As I transitioned into college, I figured out that what my mom had made look so seamless was actually quite hard - eating healthy on a tight budget. It's especially difficult when there are no supermarkets nearby. I never had to face the reality of food deserts until I came to Washington, D.C. for the semester. From my apartment on the Hill, the nearest supermarket is 0.8 miles away, which means that I am not in a food desert. However, residents of Wards 7 and 8 have very limited access to healthy food and many struggle with food hardship on a regular basis, according to DC Hunger Solutions:
In 2009-2010, 37.4 percent of households with children in the District of Columbia said they were unable to afford enough food. This is the worst rate in the nation. The food hardship rate for households without children drops to 14.9 percent.
Why would average people - the broke college students like me, the single moms with two jobs, the recently unemployed, etc. - take the pains to pay for and prepare healthy meals when it's so much easier to buy fast food? When I come home exhausted from classes or work, I have no desire to walk a mile to buy lettuce and then walk a mile home to prepare a decent salad. Half of the time I don't even have money for that. All I want to do is grab a cheeseburger and kick back on my couch watching The Walking Dead.
What the District could really use is a convenient, close, nonprofit grocery store, like Fare & Square in Chester, Pa. - the first of its kind in the United States.
The Huffington Post reported about this:
The store is the brainchild of Bill Clark, the executive director of Philabundance, a nonprofit hunger relief organization. Chester has a 36 percent poverty rate and unemployment is 13 percent. Clark said at one time Chester had five grocery stores, but they all closed when the city fell on hard times after manufacturing virtually disappeared.
About half of the city's residents don't own a car making it difficult and costly to travel to a supermarket. As Clark put it: "To bring a gallon of milk is a hardship if you have to use two buses to get home."
As a nonprofit, Fare & Square offers lower prices for a healthy range of fruits and vegetables. Time will tell if this model is sustainable and can be used in food deserts across the United States.
Unlike a drought, the weather doesn't control the District's access to healthy foods - we do. I could go on a rant about how "we the people" have the power, but I'll spare you the cliche. On top of that, the District isn't even represented in the federal government. I don't trust the government to fix the mess that we're in anyway. It'll take some enterprising individuals and some start up funding, but if it can happen anywhere, D.C. is the place.
Steps are already being taken to increase the increase the inner city's access to healthy foods. One nonprofit organization is using land in Alexandria, Va. to grow food to be sold in food desert areas of Washington, D.C. There are plans in the works to build a massive urban greenhouse in Ward 8 by 2014, as reported by The Washington Post:
And while Ward 8 is desperately in need of jobs, as the average unemployment rate in Ward 8 in 2012 was over 22 percent (one of the highest in the country), this greenhouse isn’t really about jobs, despite how the event was spun. Yes, the 25 full-time jobs and 100 short-term construction jobs that BrightFarms is bringing is beneficial. There is no question there.
The real gift to the community, however, is the one million pounds of GMO-free produce that the greenhouse will generate – provided it actually gets into the homes of Ward 7 and Ward 8 residents living in chronic food insecurity. This is the real test.
None of these initiatives in and of themselves will cure the District's food dessert. But combined, there's hope. Healthier foods with competitive prices will make the people of the District healthier. Because proper nutrition is so essential to health, the effects of this will be far reaching. I can't predict the future, but I can imagine how much brighter our Nation's capital will shine if its people, all of its people, have the power to take care of themselves.
To see how prevalent food deserts are in the United States, check out this interactive map from the USDA Economic Research Service!
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