City Limits • July/August 2004
Looking for a healthy snack? Your best bet is to head to Manhattan. It’s home to 322 supermarkets, more than any other borough. Each Manhattanite can claim 2.8 square feet of shopping space—not to mention 22 farmers’ markets and 16 community supported agriculture (CSA) clubs.
And you’d do well to avoid Brooklyn. Brooklynites scrape by with 1.4 square feet of space per resident, 11 farmers’ markets and 7 CSAs. That’s not all: Brooklyn is home to more than half of the 1.7 million New Yorkers living in zip codes with less than one square foot of market space apiece.
If, however, it’s fast food that you prefer, Queens and Staten Island will hit the spot: Of the more than quarter-million New Yorkers who live in zip codes with as many or more McDonalds than grocery stores, 40 percent are in Queens, and 36 percent are in Staten Island.
Depending on which neighborhoods they live in, students and staff from B*Healthy have very different experiences trying to find good food.
