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03/23/06
Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --
Los Angeles's homeless population is huge and highly visible, but what about the people who are going hungry?
Darren Hoffman>> The homeless are the people you may see. That's kind of the face that people put to it, but actually it's kind of a hidden epidemic here in Los Angeles County. It's your next door neighbor. It's a person down the street. It could be anybody.
Val Zavala>> And then, they're called the world's greatest rock and roll band, but does the story of former Stone, Brian Jones, make a good movie?
It's all straight ahead on tonight's Life and Times.
Announcer>> Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.
And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.
Val Zavala>> When is the last time you were hungry? I mean, really hungry. Well, believe it or not, in Los Angeles County, more than three hundred thousand people, many of them children, feel the physical pangs of hunger on a regular basis. And even more surprising, most of them are United States citizens and many have a college education. How can that be? Well, Toni Guinyard takes a closer look at hunger in Los Angeles County.
Toni Guinyard>> Inside this nondescript warehouse in Los Angeles, case upon case of food is stacked from ceiling to floor, so much food that you might think there's enough stockpiled to feed, well, a small army.
Darren Hoffman>> This is about two and a half million pounds of product that we have on hand.
Toni Guinyard>> But you'd be wrong. This is the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank. Although it's the second largest food bank in the nation, within seventeen days, all of this will be gone, given to one of the one thousand agencies that receives food from the food bank for distribution to Los Angeles County residents who are hungry.
Darren Hoffman>> It's a high-volume turnaround and we still have agencies that are asking for more. We just try to spread what we do have among all the agencies and try to give them something, but we don't have enough to meet all of their needs.
Toni Guinyard>> It's a never-ending seventeen day cycle. Get food in, fill orders, send it out, do it all over again. In many ways, the warehouse workers rushing about with clipboards listing requests from small food banks and shelters and soup kitchens --
>> "That's sliced carrots, six cases."
Toni Guinyard>> Are in a race they have little chance of winning. The number of people in Los Angeles County who are genuinely hungry is growing at such a pace that donations to the food bank don't come close to filling the demand.
Darren Hoffman>> You know, we're down twelve percent. That doesn't sound like a lot, but it is when you look at the volume we do. In 2004, we distributed forty-six million pounds. In 2005, we distributed forty-one million pounds, a difference of five million pounds. You know, we're looking at about three and a half million meals is what that translates into.
Toni Guinyard>> The food bank's communications director, Darren Hoffman, warns don't make the mistake of thinking the homeless and the hungry are one and the same.
Darren Hoffman>> The working poor families are mainly who we serve. The homeless are the people you may see. That's kind of the face that people put to it, but actually it's kind of a hidden epidemic here in Los Angeles County. It's your next door neighbor. It's a person down the street. It could be anybody.
Toni Guinyard>> A nationwide study commissioned by America's Second Harvest, a national food bank network, proved how dire the situation is. They surveyed agencies that distribute and clients that receive food assistance. In Los Angeles County, thirty-one percent of the adults surveyed were employed. Fifty-three percent had an annual household income of less than ten thousand dollars a year.
The statistics just may shatter your belief about where some of this food is going and who it's going to. According to the people who answered the survey, eleven percent said they have a college degree. Another twenty-one percent said they'd attended college. So it appears that it doesn't matter if you have an education or a job. Sometimes you simply can't make ends meet.
Anjelica Garcia>> I have, you know, barely been able to make rent. I have two children, so there were times when I had to make do. I had to make sure that I had food on the table for them and I'd rather go without.
Toni Guinyard>> The day we met Anjelica Garcia, she was at the food bank sorting donations. She is one of three volunteers on the assembly line that I asked, "Have you ever been hungry? Really hungry?" Anjelica, Loyma and Jared all answered yes.
Jared Valles>> When I was younger, I grew up sort of homeless, you know what I mean, so I was hungry at that time. I would say yeah.
Toni Guinyard>> What did you do for food when you didn't have food?
Anjelica Garcia>> Sold drugs. Sold drugs to buy food. Borrowed food.
Loyma Delacruz>> Like being a drug addict. You know, the situations that I would rather spend our money than spend it on food and I would pick out of trash cans. I got to the point that I would collect cans, you know, and instead of buying a ninety-nine cent burger, I would rather get me a dollar hit, you know.
Toni Guinyard>> All three are in recovery. They represent one extreme of Los Angeles County residents who had to deal with hunger. Jacinto Rhines, Jr. represents another.
Jacinto Rhines, Jr.>> Nobody should have to go hungry. Nobody should have to. There's enough food in the world and enough people in the world to feed everybody.
Toni Guinyard>> Rhines is owner of the Natural Soul Food Café on Martin Luther King Boulevard in Los Angeles. Here the emphasis is on nutrition --
Jacinto Rhines, Jr.>> Pure virgin olive oil we cook in food and we use brown rice instead of white rice. We're using no white sugar. We're using honey in our honey lemonade.
Toni Guinyard>> As well as food.
Jacinto Rhines, Jr.>> Well, we're the only restaurant I think that has salmon nuggets.
Toni Guinyard>> Salmon nuggets?
Jacinto Rhines, Jr.>> Yes, ma'am. I don't think anybody else has that. I've heard that nobody else has salmon nuggets.
Toni Guinyard>> But the real difference is not what you'll find in the kitchen, but what you won't find on the menu. No prices are listed. This is a nonprofit restaurant.
Jacinto Rhines, Jr.>> So we're giving people food at a price they can afford. In other words, everybody has a price they can afford. So with that in mind, and with integrity in mind, we let people pay what their taste buds say.
Toni Guinyard>> You let them pay --
Jacinto Rhines, Jr.>> What their taste buds say.
Toni Guinyard>> What their taste buds say.
Jacinto Rhines, Jr.>> Yes, ma'am, and it works so well.
Toni Guinyard>> While the menu suggests a service donation of three or four dollars, no one will walk away hungry.
[Film Clip]
Jacinto Rhines, Jr.>> If they can't afford to buy it, we give it free to them. I mean, we don't hold back a meal from anybody who wants a meal. Nobody goes away from here saying that they're hungry and not getting a meal. Now if they're tricking me (laughter) and do have money to pay, that's on them. That's between them and God.
Toni Guinyard>> Miles away, the nonprofit agency Para Los Ninos is responding to hunger by taking a different approach. The agency's focus is on children and families living in poverty. Carmen Navarro is director of Family Services.
Carmen Navarro>> A lot of the children that attend our child development center and our charter school, they come in and they're hungry. These kids are hungry and we ask the families or the families will come and ask us if we can assist them. Anything with groceries or food vouchers, if we have them available.
Toni Guinyard>> Out of necessity, the agency operates a small food pantry.
Ralph Guirado>> Welcome in to my food pantry. What I've got here, we carry basic staples. Oatmeal, oil, rice, beans.
Carman Navarro>> Everybody pitches in to keep our little pantry. This little pantry is really small. It's like a little closet, but it feeds quite a bit.
Ralph Guirado>> They'll come and they'll look at you and they'll say, "When snack?" You know, can I have a snack. Or when they're having a snack, "Can I have some more?" It's just cookies or something simple, but you see it in their eyes that they haven't eaten. They want more and you give them more. You know, you can't say no. You just give them more.
Toni Guinyard>> And that's how many of Los Angeles County's hungry are getting fed, small food pantries supplied by large food banks, all connected by a common thread, the desire to identify and help people who, for whatever reason, are unnecessarily going hungry.
Darren Hoffman>> It's a silent epidemic where you don't really see people wearing a ribbon or something saying that they're hungry. These are people that are, you know, basically ashamed to ask for help. They feel there's some kind of pride issue that they should be asking for help like this, and there isn't.
Toni Guinyard>> They aren't alone. One out of ten Los Angeles County residents, one million people, have asked for help in getting food and there is no way of knowing how many more simply are afraid to ask. I'm Toni Guinyard for Life and Times.
Val Zavala>> If you'd like to learn more about hunger in Los Angeles County and what you can do about it, you can go to the website at lafoodbank.org.
Announcer>> Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and Times. You'll find previews of upcoming stories, plus transcripts and audio of past episodes and links to some of our most interesting features. Just go to kcet.org, scroll down the page and click on "Life and Times".
Val Zavala>> If you had to find one person who best understood the complexities of Latino culture and health issues, you couldn't do better than David Hayes-Bautista. This UCLA professor is internationally known for his speaking, his writing and his research, and he gave me some fascinating insights into the Latino population here in Los Angeles.
David Hayes-Bautista is founder of the Center for the Study of Hispanic Health and Culture at UCLA. His studies have revealed something he calls "the Latino paradox". I talked with him about what he means by "paradox". Now you have uncovered some really interesting, unexpected findings in dealing with Latino health. The first one, of course, that most people see is, "Oh, my goodness, Latinos are always overweight, they're part of the whole obesity epidemic." Is that true?
David Hayes-Bautista>> Well, it's very true that Latinos, particularly those born in the United States as opposed to immigrants, have problems with obesity. A higher percent of Latinos are overweight and obese compared to any other group, and the percent is growing every year.
Val Zavala>> So if they're obese, that would also mean they have problems with strokes, heart disease, cancer? All those rates are higher as well?
David Hayes-Bautista>> Well, in every other population, there is an almost immediate corollary between being overweight, being obese and a high rate of mortality. We don't see this yet, and I'll emphasize the "yet" for Latinos. In fact, in California, across the country, Latinos have thirty-five percent fewer heart attacks compared to non-Hispanic whites. Fewer heart attacks. Over forty percent fewer cancers, thirty percent fewer strokes, lower infant mortality, five years longer life expectancy.
However, all these tremendously strong health profiles can be endangered by a couple of generations of overweight and obesity. Latinos can't get away with this forever. Actually, what happens is that immigrants usually arrive with very, very good health habits. They eat very healthy food, they rarely smoke, they rarely drink, they rarely do drugs. They have very low rates of sexually transmitted diseases. Their children born here drink more, smoke more, do drugs more, accumulate a few more sexually transmitted diseases, move less --
Val Zavala>> -- put on weight, fast food.
David Hayes-Bautista>> Put on some weight, change the dietary patterns, so we're starting to see the increase in overweight and obesity. At some point, it has got to affect these otherwise stellar figures in terms of lower heart, cancer and stroke. They might also have perhaps the same heart attack rate as non-Hispanic whites. How terrible.
Val Zavala>> So you're saying that a population that we normally perceive as poor does not have access to insurance, doctors, good health care, is actually relatively healthy?
David Hayes-Bautista>> In fact, this is why this is called a paradox because normally, if you have a population with low income, low education and poor access to care, we expect it's going to have a high incidence of adverse health outcome. A lot of heart attacks, a lot of cancers, a lot of strokes, a lot of health-harming behavior, and we don't see it with Latinos. That's why it's called a paradox. We don't understand it. How is it that a population of very low income, very low education and very, very poor access to care has such spectacular health outcomes?
Now the interesting thing is, when we look at the children of immigrants born here who have far higher incomes, far higher education and far better access to care, their health profiles begin to erode. Interesting, and that's what we're trying to understand. But let me give it a different way. If everybody in California had the same epidemiological profile as Latinos for heart, cancer and stroke, we would save forty-nine thousand lives every year. But because we have not researched, we don't know the mechanism, we don't know what it is. We don't know if it's beans or tortillas and it could be. Who knows?
Val Zavala>> (Laughter) Or Spanish language television.
David Hayes-Bautista>> We don't know the mechanism, but we know the outcome not just in California. We see it in Arizona, in New Mexico, Texas, Florida, Chicago, New York, wherever you have Latinos and a non-Hispanic white population. These are the differentials you'll see, but nobody's researching it, so we don't know the mechanism. So forty-nine thousand people will die in California this year. Not Latinos. Primarily non-Hispanic whites due to heart, cancer, stroke, and we could have saved their lives if we had done the research.
Val Zavala>> So there is something to be learned from the Latino lifestyle. We just don't know what it is.
David Hayes-Bautista>> Nobody's studying it, so we don't know what it is. If we studied it the way we're studying human genomics, just think. We could save lives and it would be a lot cheaper. You wouldn't need really gold-plated health insurance to do this because it's something that Latino families do every day just naturally without even thinking about it.
Val Zavala>> Now you also mentioned the Latinos have lower rates of drinking, smoking and drug use and yet there is a perception -- and I think it's borne out -- that there's a lot of beer consumed in the Latino community. Is that not right?
David Hayes-Bautista>> Well, certainly there are perceptions. In general, the perception is that Latinos are very unhealthy, very sickly, using services too much and always harming their health. But when we look at data compared to non-Hispanic whites, a far lower percent of Latinos smoke. A far lower percent of Latinos drink. Now there may be something in the drinking pattern for males that seems to drive this perception. A lower percent of Latino males drink compared to non-Hispanic white males.
Val Zavala>> A lower percent, okay.
David Hayes-Bautista>> A lower percent. And even if you look at the amount that they drink, non-Hispanic white males drink more ounces of alcohol than Latinos. However, it's drunk differently. A non-Hispanic white male, an office worker, will have the two Martini lunch every day. Two martinis or two glasses of wine. The Latino worker generally is on a construction site and can't have the two Martini lunch. He doesn't drink usually during the week, but on the weekend will consume a smaller amount, but in one setting which, of course, has a different consequence. But a lower percent drink and they drink less. It's just that it's drunk differently that does lead to this perception that all Latinos are natural alcoholics, which is not true.
Val Zavala>> So this is definitely putting the Latino population in a different light health-wise, but there is one problem. In fact, you call it the number one health problem among the Latino community, and that is a scarcity of Spanish speaking or Latino physicians, doctors, nurses. You call that the number one health problem.
David Hayes-Bautista>> Well, actually, the number one health problem, let's not even get too specific. Do they speak Spanish or are they simply there? Let's talk about a tale of two cities here in Los Angeles. Beverly Hills and Belle. Beverly Hills, for every hundred thousand population -- and I know Beverly Hills doesn't have a hundred thousand. It's about eighty-five -- but if there was a hundred thousand population just so we can have comparison rate, has two thousand twenty-three physicians. Literally, one out of every thirty-eight people in Beverly Hills is a physician.
Val Zavala>> Okay.
David Hayes-Bautista>> Beverly Hills is only five percent Latino. Now you go to Belle, which is only, what, about ten or twelve miles away. Belle is ninety-one percent Latino. For every hundred thousand population, nineteen physicians. Nineteen compared to two thousand twenty-three. So part of the problem is, if they want to seek care in Belle, where do you find a physician? The number of Latinos in the University of California medical schools -- and we have five -- the number of Latinos starting medical school this year is half the number of Latinos starting medical school just twelve years ago. Half.
Val Zavala>> Why?
David Hayes-Bautista>> Now you think, wait a minute, the Latino population is growing. There should have been more Latinos applying to medical school. We should have at least thirty or forty percent more than twelve years ago. Instead, it's half.
Val Zavala>> Are you optimistic about the future health of the huge Latino population here in southern California?
David Hayes-Bautista>> Yes. In part, I'm very optimistic. I'm optimistic about what Latinos bring to the table. In terms of health, rather than being a sickly population that over-utilizes services because Latinos use services far less than any other population, we have a population with some very naturally healthy behaviors derived from the culture with some very strong epidemiological profiles. But the institutions aren't stepping forward. Neither the educational institutions nor the medical care provision institutions, be they public or private sector, so that's why the D grade. Not for what Latinos are doing, but for the lack of institutional response to this really strong health profile that Latinos are bringing to Los Angeles and have brought for two hundred thirty years.
Val Zavala>> David Hayes-Bautista, thank you so much. You'll be an inspiration to those institutions.
David Hayes-Bautista>> My pleasure. My pleasure entirely.
Val Zavala>> David Hayes-Bautista's latest book is called "La Nueva California: the New California". It charts the growth and evolution of Latinos in the Golden State from 1940 to 2000.
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Larry Mantle>> Welcome to FilmWeek on Life and Times. I'm Larry Mantle of 89.3 KPCC. Our first film this week is a bank robbery hostage drama, "The Inside Man", directed by Spike Lee. It stars Denzel Washington, Clive Owen and Jodie Foster.
[Film Clip]
Larry Mantle>> I'm joined this week by critics Henry Sheehan of henrysheehan.com and Scott Foundas, film editor and critic for the L.A. Weekly. Scott, please start us off on "Inside Man". What did you think?
Scott Foundas>> I thought it was terrific, Larry. It's, to me, one of the great bank robbery pictures. It reminded me of one of my favorite movies of the 1970s, "The Taking of Pelham 123", which is another New York heist movie. This is kind of that movie with Denzel Washington in the Walter Matthau part and Clive Owen in the Robert Shaw part, two extremely clever people matched against each other, the crook and the cop who's trying to sway him from his plan.
But there's a lot more going on in this movie. It's sort of a movie about a guy who walks into a bank, takes the whole place hostage and then doesn't lay a finger on the money, and you spend the next two hours trying to figure out why and what he is really up to.
Even though it is something of a formula picture, what Spike Lee does in the movie that I liked so much is that he's constantly -- and it's a credit to the screenwriter, Russell Gewirtz too -- they're constantly infusing every scene with some interesting little twist or some little bit of business going on that makes it interesting and gives it a kind of edge that distracts you from the formula. The actors are really terrific. Denzel Washington is doing a sort of Sam Spade routine. The dialogue really crackles. I had a terrific time.
Larry Mantle>> Henry?
Henry Sheehan>> You know, I think there's a decent eighty-minute Richard Fleischer picture here struggling to get out, but it never does. I found all the extra bits of business actually just distractions from the fact that this is basically a rather routine hostage drama/bank robbery that Spike Lee really doesn't know how to animate with himself. The Jodie Foster character, in particular, seemed to me to be ridiculous. I just thought the movie didn't go anywhere. There's no excitement and it's way too slow.
Larry Mantle>> Our second film is the Belgium drama, "L'Enfant", The Child. It's from the Dardenne Brothers. The film is in France and it tells the tragic story involving a young couple.
[Film Clip]
Larry Mantle>> Henry, what did you think of "L'Enfant", The Child?
Henry Sheehan>> Well, this is another great documentary-like drama from the Belgian Dardenne Brothers, Luc and Jean-Pierre. They first came to notice in the United States with "La Promesse". Their last picture was "The Sun". This is about a homeless couple, teenagers, late teens. The movie begins when a girl comes home from the hospital with their newborn baby and she finds out that they've locked their apartment. They're living in this shack on an embankment.
What happens within the first twenty minutes -- I'm not giving too much away -- is the father sells the baby to a criminal baby broker and the rest of the movie plays out every consequence of that terrible action. I mean, let's face it. It's really horrible. The Dardenne Brothers don't excuse the action, but they kind of present the father as a kind of moral nullity, an amoral character. He doesn't really understand how bad it is he's done, although the mother certainly does. It's heartbreaking as all their movies are, but it's a little but uplifting maybe at the end.
Larry Mantle>> All right. It sounds like a nod for the best, as you put it (laughter). What did you think of it?
Scott Foundas>> I think it's a great film also. What the Dardennes are so great at doing is not just showing a sort of chain of events spiraling out from one action -- they're almost Dostoevsky in the sense of that -- but they're also great tellers of stories through action. There's hardly ever a moment in one of their movies where the characters just stand around talking and explaining the plot to you. It's all sold through action, one action leading to another action. The movie is constantly on the go and, even though you wouldn't call it a suspense thriller in the conventional sense, it really does generate an incredible anxiety as you're watching it.
Larry Mantle>> And finally this week, the bio-pick of former Rolling Stones manager, Brian Jones. "Stoned" tells the story of Jones and his tragic demise in his swimming pool accident -- or was it an accident?
[Film Clip]
Larry Mantle>> Scott, what did you think of "Stoned"?
Scott Foundas>> I thought this was one of the all-time worst celebrity bio-picks. It reminded me of that horrible John Belushi bio-pick called "Wired" that came out about fifteen years ago. It's based on the death of Brian Jones who was one of the founding members and the manager of The Rolling Stones who drowned in his swimming pool when he was in his late twenties. There was a sort of air of mystery around it even though it was dismissed officially as being a drunken incident. I forget the exact terminology of the coroner.
The film explores his relationship with a bricklayer named Frank Thorogood who sort of comes to become Jones' confidante, his driver, his live-in assistant and who may have played some role in the circumstances surrounding his death. But both characters are so fatally uninteresting that the movie just sort of presumes you'll want to know about them because of this event that happened. It's completely boring. If you didn’t know why The Rolling Stones were a significant band, you wouldn't learn anything about it from this movie. This is -- no pun intended -- dead in the water.
Larry Mantle>> (Laughter) Henry, do you agree?
Henry Sheehan>> Well, no, (laughter) I don't agree. I mean, yeah, it's like a silly movie because the whole thing that they're building up to reveal the big secret, I mean, has more to do with the liable laws than it does with any serious investigation of what happened to Brian Jones. But the movie kind of recreates that whole trippy atmosphere of the 1960s. You know, it tries to photographically reproduce what it was like to take different drugs and it reminds me of kind of a 1960s movie like "Psych-Out" and stuff like that.
That was all part of the milieu at the time. It was all part of the spirit of the 1960s. The movie is very good at getting into like power games people play with each other when they're on drugs, you know, and all that. The drugs didn't really release you from social relations. It just makes them worse. The movie really gets into all of that. Plus the actor who played Brian Jones looks exactly like Brian Jones. As a stand-alone movie, no, but if you're a certain age, yes.
Larry Mantle>> Well, thanks for joining us for another FilmWeek on Life and Times. I'm Larry Mantle of 89.3 KPCC joined by critics Scott Foundas, film editor for the L.A. Weekly, and Henry Sheehan of henrysheehan.com. Please join us again next week at this same time for the next FilmWeek on Life and Times.
Val Zavala>> To hear a full hour of FilmWeek, just tune into KPCC public radio every Friday morning at eleven a.m. And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at Life and Times, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.
Announcer>> Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.
And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.
Sponsored in part by:
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