Food and Poverty by Leslie Hossfeld

Author:Leslie Hossfeld
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
Published: 2018-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

11

Food Deserts and Injustice

Poverty, Food Insecurity, and Food Sovereignty in Three Rust Belt Cities

STEPHEN J. SCANLAN AND SAM REGAS

Food Deserts and the Rust Belt

“If a parent wants to pack a piece of fruit in a child’s lunch . . . they shouldn’t have to take three city buses [to acquire it].” These words from First Lady Michelle Obama (cited in Aubrey 2011) are at the heart of the challenges food deserts present for food security in rural and urban settings throughout the country and their impact on nutrition and health. As a component of her “Let’s Move” campaign to eliminate childhood obesity, food deserts are important to food justice and the inequality that gets in the way of it.

In this chapter we analyze food deserts and food insecurity in three Rust Belt cities: Cleveland, Detroit, and Milwaukee. We examine the intersection of deindustrialization’s legacy and the Great Recession with poverty and inequality and how access to nutritious food is problematic for the poor in urban environments, particularly food deserts. Utilizing a food justice perspective and emphasizing the limited food sovereignty poor citizens have, we connect this to food politics, health, and social movements to empower individuals and neighborhoods seeking food security.

We extend the study of food deserts from their roots in geography to sociology. Borrowing from subfields such as environmental sociology, food studies, social movements, stratification, and urban ecology, we emphasize food justice for understanding and alleviating inner-city hunger. Findings reveal multiple layers of injustice associated with food deserts, connecting not only with poverty and health but also ecology, education, work, and broader inequalities. Taken together these indicate important spatial inequality dimensions of food sovereignty and food justice and the challenge to what we call the “food opportunity structures” in meeting the needs of inner-city residents.

The concept of “food desert” has arisen from policy efforts seeking to understand and alleviate hunger and improve nutrition. Geographers in the United Kingdom Department of Health’s Nutrition Task Force defined food deserts as “areas of relative exclusion where people experience physical and economic barriers to accessing healthy food” (as cited in Reisig and Hobbis 2000, 138). In parallel efforts the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has collaborated with the Health and Human Services and Treasury Departments to define a food desert as “a census tract with a substantial share of residents who live in low-income areas that have low levels of access to a grocery store or healthy, affordable food retail outlet” (US Department of Agriculture 2014). Food deserts are dependent on “fringe stores” that provide few healthy options (Garry 2010), such as convenience stores, dollar stores, gas stations, liquor stores, or pharmacies. Full-service grocery stores on the other hand feature fresh and packaged food, including produce and full dairy and meat options alongside greater refrigerated offerings (Hurst 2010). Variations on these definitions exist, with discussion refining the meaning of food deserts and how to account for them (Shaw 2006). Diet and nutritional impacts from limited access to healthy food among low-income and discriminated-against groups is central to the food deserts discussion (Gordon et al.

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