By Krishna Ramanujan
Will Allen is one of the only African-American farmers in all of Wisconsin. At 6-foot-7, the son of a sharecropper, Allen enjoyed a stint playing professional basketball in Belgium, before he bought the last zoned agricultural land within Milwaukee city limits in 1993.
Soon after, Allen hired local youth and taught them to grow vegetables. He realized that growing fresh food in northwest Milwaukee served a vital need: The low-income residents of his community had no access to healthy foods. The streets were lined with McDonald’s, fried fish restaurants, and liquor and convenience stores, but no full-service groceries—a stark pattern found throughout American inner-city neighborhoods.
Today, Allen, who won a MacArthur Foundation ‘genius’ grant in 2008, travels the United States and abroad to teach people how to duplicate the urban farming techniques that allow him to feed thousands. His not-for-profit organization, Growing Power, includes sites in and around Milwaukee and Chicago. The original city farm site now hosts a community food center, a retail grocery, training programs, and 14 greenhouses. He has developed a bio-intensive system in those greenhouses that revolves around vermiculture, composting, and super-rich soil in 25,000 pots of herbs, vegetables, salad greens and sprouts. He grows thousands of tilapia and perch in 10,000 gallon tanks, bio-filtering the water through plant beds.
All over the country, food activists like Allen are creating oases in ‘food deserts’ – a term used to define urban areas that lack supermarkets and access to healthy food. Low-income urban neighborhoods have a third as many groceries per capita as do upper- and middle-income neighborhoods, a gap that widens when predominantly African-American areas are compared to mostly white neighborhoods.
Communities without access to grocery stores typically have some of the highest rates of food-related obesity, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and cancers.
In Chicago, the worst food deserts exist almost exclusively in African-American neighborhoods, according to a 2006 report. More than half a million Chicagoans live with no grocery stores nearby. On a typical African-American block, the grocery store is roughly twice as far as the fast food restaurant. As a natural consequence, low-income communities in Chicago have skyrocketing rates of chronic diet-related health conditions and premature deaths.
For Chicago resident LaDonna Redmond, these issues came to the forefront after her son developed food allergies. “I realized very quickly that my community did not offer the best quality food,” she said. “I could not get organic food or two percent milk.” When she traveled to organic grocery stores outside her west-side neighborhood, Redmond could not afford the lettuce and tomatoes. So, she took matters into her own hands.
Redmond started simply enough by growing vegetables on a small plot in her backyard. Eventually, she expanded to vacant lots in her neighborhood and hired local youth, who she taught to raise food and run a farm stand. Redmond’s Institute for Community Resource Development now converts Chicago’s vacant lots into grow sites, creates farmers’ markets, and works to influence food policy. This year, Redmond and other food activists opened a retail grocery store and community center, Graffiti and Grub, which sells local, organic food on Chicago’s south side.
In West Oakland, California, the numbers resemble those found in Chicago. One supermarket served over 25,000 low-income, predominantly minority residents, until it closed down in 2007. Still, there are 40 convenience stores and more than 50 liquor stores. Obesity rates hover around 40 percent in West Oakland, and residents are three times as likely to be hospitalized for diabetes as the rest of their county. The top killer, heart disease, accounts for more than a quarter of all deaths.
Brahm Ahmadi co-founded the not-for-profit People’s Grocery in West Oakland to help combat these sobering statistics. The organization offers programs in nutrition, healthy-food cooking classes, job training in sustainable food production, weekly community dinners, and it sells food grown in city gardens and on a nearby farm.
An important part of the People’s Grocery is their food delivery program. It has helped address transportation issues that further isolate people in food deserts. For years, staff members have distributed ‘grub boxes’ of produce, which residents can buy using food stamps, from a modified postal truck. A federal government study reported that a quarter of low-income households lack access to a vehicle, a number that rises to 40 percent in West Oakland. Taking the bus to a distant grocery store costs time; carrying bags is cumbersome; and taxis are expensive, so “people are willing to spend 30 to 100 percent more at the corner store,” said Ahmadi. A University of California paper reported that for people without vehicle access, distance, not price or selection, determines the choice of a food store. When residents of low-income communities are asked to rank factors that influence where they shop, convenience is number one, followed by quality and then price, Ahmadi added.
The lack of grocery stores in low-income neighborhoods has many root causes. According to both Ahmadi and Allen, older residents of their neighborhoods remember when they had “mom and pop groceries” with butchers and many choices. With the rise of car culture in the 1950s and 1960s and the middle class exodus to the suburbs, the supermarket industry found cheap land to develop large stores with parking lots, giving rise to the big box model. By the 1990s, when significant economic gains returned to inner cities, supermarkets had a new format that no longer fit in urban areas.
“When you look at this complex issue of why people don’t have access to food, it revolves around racism in the food system,” Allen said. “Retail grocery stores redline those communities, even though every study shows there is economic viability.”
To return to cities, retailers must modify their rigid systems to accommodate for the lack of sprawling land in dense urban areas and deal with contaminants and brownfields, higher operating costs, and the difficulty of assembling stores. They must also modify consolidated product lines to suit the tastes of more diverse urban customers, Ahmadi said. “When you combine all those complexities with a prejudiced mindset that there is crime, that people are poor, the attitude that residents are not interested in buying healthy food, a lot of supermarket chains have no incentive,” he added.
Next year, Ahmadi will launch a for-profit grocery store with fresh, local health food in West Oakland. The store, a sister organization to People’s Grocery, will represent a “paradigm shift” in the grocery model by being smaller, with local foods and community connections, and without a bottom line of maximizing profits. He believes the cost of his local organic foods will not be an issue. Residents in his neighborhood spend a greater percentage of their total income on food compared to people with higher incomes, and shopping locally will save travel money. Also, “prices of health foods are about equal to buying in corner stores,” he said.
Ahmadi has seen similar efforts fail because they lack community ties and education programs on nutrition and food systems, like those he offers through People’s Grocery. At the same time, in his experience, people readily embrace healthy food when they have access.
“We believe everyone wants to live a healthier life,” he said. “Whether the supports are there or not is another question.”
“In order to get people to make a choice, they have to see the choice,” added Redmond. “I don’t subscribe to the thought that people don’t know how to eat healthy.”
written by Laura Branca, November 24, 2009
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