Growing healthy food to narrow Chicago's 20-year life expectancy gap: ‘If we eat better, we do better’

Angela Taylor sits on a bench in her garden and looks out at a sea of green with bursts of color: leafy kale, round melons, red peppers and orange marigolds. A few butterflies flutter to the soundtrack of chirping birds and the roar of the L train nearby.

This garden takes up two city lots and is next door to Taylor’s house in West Garfield Park on Chicago’s West Side. This is where she comes for stress relief, while also nourishing her community.

“I'm a firm believer that if we eat better, we do better and we can live better,” says Taylor, 66, on a hot sunny day last fall. “Those things come along hand in hand. In our community here, it’s a struggle to eat well.”

Taylor and her husband Sammie have managed their Fulton Street Flower and Vegetable Garden for about 20 years. It’s part of the Garfield Park Garden Network, one of several programs run by the nonprofit Garfield Park Community Council. Angela Taylor is the wellness director there, helping to oversee the network.

Fruits and vegetables grown at 12 community gardens, managed by everyday residents or a school, are sold every other week from roughly June through October at the Council’s Neighborhood Market, as customers swap recipes on how to prepare the produce they just bought. For $25 a year, people can grow their own food in a raised bed in the Taylors’ garden, creating not just future meals, but stronger bonds between neighbors.

This homegrown solution aims to try to make healthy food more accessible in a community where people are expected to die earlier than in any other neighborhood in Chicago. Chronic conditions including heart disease and cancer are leading drivers of the stark 20-year life expectancy gap across the city. Stress plays a major role. Many of these deaths are preventable.

The so-called death gap is the widest between West Garfield Park, where most people are Black and can expect to live until 67, and the Loop, where the majority are white and can expect to live until they’re 87.

Heart disease and cancer often strike multiple people in the same family, including Angela Taylor. She has lost three relatives to cancer. The oldest was 60. It was devastating — here one day and gone the next, Taylor says. She’s also had her own health issues. She came down with a vitamin deficiency a few years ago that landed her in the hospital for about nine weeks.

“It was a really dark place that sickness took me to,” Taylor says, crediting her work in the community for helping her to recover.

WBEZ talked to and surveyed more than 50 people to understand the toll dying prematurely takes on Chicagoans and their communities. Top of mind: more access to fresh food in areas where it can be easier to buy a bag of chips at the corner store than fruits and vegetables. A suggestion: replace liquor stores with grocery stores.

In West Garfield Park, it’s common for people to leave the area for basics, including shopping for groceries in the suburbs or in other parts of the city. And it’s routine to find long lines of people waiting for their turn inside a local food pantry, lines that many advocates expect will swell as people lose financial food assistance if they can’t meet expanded government work requirements.

“Food pantries are becoming part of how people survive day to day,” rather than supplementing what they bring home from the grocery store, says Ken Cozzi, executive director of Above and Beyond Food Pantry in West Garfield Park.

There is a wide-ranging effort to improve access to healthy food on the West Side, to help everyone live longer. The Taylors’ community garden is one piece of it.

Lessons and memories from the farm

Sammie Taylor says he’s a country boy at heart. As a child, he went back and forth between Chicago and his family’s farm in Mississippi. He’s the eighth of 15 kids.

As he gets up around 6 am most days to tend to his garden, Sammie Taylor says it reminds him of his dad telling him to get up. They would feed hogs and chickens and load the trailer with hay to take to the cows. His large family had a garden, and would even make their own cornmeal. There was little need to go to the store.

He carries these memories, and lessons learned on the farm, as he works rows of raised beds with the help of high school students and volunteers, teaching them how to grow and harvest vegetables and fruits, compost and recycle seeds.

“This is nothing new to me,” Sammie Taylor says. “It just makes me think about home all the time.”

And it’s where he comes to pluck fixings for lunch and dinner. People tell him he doesn’t age. He’s trim and fit, and looks younger than his 71 years.

“What are you doing for yourself?” he says people ask. “I eat healthy. For the last 20 some years that we’ve been in this garden, I’ve been planting stuff that I really love to eat, like swiss chard and kale and eggplant.”

During the outdoor market season, Sammie Taylor will harvest produce at his garden, and pick up hundreds of pounds of produce at the other gardens in Garfield Park to sell at the local neighborhood market he and Angela helped start. He loves to see 150 people or so regularly buying fresh food. They often sell out.

This idea of food as a way to prevent disease and improve health isn’t new, but it’s gaining momentum, says Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist and director of the Food is Medicine Institute at Tufts University in Boston. Doctors even prescribe prepared meals tailored to a patient’s medical condition.

He sees community gardens as playing a powerful role in changing the narrative and the perception of what’s possible for a community, as a way to become more connected to where your food comes from.

There are other efforts on the West Side to expand access to fresh food. Living Fresh Market in nearby suburban Forest Park has signed a letter of intent to open a grocery store as part of a larger development near Madison Street and Hamlin Boulevard in West Garfield Park, where Aldi abruptly closed in 2021. Customers can expect to shop there in about two years, says Christyn Freemon, a community wealth building consultant for Westgate Development Partners, the project developer.

There is a Save A Lot in West Garfield Park, but some residents criticize the quality of the food. Jerome Bouyer, vice president of retail operations for the company, says customers should give the store another chance, saying their meat and produce “I think will stand against any competitor.” He added that fresh produce is delivered typically two to three times a week.

Sales at that Save A Lot have been flat, he says.

In the meantime, West Side United, a coalition that aims to close the life expectancy gap on the West Side, is training and connecting about 20 organizations that work on food access and nutrition, from community gardens to food pantries. They share resources, learn to design surveys for residents to better understand their needs, and receive small grants.

One organization bought a van to help pick up food, while another is building out a test kitchen to lead food demos for community members, says Elle Lynn Quimpo, program director of the COLLAB Network, an initiative at West Side United.

Looking forward to another growing season

Back at the Taylors’ community garden, the annual ritual begins as Angela and Sammie prepare for the next growing season. They are nurturing seedlings — onions, romaine lettuce, blue steak tomatoes and more — in the greenhouse. Cucumbers, cabbages and peppers soon may follow.

They’ll wait for the threat of frost to subside, typically in May around Mother’s Day, then transplant the seedlings into the raised beds.

“If it’s closer to home, the better it is for you,” Angela Taylor says.

Sammie Taylor thinks back to how often they sold out of watermelon last year as he mulls the growing strategy for this year.

They have another dream: to transform a nearby vacant lot into an orchard where children can play, and where nuts and fruit, like peaches and pears, can grow.

But for now, they are excited about a buzz in the neighborhood — openings and groundbreakings for new developments, including a massive wellness center and an arts and activism center.

Seeing a community up and on its feet is infectious, Angela Taylor says.

“Those of us that are dedicated to helping to revitalize the community, that’s … hope,” she says.

This story was produced as part of a fellowship with the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism, with support from the center’s Engagement Initiative and the Dennis A. Hunt Fund for Health Journalism and National Fellowship Fund.

Kristen Schorsch covers the health of the region for WBEZ.