How the Indiana Black Farmers Co-Op Is Helping to Alleviate Food

// How the Indiana Black How The Indiana Black Farmers Co-op Farmers Co- is Helping to op is Helping to Alleviate Alleviate Food Food Deserts Deserts The Problem: What is a food desert? Cookie cutter definition: FOOD DESERTS ARE DEFINED AS PARTS OF THE COUNTRY VAPID OF FRESH FRUIT, VEGETABLES, AND OTHER HEALTHFUL WHOLE FOODS, USUALLY FOUND IN IMPOVERISHED AREAS. THIS IS LARGELY DUE TO A LACK OF GROCERY STORES, FARMERS’ MARKETS, AND HEALTHY FOOD PROVIDERS. American Nutrition Association Vol. 38, No. 2 // This has become a big problem because while food deserts are often short on whole food providers, especially fresh fruits and vegetables, instead, they are heavy on local quickie marts that provide a wealth of processed, sugar, and fat laden foods that are known contributors to our nation’s obesity epidemic. The food desert problem has in fact become such an issue that the USDA has outlined a map of our nation’s food deserts, which I saw on Mother Nature Network. A More Accurate Way to Define Food Deserts Who in in my actual neighborhood has deemed that we live in a food desert? Number one, people will tell you that they do have food. Number two, people in the hood have never used that term. It’s an outsider term. “Desert” also makes us think of an empty, absolutely desolate place. But when we’re talking about these places, there is so much life and vibrancy and potential. Using that word runs the risk of preventing us from seeing all of those things. 'Desert' makes us think of an empty, desolate place. But there is so much life and vibrancy and potential . What I would rather say instead of “food desert” is “food apartheid”, because “food apartheid” looks at the whole food system, along with race, geography, faith, and economics. You say “food apartheid” and you get to the root cause of some of the problems around the food system. It brings in hunger and poverty. It brings us to the more important question: What are some of the social inequalities that you see, and what are you doing to erase some of the injustices? (The definition and term “food desert” is part of the problem.) The Guardian: Food Apartheid: The Root of the Problem with America’s Groceries // The Elephant in the Room The healthcare industry is part of this conversation. As a physical therapist, I used to see billions more spent on treatment than prevention. Look at the pharmaceutical companies. In my neighborhood, there is a fast-food restaurant on every block, from Wendy’s to Kentucky Fried Chicken to Popeye’s to Little Caesar’s Pizza. Now drugstores are popping up on every corner, too. So you have the fast-food restaurants that of course cause the diet-related diseases, and you have the pharmaceutical companies there to fix it. They go hand in hand. • The fact is, if you do prevention, someone is going to lose money. If you give people access to really good food and a living-wage job, someone is going to lose money. As long as people are poor and as long as people are sick, there are jobs to be made. Follow the money. – Karen Washington The Guardian: Food Apartheid: The Root of the Problem with America’s Groceries This is NOT by Happenstance The lack of supermarkets within low-income inner-city minority communities is not a demographic accident or a consequence of “natural” settlement patterns. Rather, government policies and their resulting incentives have played a significant role in shaping the segregated landscape of American cities… It is not by happenstance that low-income neighborhoods and communities of color are often devoid of affordable and nutritious food choices but have easy access to fast-food restaurants, bodegas and convenience stores. Rather, food deserts are a manifestation of structural inequities that have been solidified over time. The structural influences that have resulted in the disparate access to healthy food for minorities are innumerable. Housing policies, financial policies, and government regulations have all interacted over time to contribute to the disparity in healthy food options within cities. https://digitalcommons.nyls.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1002&context=racial_justice_p roject // Structural Causes of Food Deserts 1. RESIDENTIAL SEGREGATION 2. COMMERCIAL FLIGHT FROM URBAN COMMUNITIES 3. CONTINUING SUPERMARKET SCARCITY IN URBAN COMMUNITIES 4. BLAMING THE VICTIMS Source: Unshared Bounty Blaming the Victim Argument Even while policymakers acknowledge that food access issues disproportionately affect minorities, their rhetoric continues to suggest that the scarcity of supermarkets within predominantly low-income minority neighborhoods is a matter of choice. For example, an article published in Amber Waves, a U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service entitled “Access to Affordable, Nutritious Food is Limited in “Food Deserts,”269 states that “consumers’ demographic and economic characteristics, buying habits, and tastes also may explain why stores do not locate in some areas or carry particular foods.”270 By failing to acknowledge and discuss the historic influences for the dearth of supermarkets within cities, policymakers imply that minorities are themselves to blame for their lack of healthy food options. John Powell notes that “residential segregation is both a cause and a product in the processes that shape construction of race in America. Once structures are in place they appear to have a logic and momentum of their own that reproduces and naturalizes the meanings that they help shape.” Ignoring past influences constraining the choices of minorities redirects attention from social constraints imposed by institutions on minorities to minorities’ personal choices. Choices made within constrained circumstances are interpreted as freely chosen personal tastes. The forces that act to make the choice of eating healthier foods more difficult for minorities are ignored, and instead, minority ‘tastes’ are characterized as inferior and used to reinforce negative stereotypes of race. // The no-supermarket paradigm discourages us from considering that human beings acquire -- through childhood experience, cultural preferences and economics -- a palate. Note that the economy is part of the equation: The cheapness of sugary drinks is notorious, thanks to the popularity and influence of the muckraking 2008 documentary Food, Inc. and Eric Schlosser's best-selling book Fast Food Nation, which was made into a movie in 2006. Culture, too, creates a palate -- and to point that out is not to find "fault." Example: Slavery and sharecropping didn't make healthy eating easy for black people back in the day. Salt and grease were what they had, and Southern blacks brought their culinary tastes North (Zora Neale Hurston used to bless her friend Langston Hughes with fried-chicken dinners). Fried food, such as fried chicken, was also easy to transport for blacks traveling in the days of Jim Crow, when bringing your own food on the road was a wise decision. The Root: The Myth of the Food Desert by John McWhorter Five Years and $500 Million Later, USDA Admits That 'Food Deserts' Don't Matter- Elizabeth Brown But of course things didn't work out that way. As many business owners in these neighborhoods and other food-desert skeptics have pointed out, the problem wasn't that they simply hadn't thought to offer more wholesome items. The problem was that these items just didn't sell. You can lead human beings to Whole Foods, but you can't make them buy organic kale there. The USDA just admitted as much, with a new report on food deserts published in its magazine, Amber Waves. Highlights from the article note that proximity to supermarkets "has a limited impact on food choices" and "household and neighborhood resources, education, and taste preferences may be more important determinants of food choice than store proximity." // USDA Amber Waves (Nov. 2018) This increase in food pantry use is likely due to greater need, as the national prevalence of food insecurity was higher in 2017 (11.8 percent) than it was in 2001 (10.7 percent). The prevalence of food insecurity peaked at 14.9 percent in 2011. In addition to more need, the greater use of food pantries over time may also be due to greater availability of food pantries providing emergency food. Survey data collected by Feeding America—the national nonprofit organization that supplies food to the vast majority of U.S. emergency feeding programs—show the number of food pantries it served increased by 19 percent between 2002 and 2017. Our subsidized food system, as the activist and community organizer Karen Washington points out in the interview that follows, “skews the cost and value of food”. How do we sit with the fact that 40 million people are in poverty? The system of giving out free food is not going to fix that. Even as a farmer, I have to deal with the fact that when I come down to the farmers’ market and sell my produce I have to educate people about the value and cost of food, because I am surrounded by a food system – a subsidized food system – that skews the cost and value of food. My carrots are $2. They are $2 because I am a for-profit farmer, and unlike the carrot for 99 cents that’s sold in cellophane at the supermarket down the street or the bunch of carrots that you got for free from the food pantry, this two-dollar carrot is feeding me, my family, and it means something. // AGRICULTURE IS A BILLION-DOLLAR INDUSTRY Let’s Go Local: FOR INDIANA, WHERE FARMERS PRODUCE MORE HOGS, EGG, WATERMELONS, TOMATOES, EGGS, TURKEYS, CORN AND SOYBEANS THAN MOST Indy’s Issues: OTHER STATES IN THE COUNTRY.

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