to the percentage of restaurants which allow smoking in all areas. No great pattern there, either. I thought that the high percentages might correspond with heavy tobacco producing communities, but except for Pittsylvania County, that theory isn’t really born out.

But maybe you’ll see things that we missed. As always, let us know.

Just over a year after the Amethyst Inititive to re-examine the legal drinking age was launched, 135 college and university presidents have signed on, and just 27 of them are from public colleges.

That same ratio seems to be playing out in Virginia.

Of the seven Virginia college and university presidents who either signed on to the initiative or said they support it in a survey by The Roanoke Times, six lead private schools, and just one is at a public university: Charles Steger of Virginia Tech.

“Unfortunately, as a large university, Virginia Tech experiences the problems associated with college-age drinking all too often,” Steger said in a statement submitted as part of the survey. “The ‘binge drinking’ rate at Virginia Tech is 58.4 percent, far above the national average of 42 percent.

“The Amethyst Initiative, fundamentally, seeks to open a nationwide dialogue on misuse of alcohol. I signed the initiative to help facilitate this discussion. I applaud and support that effort.”

In all, 18 of Virginia’s 44 four-year, residential colleges and universities in Virginia completed all or part of the survey, and two more who did not complete the survey have declared their support for the initiative on the Amethyst Initiative Web site.

Five of the schools that responded to the survey said they oppose the initiative, three of them public schools.

Another eight schools said they were undecided in the survey, six of them public.

You can see the first wave of survey responses here. You’ll find an interactive map of all the schools we surveyed and the schools’ unabridged answers to the parts of the survey related to our coverage so far in our Under 21 series. The series looks at the Amethyst Initiative and college drinking in general.

The survey responses suggest relatively weak opposition to the initiative, and a lot of indecision about it.

That’s especially true among the state’s taxpayer-supported public colleges, for whom the notion that the 21-year drinking age has led to more clandestine and heavier drinking and ought to be re-considered seems to be a touchy one.

As Longwood University in Farmville pointed out in its survey response, supporting a re-consideration of the legal drinking age can be more complicated for a school that depends on taxpayers.

“We answer to a higher authority and our number one priority has always been, and continues to be, the safety and security of our students,” the school said. “It’s a matter of trust between our students, their parents and us.”

The University of Virginia’s John Casteen, who also said he’s undecided, acknowledged in an address to parents in August 2008 that changing the drinking age to 18 would make life simpler for college administrators, who would then have student bodies almost uniformly of legal drinking age. But he isn’t convinced it would be a good idea on the whole.

“I’ve encouraged the people involved in this Amethyst Initiative … to lay out their evidence to show how they can assert that there is no appreciable difference between behavior at age 18 and behavior at age 21,” he said. “I fear sometimes that part of the motive here is to make the lives of college deans and dorm head residents, and so on, easier. I don’t think that’s the point. But I’m also perfectly willing to be persuaded by good evidence.”

Radford University’s Penelope Kyle found the same lack of compelling evidence reason enough to oppose the initiative.

“There is still no compelling evidence that clearly demonstrates that lowering the drinking age to 18 would, in fact, ameliorate problematic drinking behaviors of college students,” the university said in accounting for Kyle’s position.

While public colleges seem reluctant to sign on, three schools with religious affiliations who responded to the survey support the initiative.

Billy Greer, president of the United Methodist Church-affiliated Virginia Wesleyan, “believes that the proposed 18-year-old requirement for drinking alcoholic beverages is more in line with both the reality of what already occurs and the appropriate rights for that age individual,” the college said in its statement.

A number of religious schools that didn’t complete the survey, such as Regent University and Patrick Henry College, oppose drinking in general, regardless of age.

He is nameless, faceless, thoroughly anonymous. Just a simple bar on a graph in a government report.

Yet he seems lonely even in that representation. On a bar chart of child suicides in Virginia in 2007, his bar stands off to the left, alone, above the number 10, denoting his age.

A statistical outlier.

Scan to the right, and you pass a series of zeroes over ages 11, 12, 13. Then a clump of teen suicides – all of them tragic, yet not so much as that solitary bar off to the left.

Was he an outlier in life, too, as alone with whatever sadness or circumstance lead him to this as his remote spot on the chart suggests?

I had pulled up annual report of Chief Medical Examiner of Virginia looking for data on alcohol related deaths. I paged through dozens of charts, graphs, maps before coming to “Suicide Deaths of Children” on page 84.

And there he was.

The questions rushed up to me: Who was he? Whose child was he? What could make a 10-year-old so unhappy as to think, at that tender age, that there was no need to go on? What about the poor parents, or whoever cared for him? Somewhere, there’s a mother, a father, a grandparent, a brother, a sister, a teacher, a neighbor, a friend, wondering what they missed. Could they have done more?

There’s only my wondering, and not much else to know in the report. He was one of 19 child suicides that year. I could guess at how he died. Most likely it was by gunshot or hanging. Those methods account for all but three of the child suicides that year. One inhaled a toxic agent, one jumped from a high place, one drowned.

I have a 10-year-old. My wife teaches 10-year-olds. Ten-year-olds don’t do these things.

Well, they do. Remember Aquan Lewis? A little more than a month ago, he was found hanging by his shirt collar on a hook in a bathroom at Oakton Elementary School in Evanston, Ill. Investigators found his footprint on a toilet. A coroner ruled the death a suicide.

He was in the fifth grade.

I have a fifth grader.

Ok, so maybe I’m not that smart. I should have occured to me that a sandwich with chicken and bacon and cheese wouldn’t be healthy. But it was from Panera Bread. That’s no fast food joint dishin’ out triple Whoppers and supersizin’ french fries and selling soda pop in cups the size of gallon paint cans.

It’s Panera, it’s hip, it’s clean, it’s modern. It bespeaks a lifestyle, doesn’t it? Somewhere in all that, doesn’t the Panera brand at least imply “healthy?”

But sometimes you have to see the cold hard facts. That chicken-bacon-dijon sandwich is packin’ 36 grams of fat, friends. And that puts it squarely in the same league as the super-fat sins on fast food menus. A Big Mac? Try 29 grams of fat. A Wendy’s double, 40 grams. Burger King’s Whopper, 40 grams. A large popcorn chicken from KFC, 40 grams.

The point here is not to whack Panera for selling me something I decided I wanted. That was clearly my choice. It just wasn’t an informed choice. Here I am making my living as a data guy and talking up how you need the data to make smart decision in your life, and I’m clogging my arteries because I didn’t have the data.

But the data is out there. All of these fat gram totals came from the websites of the restaurants that serve up these sandwiches.
Panera
McDonald’s
Wendy’s
Burger King
KFC

Before you order that Triple Whopper with cheese, you might want to know it has 66 grams of fat. You could save a few grams by swinging by Panera instead and ordering the Chipotle Chicken on French Bread with it’s slimming 56 grams of fat.

There are healthier choices on all these menus, but until you check out the data, you may not know which ones they are.

When you deal with data all day long, you start to look for it everywhere – and find it.

So, Tuesday I’m at the Kirk Family YMCA in downtown Roanoke for my lunch-time workout, and during a break, I scan the bulletin board. There are lists there, lists with names and numbers. Ah. Data.

It’s there that I spot it, on the list of the top females for September in terms of weight lifted as tracked by the Y’s FitLinxx system.

No. 2 on the list: Darlene Burcham.

Yup, the 63-year-old Roanoke City Manager pushed, pulled, hoisted and hauled a total of 535,445 pounds during September.

Now, Burcham has been accused of throwing her weight around as city manager before, but a half million pounds?

I called her. She was gracious, but not thrilled by more attention from the press, even for something like her athletic prowess. But she indulged me.

“I was startled to see that myself,” she  said. And she was skeptical. “I don’t believe it. I think it’s fake,” she said of the number. The FitLinxx system must add wrong. FitLinxx users create an account they log into before a workout, and it tracks your workouts on the assorted fitness machines at the Y.

Burcham said she started working out at the Y back in June, mainly walking around the track at the inhuman hour of 5 a.m. She’s had two different foot surgeries in recent years, is overly careful when traversing stairs now, and realized because of fear of injury, she just wasn’t getting as much exercise as she used to. Her daughter Ann Kreft, a Roanoke City Schools principal, joins her often. (She’s No. 14 on the list, by the way.)

After a couple of months of walking, Burcham started working out on 10 different fitness machines, too.

“I do not have any kinship with those machines,” she said. “I think this is something you do because it’s good for you.”

And when she thinks about it, and how the weight can add up during a workout, she thinks maybe that number could be right after all.

But she found the number meaningless as a motivator. Nor did she take any satisfaction from the fact that anyone had noticed.

“The last thing I need,” she said, “is more publicity.”

And I lived to write about it.

Candidly, I wasn’t sure for quite a while if I could go back after seeing the pictures and reading the reports from the health department after a well-documented mouse-infestation and general disrepair caused the city to shut the building down.

But yesterday, with a fair amount of forethought, I made the trek down Campbell Avenue and had one of my faves, a bowl of pho soup from the Hong Kong restaurant.

Why? you might wonder. Partly I missed some of my favorite food. Partly, just habit.

And then there’s this: I found I didn’t care as much for the other options out there in downtown when I didn’t have the market building. Don’t get me wrong, there are more great restaurants serving lunch within walking distance of my building than I could name here from memory. But I rarely have the time or the do-re-mi to eat at those places.

In the Market Building, there’s a great range of stuff, moderately priced, no waiters to tip, and I can get in and out fast.

I wonder how many others — including those who want to change the Market Building one way or another — came to this same realization, that the place as it is serves an important role for downtown diners, and is the only place serving it.

I went back to a place that, while seemingly less-crowded, was more pleasant than before. It’s cleaner and the dinged-up old furniture is gone. I looked around and saw an anchor and reporter from Roanoke’s two tv stations, a federal judge, and a high-powered local banking muckety-muck.

I ate my pho sitting in chair with a back on it — a nice improvement from the old benches — and never once thought about the kitchen where it was cooked, or what might be in it that isn’t in the recipe.

With all that’s gone on, the hard-scrubbing the whole place got, the damage to reputations and everyone’s heightened awareness of cleanliness, there’s probably no eating establishment in Roanoke that’s cleaner right now.

Plus, I find I’m really back where I started with all this, eating food I like, and because I want to keep eating it, preferring my ignorance of how that food got to my plate.

Well, the evidence is in. It’s not a pretty picture.

The health department released reports from the latest inspections of the Roanoke City Market Building’s 10 restaurants on Tuesday. What emerges is not the image of a small rodent issue. Mouse “excreta” – poop to us regular folks – was found in essentially every corner and every stall of the building.

The building was shut down and all its vendors’ licenses suspended after a health department inspection Friday. Read the reports yourselves here. Links are on the left side of the page about half-way down.

Some had worse problems than others. Read more »

The Roanoke City Market Building and its 10 restaurants are about an 8-minute walk from my office. I eat there twice a week at least. I’ve never looked at the Virgina Department of Health’s inspection reports for those restaurants, even though I have link to the search in the DataSphere.

I guess I preferred my ignorance of how clean the building is.

But over the weekend the building was shut down because of a rodent problem found by health inspectors. Details are thin at this point on exactly what inspectors found. Actual rodents? Droppings? What kind of rodent? And where?! One shudders at the possbilities.

Now, curious, I’ve been looking at past inspection reports online, and thought it worthwhile to remind you, gentle reader, that you can do the same on the VDH website. There’s a search box on the left side. I searched on the word “market” to get a list that included all of the restaurants in the market building. You can click down to details of the violations cited in each inspection. Some are as recent as last month. Others go back to December.

Rather than summarize the results for 10 different vendors, I’ll let you see what’s there for yourself. You’ll find violations for pretty much all of them at some point.

Some of the violations will be called “critical.” But I encourage you to read what the actual violations are, and to check out their definitions. You hear the word “critical,” and you think of Band Aids in sandwiches and roaches in salads. But more often those critical violations have to do with proper storage of food with regard to temperature, or things like food workers drinking from soda cups with no lids in the food preparation area.

To be sure, there are disgusting things documented among the critical violations, but not every critical violation is something so horrifying as to make you nauseous.

That said, you might also consider not only quality, but quantity. What if a restaurant has not a couple of critical violations, but, say, ten? (And, in fact, one restaurant — Zorba’s, where the Jamaica Joe’s special is one of my favorites — did have 10 during an August inspection.)

And then there’s rodents. Yeah, I think that meets my definition of critical.

None of this covers the latest inspection which prompted the building’s closure. Again, what was found — and where?

In the urge to assess blame, those things matter.

With ten vendors in one space, can you single out those at fault, or are they all partly responsible? And don’t forget the building’s owner and management — the city of Roanoke. What is the the city’s responsibility in all of this? Can the city totally shift blame to the tenants, when the building is under its oversight? Or vice versa?

Before deciding that, let’s see what this latest report says. Keep watching roanoke.com for that.

Today, the city of Roanoke is once again auctioning off properties on which there are unpaid local real estate taxes, assessments for weed and trash abatement, and demolition or board up costs. They do this once or twice a year. More than 30 properties are on the auction block this time, a number of which are vacant lots.

You can see the list on the city’s department of billings and collections website, and there are photos on the Woltz and Associates site.

But I wondered where they were, so I tossed the list onto a map:

No surprises here, really. It’s the more depressed parts of town where the pinpoints fall. But part of the story might be in where there aren’t any pinpoints.

As Roanoke blogger and neighborhood activist Chris Muse points out, the presence of delinquent properties “a fairly good sign of the progression or regression of a neighborhood.”

Chris is rightly proud that there’s a single delinquent property on the list this time in his part of Old Southwest. I know that property, and while I haven’t asked Chris, I wonder if some aren’t glad to see that vacant property seeing some action and the potential for a new owner to make it a credit to the neighborhood, and not a blight on it.

That, after all, is what the city says it’s up to with these tax sales. It might be a bad sign when your neighborhood is host to landowners who can’t or won’t pay their taxes or maintain their properties. But everytime one of those properties is turned over to a new owners, it’s a new chance for the land, the house, and the neighborhood.