The Urban Grocery Gap: Killing Us Softly

On Saturday afternoons when I go grocery shopping, I can find affordable, fresh food at five different, well-stocked grocery stores — all within five minutes of my home. That doesn't include the options at the town's weekend farmer's market, either. It's wonderful.

But it also makes me think back to my experience living in a predominately black neighborhood on Chicago's South Side, before I moved to this overwhelmingly white town of less than 30,000. And I wonder: Why should access to good food be so much easier in a place with barely the population of few big city blocks?

My first urban apartment — a vintage (read: old) studio on Chicago's South Side offered more limited options. There was the dimly-lit market that always smelled vaguely of meat left out too long; a corner store with marked-up toilet paper and sundries, plus food in the form of Hamburger Helper, Slim Jims and soda. There was also a community-owned co-op, with well-stocked aisles and high prices, where the neighborhood academics and yuppies could buy pantry staples, good imported cheese and wine. They weren't much, but I had choices. I never had to craft a dinner from the corner store or buy mottled fruit at the dingy market. But many of my neighbors were not so privileged.

Residents in my old neighborhood are not the only victims of the growing grocery gap, in which urban areas — especially poor ones with black and brown residents — face extremely limited access to good food. Detroit, a mostly black city of nearly 1 million residents, doesn't have a single grocery chain store within the city limits,says a 2009 CNN Money report. In fact, according to a 2002 article in the American Journal of Public Health, only 8% of black Americans live within a census tract with at least one supermarket, compared with 31% of white Americans. Poor neighborhoods typically have about 55% of the grocery square footage of more wealthy neighborhoods. It's not hard to correlate this dearth of nutritious foods in black communities with disproportionate rates of diseases linked to diet: cancer, obesity and Type 2 diabetes. The Hood Diet is a killer.

Earlier this week, several articles about the so-called the Bodega Diet caught my eye. At the moment, nutritionist Janine Whiteson — as part of promotion for the new book What To Eat — is on a media tour talking about how to make healthy choices at your neighborhood convenience store. According to Whiteson, a few tips can transform urban convenience stores from harmful to healthful. For example: Trade potato chips for Sun Chips. Buy frozen veggies (they're almost as good as fresh).

Teaching people how to eat the best way possible with limited choices is surely a good thing. Yet I can't help but feel that the Bodega Diet smells more like a media hook than a real answer to urban problems. Traveling from the Upper East Side and accompanying a reporter on a day trip to the Bronx and Harlem to point out the healthy choices among the processed fare is nice. But a drive-by nutrition lesson won't help the millions for whom lack of access to good food is an ongoing problem — the people who are not likely to have access to Cooking Light's newest tome. Coverage of the Bodega Diet — with its too-cutesy moniker that brings to mind "get slim for summer" weight-loss schemes — trivializes what is far from trivial. The real victims of the grocery gap aren't urban hipsters looking for a food fix after a night at the bar. They're the folks who have to eat The Hood Diet every day.

Luckily, several communities are making real efforts to ensure that all urban residents have access to healthy food. Notably, New York City has launched the Healthy Bodegas Initiative, which works with convenience stores to bring healthier food choices to neighborhoods (Harlem, South Bronx and Central Brooklyn) with the highest rates of obesity and diabetes. In Detroit, community members are working together to help residents eat better through the Garden Resource Program, which supports nearly 1,000 urban gardens in the Detroit metro area. This, I think, is where the answer lies — in local government intervention and grassroots advocacy for urban agriculture and incentives that push food stores to be healthy, as well as convenient.

I have mostly taken for granted my access to good food. I write this post with trepidation because I am, admittedly, unlearned about sustainable food movements and how they work. Of one thing I'm certain, though: My old neighbors are no less worthy of healthy, life-sustaining food than my current ones. Can we really abide whole communities eating themselves to death in this land of plenty?

Photo Credit: randomidea