As an urban planning scholar who teaches a course on food justice, I am aware that this disparity is largely due to design. For more than a century, urban planning has been used as a set of tools to maintain the white supremacy that has divided American cities along the racial line. And this has contributed to the development of so-called “food deserts” – areas of limited access to healthy and culturally relevant food at reasonable prices – and “food swamps” – places with a preponderance of stores that sell “fast” and “junk” food. .
Both terms are controversial and have been disputed based on ignoring the historical roots and deeply racialized nature of access to food, making it more likely that white communities have sufficient availability of healthy products at a reasonable price. .
Instead, food justice scholar Ashanté M. Reese suggests the term “food apartheid”. According to Reese, food apartheid is “closely linked to current and historical policies and practices, which come from an anti-black place.”
Regardless of what they are called, there are these areas of inequitable access to food and limited options. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that 54.4 million Americans live in low-income areas with little access to healthy food. For city residents, this means they are more than half a mile from the nearest supermarket.
More expensive, fewer options
The development of these limited healthy food areas has a long history linked to urban planning and housing policies. Practices such as redlining and yellowlining, in which the private sector and government conspired to restrict mortgage lending to black and other minority home buyers, and racial pacts that limited the rental and sale of property to white people only meant that areas of poverty be concentrated along the racial line.
In addition, homeowners ’associations that denied access to black people in particular and federal housing subsidies that have largely gone to wealthier, whiter Americans have made it difficult for them to get out or accumulate wealth. people living in lower-income areas. It also leads to the urban plague.
This is important when considering access to food because retailers are less willing to go to poorer areas. A process of “supermarket downsizing” has seen large grocery stores refuse to move to lower-income areas, close existing outlets, or move to richer suburbs. The thinking behind this process is that as a city’s pockets become poorer, they are less profitable and more prone to crime.
There is also, scholars suggest, a cultural bias among large retailers against putting outlets in areas populated by minorities. Speaking about why supermarkets were fleeing New York’s Queens neighborhood in the 1990s, then-city Consumer Commissioner Mark Green put it this way: “First they may be afraid they won’t understand the minority market. But the second it is the knee, the absurd premise that blacks are poor and that the poor are a poor market. “
In the absence of larger grocery stores, less healthy food options (often at a higher price) have taken over low-income areas. Research conducted among food suppliers in New Haven, Connecticut, in 2008, found “significantly poorer average product quality” in lower-income neighborhoods. Meanwhile, a New Orleans study in 2001 found that fast-food density was higher in poorer areas and that predominantly black neighborhoods had 2.5 fast-food outlets per square mile, compared to 1 , 5 in white areas.
“Whole Foods and Whole Foods Deserts”
Geographer Nathan McClintock conducted a detailed study in 2009 on the causes of food deserts in Oakland. Although restricted to a California city, I think what he found is valid for most cities in the United States.
McClintock details how the development of racially segregated areas during the interwar period and the reduction of policies led to concentrated areas of poverty in Oakland. Meanwhile, the late 1950s decisions of the then-white Oakland City Council to build large highways running through the city effectively isolated predominantly Black West Oakland from downtown Oakland.
The net effect was an outflow of capital and a white flight to the affluent neighborhoods of Oakland Hills. Black and Latin neighborhoods were depleted of wealth.
This, along with the emergence of suburban car-accessible Ourland supermarkets in the 1980s and 1990s, led to a shortage of fresh food outlets in predominantly black districts such as West Oakland and Central East Oakland. What was left, McClintock concludes, is a “raw mosaic of parks and pollution, privileges and poverty, whole foods and whole food deserts.”
Urban planning as a solution
Food disparities in U.S. cities have a cumulative effect on people’s health. Research has linked them to the disproportionately poor nutrition of blacks and Latin Americans, even after adjustment for socioeconomic status.
As much as urban planning has been part of the problem, it could now be part of the solution. Some cities have begun using planning tools to increase food equity.
Minneapolis, for example, aims for its 2040 plan “to establish an equitable distribution of food sources and food markets to provide all Minneapolis residents with reliable access to healthy, affordable, safe and culturally appropriate food.” . To achieve this, the city is reviewing urban plans, including exploring and implementing regulatory changes to enable and promote mobile food markets and mobile food pantries.
My hometown of Boston is involved in a similar process. In 2010, the city began the process of establishing an urban agriculture overlay district in the predominantly black and Latin neighborhood of Dorchester, changing the zoning to allow for commercial urban agriculture. This change has provided employment for local people and food for local cooperatives, such as the Dorchester Food Coop, as well as restaurants in the area.
And that might just be the beginning. My students and I contributed to the Food Justice Agenda of Boston mayoral candidate Michelle Wu. It includes provisions such as a formal process in which private developers should work with the community to ensure there is room for various food retailers and commercial kitchens, and licensing restrictions to deter the proliferation of fast food outlets in the poorer neighborhoods. If Wu is elected and the plan is implemented, I believe, it would provide more equitable access to nutritious and culturally appropriate food, good jobs and economically vibrant neighborhoods.
As Wu’s Food Justice Agenda notes: “Food justice means racial justice, which requires a clear understanding of how white supremacy has shaped our food systems” and that “nutritious, affordable, and culturally relevant foods are a universal human right “.
Julian Agyeman iProfessor of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning a Tufts University.
Disclosure Statement: Julian Agyeman does not work, consult, share, or receive funding from any company or organization that may benefit from this article, and has not disclosed any relevant affiliation beyond his or her academic appointment.
It is republished with permission from The Conversation.
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