Recently, First Lady Michelle Obama penned a cover story for Newsweek magazine in which she detailed her fight against the growing rates of obesity in school age American children. Obesity brings with it a host of health problems such as diabetes, heart disease and cancer. Further, high obesity rates negatively impact the economy, as millions of tax payer dollars are spent each year in treating the chronic diseases that stem from it. Since, as the First Lady noted, a third of American children are either overweight or obese, the fight against obesity is a matter of national concern.
The First Lady has launched “Let’s Move,” a program that employs several different tactics to help children and their parents towards the goal of a healthy weight. The strategies include: offering parents the tools to make better food choices for their children; a push towards more healthful food options at schools via the Healthier US Schools Challenge Program and the updating of the Child Nutrition Act; more physical activities for children; and the elimination of “food deserts.”
“Food deserts” are community areas with little or no access to affordable, quality, and nutritious food. These communities, found in such cities as Detroit, Los Angeles, Memphis, and Newark, and most of which are largely populated by Blacks and Latinos, suffer from a dearth of supermarkets, and can only rely on fast-food chains and corner stores that sell mostly liquor and some produce at exorbitant prices. About 23 million people, of whom about 6.5 million are children, inhabit low-income urban and rural spaces where the nearest supermarket is more than a mile away -- keeping in mind that many low-income families can not afford a car. For an extreme example, nearly 633,000 of Chicago’s population live in communities that lack nearby supermarkets.
Access to healthful food is a human rights issue. Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which is adopted by the United Nations affirmed that: “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food…” Thus, the RightRespect commends the White House for its dedication to providing access to nutritious food for all Americans. As part of the Fiscal Year 2011 budget, the Administration proposes the Healthy Food Financing Initiative which will invest $400 million a year to fund innovative projects that bring grocery stores to “food deserts” and other underserved areas. The Administration also plans to use grants to entice farmer’s markets and fresh food services to areas where they are currently lacking.
Not only will the elimination of “food deserts” boost the health of many of America’s population, the financial incentives for doing so will also revitalize the economy by providing new opportunities for entrepreneurship.
There are several pioneers who can serve as positive examples for entrepreneurs willing to take advantage of the fertile business climate of “food deserts.” One such trailblazer is Karriem Beyah, who runs Farmers Best Market, a store he recently opened in a predominantly Mexican-American neighborhood of Chicago known as Back of the Yards, and which had been abandoned by large supermarket chains.
Another is William Allen, a 2008 recipient of the MacArthur “Genius” award who founded Growing Power, a non-profit farming business. Through Growing Power, Allen uses both rural and urban farming -- at sites like Merton, Milwaukee, and Chicago -- to bring fresh produce and meat products to low-income urban residents at a reduced price. His organization also offers internships that train minorities, immigrants and other interested participants to produce healthful food in their communities.
With the Obama administration wiling to invest millions of dollars to making the steps of all Americans a bit lighter, socially-minded entrepreneurs need only find a “desert” that needs cultivating to get their businesses off and running.
Ifeoma Ajunwa obtained an undergraduate degree in Political Science and Sociology at the University of California, Davis where she was a McNair Scholar. She earned her law degree from the University of San Francisco School of Law. She is admitted to the Bar in California (2007) and New York (2008).Ifeoma has conducted extensive research and advocacy work with such organizations as the NAACP (Washington Lobbying Division) and the United Nations Human Rights Council. She is interested in the connection between corporate social responsibility and social justice. She will be a PhD student in Sociology at Columbia University starting in Fall 2010.
9 comments:
Great post, Ifeoma. A couple questions I thought of:
What part do you think efforts to deconcentrate poverty have in improving food access to the poor and people of color?
How do you think food access issues would manifest if all neighborhoods were perfectly economically and racially homogeneous?
The effort to bring grocers to poor communities of color has 1 particular drawback I can think of in that it keeps those poor people of color as consumers in the obviously broken food system. How can we use opportunities like these to get poor people of color to become owners in the system and develop assets for these people and communities?
Thanks, Jacob. Great questions.
I'll start with an answer to your last question. I don't think that the initiative to bring nutritious food will enforce the status quo of poor people of color as consumers. Rather, as the initiative is available to anyone with the right ideas and plan to take advantage of it, the available funding should encourage entrepreneurship among the people living in those low-income communities who would like to see fresh produce at the family dinner table.
In fact, the people I mentioned in my article like Karriem Beyah and William Allen, are people of color who saw and rose to the challenge to provide quality food for low-income, and primarily, minority neighborhoods. It is also worth reiterating that Allen's organization, Growing Power, offers internships that train any interested individual to produce nutritious food right in their neighborhood...through the use of urban farming.
I think your first and second questions are linked and here is my answer to them. De facto segregation is still a bane of the health of minorities in America. Once it was that African-Americans had to travel many miles to find a “colored” hospital that would treat them, now it is that many are slowly eating themselves to death because of lack of access to healthful food. Due to predatory and discriminatory lending practices (many of the people hit hardest by the failed housing market where immigrants…some of whom did not fully understand the financial repercussions of the housing loans they were signing), minorities are fenced into blighted neighborhoods that are deemed as “lost causes” by many businesses including grocers. Thus, in addition to providing incentives for businesses to come to “minority” areas, the Obama Administration should also look into lending and renting practices to ensure that minorities have the same access to housing as others. Furthermore, in constructing governmental low-income housing, the Administration should ensure that such housing is not isolated and that its residents will not be deprived of access to healthful food.
I was thinking of writing a post about this article I heard on NPR about incentivizing the consumption of healthy food and what it meant for isolated communities of color, but I'd rather get your opinion on it's applicability than spend all the effort writing :)
Oops, link didn't work: http://www.nprdigitalmedia.mobi/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124610428
Good article, and one that is certainly relevant. It's true that making healthful foods cheaper or more accessible won't automatically translate to people eating them. However, accessibility is a necessary first step. As the article also points out, educating people to make healthful food choices, is the next step (In fact, as I have witnessed, education is important for many things in life!)
The article notes that when students have access to free fruit at school and are educated to understand the health benefits, those students will then influence their families at home to make better food choices.
As well-intentioned as it is, I am a bit uncomfortable with the idea of paying people to eat healthful food or even to lose weight...it seems a bit overly paternalistic to me. I am all for social welfare, but I think people should be educated to willingly and consciously make these life-style choices on their own.
Education certainly is important, but I'm not sure I would classify a pay-to-eat-healthy program for the poor as paternalistic. Thinking about how your post explains the poor's isolation from healthy food, if they currently want to get healthy food, they have to pay additional costs - either in travel or in simply higher prices. So I would see such a program as a subsidy to cover what is currently an unjust tax on the poor.
To get healthy, affordable food to food deserts, won't we likely have to subsidize someone - growers of the food, transporters, supermarkets, or consumers? I'd like to work on the structural (subsidizing grocers and other providers of healthy food to build infrastructure in food deserts) while providing (hopefully) temporary relief to those waiting for the structural change to happen (which could include pay for healthy food).
I guess the problem is how do you regulate that? How do you ensure that people are going to use the money for nutritious food? I guess you could do a food stamp program where the food stamp can only be used for certain foods? Who gets to determine what exactly is nutritious and whether one is allowed a less healthy snack (such as french fries) now and then? It starts to become a bit Big Brotherish, I think... Further, it seems to imply that poor/minority people don't already want healthful food, i.e., that they have to be paid to eat them...
I understand your concern with providing temporary relief until the infrastructure is in place...but I worry about the overarching implications.
If I can quote the Godfather (James Brown): "I don't want anyone to give me anything, just open the door and I'll get it myself." :)
How such a program would actually be employed is not a full thought in my head, but that doesn't mean it can't happen. The government can employ a healthy-food-only food stamp program as you suggest. Or it could subsidize grocers and others who provide healthy food.
I don't see as determining what food is healthy and what is not as Big Brotherish. The FDA already does this and we have tons of other mechanisms in other markets determining safety of consumer products - FHSA, FAA, CPA, local building codes, etc.
This speaks to your earlier point about educating people, but I see food as a totally broken market due in part to food desert and related phenomena and also largely do a complete lack of useful information in the hands of the consumers. Sure, we can tell people how many calories are in a burger, but for most people the idea that that particular burger makes them X% more likely to have Y set of health problems in the future is an abstract concept they can't really appreciate the value of. It's almost as if health consequences are externalities not incorporated into what consumers calculate as costs of their food. The only thing that fixes a broken market (or ameliorates the consequences of one) is government intervention.
The point about poor/minority people not already wanting healthful food is at the intersection of structure and culture. I would probably say that in this case structure (food deserts, lack of adequate cooking facilities in the homes of the poor, lack of time to cook, etc.) is largely driving what can be perceived as culture and what's needed to get the poor to eat healthier is a structural approach and a direct transfer approach.
Lately I've been using the "Give a man a fish vs. teach a man to fish" adage and saying that sometimes people just need a fish!
Rise of company organic gardens!: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/12/dining/12gardens.html?hp
Post a Comment