A bright red tablecloth adds a pop of color to Ashara Manns' kitchen at her home in Flint, Mich.
The substitute teacher is at the stove, where she pours two bottles of water into a stockpot before dumping in big bags of mixed greens.
"Normally, I would rinse these with the running water, so hopefully they're still safe," Manns says.
Flint residents have been told not to drink or cook with the city's lead-tainted tap water, so Manns and her husband, Bennie, rely on bottled water to prepare their meals.
Bennie and Ashara Manns, along with their daughter, 4-year-old Jada, and Ashara's nephew, Elliott Jones, 3, gather for a healthy dinner.
"I used to just get whatever I wanted at the grocery store, but now I have to plan my meals around how much water I have or how much water I'm going to buy that week," she says.
Healthy eating is especially important to Bennie Manns. He's a bodybuilder and personal trainer.
"I don't put the sink water in my protein drinks anymore," he says.
A filter on their kitchen faucet is designed to remove lead, but Ashara Manns doesn't trust it ā especially when it comes to the couple's 4-year-old daughter, Jada.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention considers a level of 5 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood to be high in children, but no level of lead is considered safe. Jada's lead level recently tested at 2.5.
[For more of this story, written by Rebecca Kruth, go to http://www.npr.org/sections/th...-fight-lead-exposure]
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