Food Deserts: HJ88

Virginia House Joint Resolution #88 recognizes that Virginia already has "food deserts." Unfortunately, it doesn't recognize that the national "Safe Food Act," which should have been called the "Making Groceries More Expensive Act," expands and aggravates the problem. Full text:

http://lis.virginia.gov/cgi-bin/legp604.exe?121+ful+HJ88

I'm not sure exactly where the "food deserts" in southwestern Virginia might be; this is the part of the state where lots of people have low cash incomes, but most people, other than the abused and neglected children of alcoholics and other addicts, actually live pretty well. In some ways our poor people have a great deal in common with the genuinely poor people in the slums of Washington, D.C., but this isn't one of the ways. At least, if anybody in Gate City is not able to enjoy fresh, organically grown fruits, vegetables, nuts, dairy products, and meat, that person must be completely friendless...probably for a good reason.

In the cities, Gentle Local Readers, it's a different story. I've been there. I've seen it. You drive through the inner city--as quickly as you can--and you see all kinds of fast-food outlets, and you see fat people, and you think, "There's no problem with hunger in the city." But then, let's say for an example, you take a job in an inner-city school. Let's say that you've done a lot of temp work and are familiar with the rule that it's polite to buy lunch in the neighborhood where you're working. Only, in Anacostia, D.C., or in similar neighborhoods, your choices are limited to a few of the more obnoxiously unhealthy fast-food chains and a few unsanitary-looking snack wagons. All your healthy-looking co-workers bring their lunch. There's no place where you would want to buy lunch in a typical ghetto neighborhood.

People who live in these neighborhoods usually are employed--not in high-salaried jobs. If their salaries don't cover a reasonable amount of groceries as well as rent, they can get food stamps. They can buy groceries just like everyone else in the city. However, there is no Fresh Fields in the ghetto. There's not even a Shoppers Food Warehouse. SFW is based in a majority-Black suburb of Washington; I don't know what the owners look like, but all the affluent majority-minority and multiethnic neighborhoods had SFW outlets when I was  living in the city. The company took pride in "keeping it real," with low prices for lots of healthy food, including the tropical vegetables the Caribbean immigrant community love. But they had no store in Anacostia. Who wants to put a store outlet in a neighborhood where riots, even if they happened twenty years ago, are still scaring off any potential shoppers who can afford to be anywhere else?

Let's say you have, for whatever reason, decided to move into the ghetto neighborhood. You have some money and want to buy some healthy veggies at your favorite uptown supermarket--the one near where you work, or used to live. You can take the bus uptown. One thing you notice right away is that, in this kind of neighborhood, bus schedules tend to be regarded as inspirational fiction bearing no resemblance to the observed behavior of any actual bus. A bus may be scheduled to run every hour, but you find yourself waiting for two hours. You have a long ride each way. You spend most of the ride back standing up, with angry fellow commuters squashing your fresh vegetables against your legs. By the time you put them in the refrigerator they don't look so fresh any more.

Then you start cooking. You live in a densely populated neighborhood. You may think of yourself as a clean person, but a row house or apartment building is only as clean as the dirtiest bathroom in the row. So you start to clean and cut up your fresh vegetables, and if you hadn't noticed it before, you now notice that you are sharing your kitchen with insects. Large, ugly insects that have obviously been hanging out in the sewer, before they decided to follow the aroma of fresh vegetables. Things cooked in your kitchen suddenly become much less appetizing to you.

So the chances are that you'll continue to live in a "healthy food desert," even if you like and can afford healthy food, because ghetto neighborhoods just make it so much easier to live on junkfood. With results similar to what Morgan Spurlock documented in Super Size Me. (The book version is called Don't Eat This Book.)

And several generalizations you've resisted forming about your students suddenly stop seeming like prejudices, and start seeming like simple and obvious facts, to you. They are fat. They are depressed. They are irritable. You would be, too. And if you don't make the pursuit of healthy food into an actual unpaid job, you will be those things. Race has nothing at all to do with it. Social background has little. Food "choices," or the lack of them, are a serious problem for people who live in inner cities.

Can government solve the problem? Well...there are things government could try that might help. Such as getting out of the way. Repeal the Overpriced Groceries, or "Safe Food," Act; make it easier, not harder, for nearby farmers to distribute fresh produce in the inner city. Encourage the snack wagons and convenience stores to distribute more fresh fruit and vegetables, peeled and cut up as necessary, instead of limiting themselves to greasy salted meat, stale white bread, and oily "dressings." 

How much tax-funded "study" of this obvious situation do we need? Not every "super-sized" poor person in America, or in Virginia, will be helped...or even want to be helped...by anything anyone does. Simply making healthy food available to the inner cities, by supporting rather than burdening the people who are trying to produce healthy food, would make it possible for more people to help themselves.