Transcript: Food Deserts

 

 

MARK SOMMER: Rushing home, maneuvering through traffic after a hard day at the office or on the construction site, we stopped by the neighborhood market to pick up a few things for dinner. Let's see… Ground beef, Hamburger Helper, frozen hash browns, a six-pack. Skip the lettuce, it looks terrible. Carrots are limp. Tomatoes are hard as baseballs. How ‘bout Twinkies for dessert?

 

In the door and into the skillet go the burgers. Mmm, sizzlin’ good. Ketchup and steak sauce, mayo and pickle relish. Skip the veggies. Who’d want to eat those lame excuses for live plants.

 

MARI GALLAGHER: We might hear the Surgeon General say, you know, “Eat five. Eat seven,” you know, whatever, vegetables a day. In some neighborhoods, you can’t find five vegetables.

 

MARK SOMMER: They’re called food deserts, neighborhoods in our inner cities and in some rural communities where it’s almost impossible to find healthy, fresh, sustainably grown fruits and vegetables, neighborhoods where you can’t find a supermarket for miles around, and all that’s available is a cooler of wilted vegetables and a shelf of white foam bread in a liquor store.

 

Some say it’s what the local want to eat or all they can afford. Others say food deserts are just a symptom of a broken global food system.

 

ORAN HESTERMAN: The fact that it’s more expensive to get a locally grown product into market in an inner city versus being able to get highly processed foods from a greater distance into that city, there’s something wrong with that.

 

MARK SOMMER: Today on A World of Possibilities, “Food Deserts: Nutritional Starvation in the Land of Plenty.” Why don’t we hear more about this issue? Good question. Maybe because if we live in a more prosperous part of town near the supermarket or the Whole Foods, we have the pick of the crop and a panoply of food choices. You got the money, we got the goods.

 

ORAN HESTERMAN: If you have adequate money, it doesn’t seem that there’s a problem, because it looks like we can access whatever food we want. But you scratch the surface, and we can see the symptoms of a broken system all around us.

 

MARK SOMMER: Well, they’ve scratched the surface in Brooklyn and found a way to grow healthy food in one of the poorest parts of one of the biggest cities in the world.

 

IAN MARVY:  The act of growing food is, as far as I’ve seen, almost-- universally has some appeal.

 

MARK SOMMER: I’m Mark Sommer. Welcome to A World of Possibilities. First, let’s go trekking into the desert, not the parched baking wilderness of sand and solitude, a world away from water and civilization. We’re talking here about food deserts, neighborhoods in the very heart of otherwise thriving cities where you can’t even locate the ingredients for a decent meal.

 

What food choices are to be found in inner cities are displayed alongside the thirty weight motor oil at the gas station mini-mart, beside the “brewskies” at the liquor store, or nested beside candy bars in the pharmacy. Mari Gallagher studies such deserts. She’s the founder of Mari Gallagher Research and Consulting Group and the National Center for Public Research in Chicago. She studied major U.S. cities to assess the impact of food deserts on the health of those living in those neighborhoods, and the results are stunning.

 

Take Chicago where she and her firm have looked at every block in the city (that’s 18,000 city blocks) and measured the distance from the center of every block to the nearest mainstream grocery store and fast food restaurant. To describe her findings, Mari Gallagher joins us now from Chicago.

 

MARI GALLAGHER: What we found is that there’s a huge area in Chicago that is a food desert. And we define that as areas with no(?) more(?) distinct(?) grocery stores that are large and isolated, and additionally there are lots of fast food or fringe food options and worse health outcomes.

 

Because we found that people who live in food deserts and people who live in these out of balance areas are more likely to suffer and die prematurely from diet‑related diseases such as diabetes, certain kinds of cancers, and so on. So it’s a very serious situation.

 

We moved on to do a similar report in Detroit and other parts of Michigan. And we expanded our methodology to quantify other kinds of fringe food. So we’ve been looking at all kinds of USDA food stamp retailers. We found in Detroit that, not only is there a huge, huge food desert (it’s practically the entire city that suffers) but many of the establishments that sell food, that are part of the USDA food stamp retailer program, which are supposed to be the first line of defense against malnutrition, are actually these fringe food providers.

 

So it’s not fast food that’s the killer in Detroit. It’s the gas stations, the liquor stores, the party stores, the shabby convenience stores that mostly specialize in high fat, prepackaged food products, as well as, you know, tobacco, cigarettes, phone cards, lottery tickets. So it’s very, very hard to find nutritious food. And we find that the communities there suffer more than they would otherwise from these diet-related diseases.

 

MARK SOMMER: I would imagine that many listeners would think, “Well, just drive to the nearest grocery. If it’s three miles away, what’s the big deal?” But is part of the problem that many people in low income neighborhoods don’t even own their own transportation?

 

MARI GALLAGHER: Right. It’s very, very difficult if you’re a working family. Many of these family, by the way, are not completely poor. There are a number of families that indeed are very, very poor. And there are other families that, you know, they’re working families. They have two or three jobs. They have multiple responsibilities. They’re struggling to make ends meet. They might not have a car. They’re limited with time. They’re taking their kids around.

 

And what we found in our research is that overall people will shop for food at the places that are close to them. And so especially if you have difficulty with transportation, you’re going to look around in your neighborhood and say, “Gosh, where can I get dinner?” You know, “I just finally picked up the kids. I’ve got to, you know, prepare something for-- you know, to be ready for work tomorrow. We have little bit of time to have dinner.” You know, you just might go to the McDonalds or the Kentucky Fried Chicken or the Burger King or the convenience store or the liquor store to get, you know, a package of hot dogs and a bag of chips.

 

None of these things are inherently bad. We’re not saying that fast food is evil or wrong, or that, you know, convenience stores shouldn’t exist or that liquor stores are, you know, terrible. But what we are saying is that if you turn to them, day in/day out, for your regular diet, that indeed those diets suffer. And we see the suffering after we control for other factors. I mean, certainly personal choice plays a role, culture, you know, income, you know. Race predetermines in many cases the kinds of diseases that you would be more likely to take on.

 

So there are a number of things to consider. But geographic access is a key determinant for health outcomes we’ve found. And it’s really critical if you don’t have access to foods, healthy foods, you can’t choose those healthy foods. So a lot of times we hear people preach, you know, “Just say no,” you know? It’s kind of like the Nancy Reagan, just say no to drugs, just say no to, you know, fatty food.

 

Well, it’s not so easy if that’s all you have around you. And we might hear the Surgeon General say, you know, “Eat five, eat seven,” you know, whatever, vegetables a day. In some neighborhoods, you can’t find five vegetables. It’s very, very difficult. And if we care about public health, and if we care about the financial impact of these consequences in our emergency rooms and so on, then we need to take some steps to remedy it.

 

MARK SOMMER:  LaDonna Redmond(?), a resident of West Garfield Park in Chicago says that, “I can walk out my door and buy a semiautomatic weapon or narcotics, but I can’t find organic tomatoes or lettuce anywhere. I need to get in my car and drive to Oak Park.”

 

So what’s always mystified me is, when I go into, say, a mini-mart attached to a service station (and there are a lot of those around) they’re generally big chains. And I can’t find a single thing I would call healthy food in them. And I wonder, what would it take for those chains to just change what they have in there, to have a few things that are actually real food and not pre-packaged junk food?

 

MARI GALLAGHER: The most exciting proposition, because there are so, so many of these fringe locations, is for the fringe locations to crossover and become mainstream. So what would it take for these marginal convenience stores that sell limited produce if any produce, that have mostly frozen or pre-packaged, high salt, you know, high fat, high sugar products to begin to offer a greater variety of fresh and healthy foods?

 

And to use the USDA food stamp retailer program as part of a carrot and stick approach, I think would help. We should not be rewarding these marginal places by giving them the EBT status, allowing them to participate in the food stamp program if they have very few healthy products. If we made it a more competitive environment and didn’t accept everybody but accepted, you know, the vast who wish to start selling those healthy foods, we would do a great service in terms of public health.

 

MARK SOMMER: Are there certain kinds of healthy foods that are more likely to be appealing than others in, say, a convenience store where you’re not going to be able to carry that much variety?

 

MARI GALLAGHER: Right. Well, I mean, there are some basic food types that everyone knows about, and that most people would find acceptable. If people are already used to eating donuts, and you can get them to graduate up to a low‑fat muffin, that’s progress. But it’s not the end of the line in terms of what we need to do for public health.

 

And I think having more public education beginning in school around the relationship between food and health is really key. And, you know, we have known for a long time in society that, particularly in urban areas, but rural areas do suffer as well, that for the last 30, you know, 40 years in some cases, there has been a disinvestment, a decline in certain kinds of neighborhoods. And I think now because in those neighborhoods you see not only the lack of grocery stores, but, you know, many retailers have left.

 

And I think we are seeing that effect catch up now in these neighborhoods. So if I compare a certain cluster of communities with very few grocery stores to other kinds of communities that are exactly the same, except they have better food access, we see worse diet-related health outcomes in that first group, the group without the mainstream grocery stores.

 

So not only do we see that there is more premature death and suffering, but the likelihood of these young children who are growing up there who have had-- You know, basically the families have lived there, you know, potentially for three generations. We’re seeing a compounding effect. It’s not just that people are currently less healthy, although that’s true, or dying earlier, although that’s true, but we’re seeing young children with adult level diabetes. We’re seeing more and more children with asthma. We’re seeing a lot of conditions that people might have taken on later in life in their 40s or 50s or 60s, now hitting children under 18.

 

So I’m very concerned that this effect is having, if you will, an imprint on these generations, and that while we’ve known for a long time that diet and health go together, I think what we’re learning more about these days is this compounding generation after generation of kind of worse and worse, you know, public health, you know, built environment infrastructure and kind of earlier manifestations of that impact through these diseases at younger and younger ages. So it’s a very, very serious situation. And I think for some communities, the deck seems stacked against them.

 

So as you’re born, then growing up, and having access to very sugary, high fat products, you know, that creates not only earlier health consequences, but difficulties paying attention in school, difficulties with normal kind of body and muscular and intellectual development and, you know, kids getting in trouble earlier. And so it’s really a compounding effect. And I’m very, very concerned that these communities are just going to continue to suffer unless we do something to intervene.

 

MARK SOMMER: We’ve spoken about the large mainstream, full-service groceries and supermarkets. They’re primarily in business to make a profit. Yes, they want to serve good food, but they’re in business to make a profit. Why would they want to move to a poor community where there isn’t that much disposable income?

 

MARI GALLAGHER: That is an excellent question. I’m so glad you asked it. We’ve been looking at this very question. We believe, based on our research and our hands-on development experience, that there are two types of problems in the U.S. food desert today. One is, you do have markets where you can support and sustain a mainstream grocery store but there’s not good data and information and market sizing methods to illuminate where that store can go. And that’s something that we spend a lot of time on. So we work with different companies to do custom analysis of where these stores can be sustained.

 

You might not have good population figures. You might not have good buying power figures. There’s also a number of other things that go on, that cloud the market environment. People do business with people they know. A lot of the decision makers aren’t from those communities. They drive out there. They don’t get the community, and they go back to the suburbs where they know people and things look just like, you know, wherever they live. And then they build a store. So that’s one issue. You can support some mainstream grocery stores in some of these markets.

 

Now, there’s a second kind of dilemma though, and that is, where indeed these stores cannot be supported through a regular market lens. There’s low density. There’s low buying power. The other issue-- We’ve been working on this a lot and doing a lot of public testimony(?) around agglomeration. Agglomeration in economics and in retail is basically the nature of retail attracting more in(?) retail.

 

So part of the problem in some of these markets is there’s no retail. There are no grocery stores. And grocers don’t want to go where there’s no other competition. That sounds kind of crazy because, gosh, if there’s no competition, maybe they could go in and get the whole market share. But they would rather go in and steal market share from other existing grocers rather than to have to count on developing a market and leaning on an untested market.

 

So in some of these areas, there’s just, you know, nothing really going on. Grocers don’t want to go in and there might also be very low buying power, low density, and so on and so forth. And so those are the areas where we have to determine where the greatest need is from a public health standpoint and do it through statistical methods, not do it through political methods of who, you know, yells the loudest, but really figure out, what is the public health benefit of incenting a store to go in there anyway? What can we do to bring in mainstream groceries anyway? And then how can we quantify that return on investment, either from the standpoint of quality and length of life or loss productivity or reduced visits to the emergency room of uninsured patients, things of that nature.

 

So I think you see two issues. One, you can support stores in some markets, but you don’t have the right information. And two, in some cases, it really still is very marginal. And so what do we do anyway because there’s such a great need?

 

MARK SOMMER: Finally, there’s the whole question that I suppose many retailers look at, which is-- and it’s a stereotype, but, you know, to say, “The food we’re giving them is the food they want.”

 

MARI GALLAGHER: Right. That is a question that comes up. And I don’t think it’s an accurate one. Again, we get the challenges of agglomeration. We do a lot of work on how to revitalize your commercial corridor. And so if you have a commercial corridor with a lot of fringe locations, pawn shops, liquor stores, empty buildings, things like that, it sets a tone for what else will be attracted. Like attracts like. So if you can have a strong anchor, it will tend to attract other things.

 

And so these communities have indeed many consumers who would like to purchase other kinds of things than what’s available to them. But it’s the wrong kind of snowball effect going on. More and more fringe retail gets attracted or just fringe uses, because there’s nothing at a higher retail level to set the tone for something else. You need that one brave retailer to go in and take a chance and set the tone. Because the way retail generally works is retail attracts more retail.

 

And so I think if we look at some of these neighborhoods and actually crafted a thoughtful plan and brought in an anchor, we would see those other kinds of developments naturally take place.

 

MARK SOMMER: Mari Gallagher. More information about Mari’s work on food deserts can be found at MariGallagher.com. That’s M-A-R-I-G-A-L-L-A-G-H-E-R. After a short break, Fair Food Foundation president Oran Hesterman tells why food deserts are more than isolated instances of deprivation.

 

ANNOUNCER: You’re listening to A World of Possibilities. To hear the podcast of this program and to access our show archives, please visit our website at AWorldOfPossibilities.com, or visit iTunes.

 

MARK SOMMER: In food, as in shelter, healthcare, and education, there’s a world of difference between haves and have nots. The fact that the organic food revolution that’s sweeping the country hasn’t reached the inner cities is not just an oversight. It’s in the nature of our current food production and distribution system that it makes all things available in all seasons to those with the means to pay for it, while distributing a narrow range of low-cost synthetic foods and low quality fruits and vegetables to those lacking those needs.

 

To Oran Hesterman, president and CEO of the Fair Food Foundation and long-time program director for food systems in rural development at the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, it’s a question of social and economic justice. It’s also a public health disaster. Obesity and diabetes rates in inner cities are double what they are in the suburbs, largely because the food choices are as poor as the residents.

 

Dr. Hesterman has researched issues of food fairness for many years, and has authored hundreds of reports on sustainable agriculture. He joins us now to explain why food deserts are the natural outcome of a global food system that, in his words, is out of control.

 

ORAN HESTERMAN: If we think that the solution to the problem of a food desert is convincing a grocery store to site itself in an inner city, we’re missing the point, in my opinion. We’re even missing the point when we think of a food desert as a problem to be solved. In my view, a food desert is one of many symptoms of a food system that is broken, broken and it’s out of control. And we need to redesign this system in order for people of every income level to have access to healthy, fresh, and sustainably-grown food.

 

I don’t pretend to know about all the decision making that goes into somebody in a grocery chain to decide where to site a store. But I’m willing to bet that it is not solely economic return that drives those decisions. It’s probably decisions that have to do with availability of workforce, security, perceptions about crime and safety. There is a lot that factors into these decisions. And I think we have to be careful not to try to define it as simple a problem of a grocery store trying to make enough money.

 

MARK SOMMER: I appreciate moving to the broader frame. It’s a food system that’s broken. How do you approach this particular part of it, about the access and affordability of food to low income people?

 

ORAN HESTERMAN: Well, this requires a redesign of the system. You know, it’s not just that there are pockets of poverty in inner cities. We have an entire policy infrastructure around food and agriculture in this country that also helps drive the system the way it is right now. The fact that it’s more expensive to get a locally grown product into market in an inner city versus being able to get highly processed foods from a greater distance into that city, there’s something wrong with that. It’s policies that help drive that. It’s not pure economics. It’s economics that follow the public policies that are in place.

 

So to think that this is a problem to be solved, again, by only looking at site-ing of a grocery store is, my view, too simplistic. We have to look all the way to Federal public policy around food and agriculture, think about how this is going to happen. We have to think about land use issues in and surrounding urban areas. And I’d say first and foremost the solutions for, how as a society we’re going to create greater access and affordability to fresh, healthy, and sustainably-grown food in our inner cities has to be solutions that come from those communities. And they’ll likely be specific to the context of each community, that to pretend that any foundation would have the answers is a mistake. But we need to be asking different questions.

 

MARK SOMMER: Okay, so let’s look at the questions that need to be asked. You say first of all about Federal policy, how does Federal policy end up sort of disadvantaging those who can’t afford expensive food?

 

ORAN HESTERMAN: The issue is, we have Federal policies that put a lot of incentive into producing certain types of food in certain types of manners in this country. And basically we have commodity policies that incentivize the production of cheap sugar and cheap fat. I mean, if you look at it real simplistically, you know, you incentivize producing a lot of corn and a lot of soybeans, goes into animal feed. And then high fructose corn syrup and the raw ingredients for highly processed foods come very cheaply because in part they’re subsidized by tax money.

 

Those products, those ingredients are going to make their way into most of the food that’s processed in this country that is less expensive. Thus, it makes its way into those outlets that many people in the inner city, some of the only places they have to go and purchase their food.

 

Now if instead we had a Federal policy that, rather than putting money into production of cheap sugar and cheap fat, we had a policy that was incentivizing production of locally grown fruits and vegetables available to inner city populations, and that there was a tax subsidy to do that, I’ll bet you would see a change in our food system.

 

MARK SOMMER: That’s a very interesting point. So what you’re saying among other thing is that there are tremendous subsidies to grow corn for these particular uses.

 

ORAN HESTERMAN: Well, subsidies for corn production, right? And so the uses that had been found for corn, some of them are animal feed and high fructose corn syrup. So it’s not that there’s a subsidy to produce high fructose corn syrup, but there’s subsidies for farmers that are growing corn.

 

MARK SOMMER: So do you think at the Federal level there needs to be a policy that actually directs the-- a certain-- as you say incentivizes essentially the production of actually healthy high quality-- How should I put it?

 

ORAN HESTERMAN: I call it healthy, fresh, and sustainably-grown food. If we care about having that kind of food more available to more people in this country, as a society, then it would make sense to me for us to use some of those tax dollars that are now subsidizing a different kind of agriculture ...(inaudible) subsidize the kind of food system that’s going to help provide those foods.

 

MARK SOMMER: You know what? What strikes me is, I grew up in Ohio, and I remember the farmstands seemingly on every other corner in the summer, where there would be corn on the cob. And a huge-- amounts of it was sold and eaten. I mean, we ate it every night. These days, people don’t do that anymore. And corn as corn, to be eaten, is just not that common as a vegetable.

 

ORAN HESTERMAN: But if you go into a grocery store and you start looking‑‑ You start reading ingredients on the label of high processed products in grocery stores, cans and packages, and you’re going to see corn in everything. You’re going to see either high fructose corn syrup or you’re going to see corn starch or other ingredients that are made from corn. So we’re eating lots of corn, but we’re not eating it like you say, in a whole form anymore.

 

MARK SOMMER: But it would seem that it would be perfectly possible, when corn is grown in such huge volume, for it to be very inexpensive and distributed as corn on the cob in any number of low income neighborhoods.

 

ORAN HESTERMAN: Well, you could. I mean, there’s another challenge, and that is, the corn that’s being grown right now, that’s being subsidized, is not corn that would be very appetizing.

 

MARK SOMMER: Right. It’s feed corn.

 

ORAN HESTERMAN: Right. Number two dent corn, which is great for all these raw ingredients, it’s not great corn to sit and eat off the cob.

 

MARK SOMMER: What are the sources of resistance to this kind of change? Has it not been thought of at the Federal level when farm bills come up to essentially incentivize, you know, the growing of corn for these uses?

 

ORAN HESTERMAN: It’s thought about by those organizations and leaders that understand the issue, the problem, and are working to try to do something in these communities and on behalf of these communities in inner cities. So it’s not as if the ideas are new. But the power structure around the current commodity policy is very strong and very entrenched, and has been in place for many years. And so the lobby that continues to convince our Congress and Senate that these kind of commodity policies are necessary in order to support agriculture production are very successful. They have been for 70 years, and they continue to be so.

 

What it’s going to take is-- You know, right now, most people kind of figure that farm and food policy is something that is only the purview or rural people, rural legislators, and farmers. And it gets ignored in large measure by those people, organizations and legislators that are concerned about urban issues. And we need a major call in this country to understand that the Farm Bill is a food bill that affects all of us and all of our diets.

 

MARK SOMMER: Oran Hesterman, president of the newly established Fair Food Foundation. I’m Mark Sommer. And this is A World of Possibilities, distributed by the WFMT Radio Network.

 

ANNOUNCER: This is A World of Possibilities. We enjoy hearing from our listeners. If you wish to contact us (and we hope you do) here’s how. Please direct emails to comments@aworldofpossibilities.com. This program is distributed by the WFMT Radio Network.

 

MARK SOMMER: I’m Mark Sommer, and this is A World of Possibilities. This program, “Food Deserts: Nutritional Starvation in the Land of Plenty” is underwritten by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. Coming up, perhaps you’ve heard of the popular ‘50s musical A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Well, try planting veggies there. Certainly no place to carve out a farm, right?

 

Not so fast. We found one, and we’ll take you there and into the rows of tall corn and a dozen other crops that are gracing a neglected former asphalt playground near the Brooklyn Navy Yard. First though, we continue our conversation with Dr. Oran Hesterman, CEO of the Fair Food Foundation and head of the food systems and rural development program for the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. We pick up our talk with Dr. Hesterman now and begin a discussion of some solutions aimed at fixing our broken food system.

 

You say there are very strong lobbies essentially on behalf of the current food system. We produced a program recently on what we called “The Empire of Corn.” It actually analyzed, you know, the sources of that influence. And it didn’t seem it was primarily the farmers themselves. Yes, they have an interest, but their voice alone wouldn’t carry. It doesn’t in so many other ways. It seemed that it was more the commodity distributors and traders.

 

ORAN HESTERMAN: Uh-huh. Well, that would make sense, because it’s those companies that can make a lot of money by having cheap ingredients for the products that are going to be processed. So it’s to their advantage to maintain low prices with corn and soybeans, and have those subsidized.

 

MARK SOMMER: So in some ways, both the farmer and the consumer suffer to some extent, with the middle man being the one who benefits most. Is that right?

 

ORAN HESTERMAN: I would say that our system is broken to the extent that very few people are not suffering from it. You know, those of us that have enough money to pick and choose the food we buy, you know, and can basically access any part of the food system we want aren’t suffering at all, or not very much. But the suffering happens when people don’t have the income to purchase any type of food from anywhere at any time. And even with the situation where those of us who can buy any kind of food we want, you know, there’s suffering happening in the environment from this food system with a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico where nothing can live directly as a result of the runoff from agricultural production along the Mississippi watershed, largely corn and soybeans.

 

That’s why I say the system is broken and out of control. And to think about solving one problem without really thinking about how the system needs to be redesigned, I don't think will work.

 

MARK SOMMER: It’s so much easier to think of it as a particular set of problems that are definable. You’re taking an almost ecological approach to a food system to redesigning a food system.

 

ORAN HESTERMAN: Yup. So then I think about, what are the principles of a redesign? Rather than saying exactly, “This is how it would look”-- Because it’s going to look different in every place. That’s the nature of ecology. I would submit that one of the principles is localization or re-localization. Because our food system used to be a local food system. It’s only in the past couple generations that we have moved from a very local food system to one that is primarily a global food system now.

 

I’d say another part of the redesign needs to be greater diversity in the food system. We need greater diversity of what’s being grown where. We need greater diversity in terms of reintegrating crops and livestock for the health of the land. We need greater diversity in terms of the kind of economic structures that we have in place. If we think about the principles of redesign for health(?), we would be thinking about, how do we help incentivize a whole generation of food system entrepreneurs who could see themselves creating food systems enterprises using local and sustainably-grown products, in catering, in local small scale processing, in local markets, in bakeries, in local butcher shops, in local produce stands?

 

You know, there’s all kinds of opportunity there if we start thinking about redesigning the system and not simply thinking about, the answer is, attracting a grocery store.

 

MARK SOMMER: These food system entrepreneurs, do they also need to receive some kind of support initially to get started? Do they need to, for example, form, as they have out here, food incubators?

 

ORAN HESTERMAN: Yes. That’s a great start. In some places, that’s happening and it’s making a difference. The food incubators is a-- you know, business incubators is certainly important. You know, I also think about the situation where either municipalities or counties or states offer tax incentives to attract a company from out-of-state to site a manufacturing plant or a sales department or even a corporate headquarters in a certain place. And in some cases, the tax incentives are huge. There’s one case that I heard about recently where the State of North Carolina was willing to pay about $800,000 dollars per job for a new plant to be sited in North Carolina.

 

And I think about, what would happen if a state like Michigan said, “You know, we’re willing to offer $500,000 dollars per job for a locally owned food business to site itself in Detroit,” and how much of an incentive that would be to create all kinds of new businesses. So there’s lots of ways to do this, you know? Ways that we’re using right now I think we’re just using them to help perpetuate the system that’s broken, rather than using some of these incentives to help redesign a system that’s healthy.

 

I mean, if we put our minds to it, there is so much that we could do to help redesign this food system for health. Most of the people in The United States don’t see that there is a problem here. If you have money, if you have adequate money, it doesn’t seem that there’s a problem, because it looks like we can access whatever food we want. But you scratch the surface, and we can see the symptoms of a broken system all around us. And it’s not magic, how to fix this system. And I believe it’s going to take, like you said, an ecological approach. It’s not going to get fixed problem by problem. I think that’s the wrong approach.

 

MARK SOMMER: Oran Hesterman, president of the Fair Food Foundation in Ann Arbor, Michigan. In a moment, growing healthy food between the cracks in Brooklyn’s asphalt jungle.

 

ANNOUNCER: This is A World of Possibilities. We love hearing from our listeners. Contact us at comments@aworldofpossibilities.com.

 

MARK SOMMER: Here’s what our next guest says he’s not trying to do: “I’m not trying to grow farmers, nor am I trying to grow market managers, not computer programmers,” says Ian Marvy. He’s the co-founder and director of added value in(?) Red Hook Community Farm. What he is trying to do he says is grow a generation of young people who understand sustainability and have tools and skills that can help them create a more sustainable world, young people who have a concept of themselves as part of a community of concerned citizens that wants to make that happen.

 

Based on what we’ve heard so far in this program, it’s clear that such work is desperately needed. To find out more about what he and his coworkers have done to bring bounty and beauty back to Brooklyn, Ian Marvy joins us after chasing loose chickens from his perch at Red Hook Farm in Brooklyn.

 

IAN MARVY: Red Hook was once a thriving waterfront community where 50,000 people worked three shifts a day on the docks, and went home to the smell of fresh-baked bread being baked at the bakeries here, or stopped off at one of the 20 taverns that was in the neighborhood, that were in the neighborhood, maybe went off to the two movie theatres that were here and worshipped at any number of the 16 churches that were in the community at that time.

 

And actually come the late ‘40s, early ‘50s, three very distinct public policy measures sort of strangled Red Hook. New York City and New York State decided that maritime activity would no longer be the heart and soul of New York City’s economy. And almost immediately, jobs headed off to New Jersey and headed down south and up north. Robert Moses built the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, which cut off Red Hook from the rest of New York City, literally seven years of construction projects ripping almost a quarter of a mile wide swath for three or four miles.

 

And the G.I. Bill was enacted. And this incredible sort of Marshall Plan for returning soldiers, you know, you could go off to college and get a low interest loan to build a home, to buy your first home. But what most people forget is that the military at that point was highly segregated. And so the G.I. Bill was essentially a hand-up for only one portion of our population.

 

So pretty quickly, Red Hook collapsed. And by the ‘60s, you’re talking about, you know, rather than there being 50,000 people here, you’re talking about 25,000. When I got here in 1998, there were 11,000 people living in this neighborhood. More than 80% of them were living in public housing units. And the average income for a family of four then and still now hovers somewhere around $14,000 dollars, now at this point, $9,000 dollars under the poverty line.

 

MARK SOMMER: So it’s one of the poorest places in all of New York.

 

IAN MARVY: It’s one of the poorest places in all of New York, and yet because of our class structures, because of the economies that apparently exist, there are homes that are selling for millions — a million-one, a million-two, right across the street from 14-story housing complexes. Some people would call it a shifting sands community. Other folks would call it, you know, a transitional neighborhood. You can buy a $400.00 dollar bottle of scotch half block away from my house. And you can buy a $2 dollar bottle of Wild Irish Rose two blocks in the other direction. And both stores are very busy.

 

MARK SOMMER: So you begin to splinter up the asphalt and-- Or was-- It was always a dilapidated community garden at the time.

 

IAN MARVY: Sure. Well, we started in a dilapidated community garden here in Red Hook, and then one actually far out in Queens. And what we discovered is that the gardening that we were doing was resonating with young people, that the collard greens that we were growing brought to mind, for many of the kids we were working with, their family’s land in South Carolina, or the peach trees that we had reminded kids from the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico of guavas and mango trees. And just really enjoyed the space, enjoyed the opportunity to be quiet, enjoyed the opportunity to be effective and have efficacy. You’re planting something. It’s growing. You’re nurturing it. You get to see it grow again.

 

And in a time when things are so irrational in our society, the rationality of caregiving and the rewards of doing that seem to resonate very deeply with a lot of the kids who we’re working with.

 

MARK SOMMER: Don’t many people start with some cynicism? After all, they’ve seen only the worst side of life.

 

IAN MARVY: I guess what I’ve found so inspiring is that the act of growing food, particularly, I believe, food (some people would say interaction with nature and gardening, but I really do believe food) is particularly important, is, as far as I’ve seen, almost-- universally has some appeal. Some folks might say they don’t want to get dirt under their nails. And some folks might say that they don’t want to, you know, bend over or they don’t want to get their new shoes dirty.

 

But by and large, you know, we’ve seen it in the growth of new immigrant farming initiatives all across the country. There may be some cynicism, but I think the natural tendency is to want to be a nurturer. It’s to want to help things grow. It draws together people from across boundaries, whether they be race or class. If you’re lucky, you get to choose to eat every day. Then you get to choose to have a relationship with your food. And the deeper your relationship is, the more rewarding it seems to be.

 

MARK SOMMER: Now, is Red Hook an area that has been a food desert in the sense that there have not been big supermarkets are the availability of reasonably good food, in some variety of selection up to now?

 

IAN MARVY: Absolutely. When we started this program in 2001, we had the idea that we were actually just going to do a fruit cart sort of, a cart being pulled around the neighborhood. And what ended up happening was, at that time, the only large full-service grocery store in the neighborhood closed. And so we had to start, rather than a pushcart or a little mobile market, we had to start a farmers' market here.

 

You know, we now have in New York City what is this place called Fairway. It’s a wonderful grocery store actually, located up in Harlem. And now we have one here. And there’s one in midtown Manhattan. And all things considered, some of their bulk goods and some of the sort of staples are pretty cheap. But as it goes, their vegetables are, relatively speaking, more expensive than most can afford. And they stock a lot of high-end cheeses and sausages.

 

So it would be hard to call Red Hook a food desert at this point. But if you consider food security, access to healthy, safe, and affordable food that is culturally appropriate, we’re missing the affordability. So the vast majority of people in Red Hook still leave the neighborhood to purchase their food.

 

MARK SOMMER: When you look at this phenomenon of food deserts or the lack of healthy and affordable food in many inner cities, how viable is it to see what you’re doing and what some are doing in various places around the country as one of numerous significant contributors to changing that?

 

IAN MARVY: I think it’s very viable option. There’s an incredible economist actually in Minnesota, Ken Meter(?). And he’s actually been working with poor people and farmers to do the metrics, to actually do the numbers. And he’s looked at, you know, acreage and square footage and found that communities in southern Minnesota can grow the staples for the people who live in south Minneapolis or St. Paul. Another individual, Hank Herrera(?), has actually done the same thing for Rochester, New York and Red Hook, sort of said, statistically speaking, we could be growing the vast majority of what we consumer locally. And that what we need is these urban agricultural projects to be bridges to help support innovation, to help support education and help create opportunities for the urban to meet the rural, in as direct a way as possible, as-- most humane way as possible.

 

MARK SOMMER: This is a sort of a multilevel challenge, because it’s both an economic challenge. It’s a cultural challenge. It’s a social challenge. But it’s also, you start to work on one, and the others are released to improve as well.

 

IAN MARVY: I mean, that’s the beauty of the work that so many people are engaged in. It’s all over the country. But the recognition that, no matter what your analysis of the last 50 or 80 years of economic structures and particularly agro‑economic structures and how they impacted people's health, the wellbeing of the land, and ultimately the environment as a whole, social, economic, and almost spiritual in a sense, we can really see that this work, this sustainable, local, ecologically sound agricultural work does exactly what you’re saying. It releases impediments to health, to healing, to strengthening.

 

I mean, today on the phone I had an 84 year-old guy named Joe who lives in, you know, Carroll Gardens. He drives his Cadillac down to the farm, does his work on the farm each day, just because he loves to be there. And then he stops and he polishes his Cadillac.

 

And there’s Maria-- Joe is Italian. There’s Maria. Maria’s Puerto Rican. Maria shows up every day. Today what she did, is she split garlic so that we could plant garlic in the season. She weeded and pulled up squash that had overgrown so that we could shred that up, compost that, put that back in the garden. My teenagers were there after school. And in fact, what they did was they flier-ed for our harvest festival. They used their strong legs to get out there in the streets and let people know what’s happening.

 

And this harvest festival that we’ll do, we’ll have folks who are doing biofuel, but not new biofuel. There are people here in New York who are going to do a three million gallon recycled vegetable oil refinery. We’ll have folks doing wind and solar power. We’ll have folks doing WIC and EBT food benefit outreach here. We’ll have high-end restaurants serving local crepes, pumpkin crepes. And we’ll have the Onhelve(?) Family who are immigrant farmers serving tacos. And most of the taco will, save for the shell, will come from their farm. And they’ll be cooking it fresh here. And the joy, the sense of excitement, the-- what you called the unleashing or the synergy is quite amazing to feel.

 

You know, I have these kids right now outside. When I go outside tonight to get some compost from the local food co-op, I’m going to get attacked by a group of eight kids. And what they’re going to attack me about is lemon sorrel. The vast majority of people in this country have never eaten lemon sorrel. But these kids fiend for it, like it’s licorice or, like-- I don't know, like kids in the ‘50s thought was licorice was, or whatever it is. I don't know. It was Hubba-Bubba or something like that when I was growing up.

 

But I get sacked by kids who, you know, are developing a palate that is-- you know, a chilled sorrel soup or a nice sorrel served on a great piece of cod, I mean, these are really erudite things. And because of their exploration of a local farm, that’s what they’re clamoring for. And it’s that kind of thing, like you’re saying, the impediments get released and the joy just gets to well up and come out.

 

MARK SOMMER: Ian Marvy, co-founded of Brooklyn-based Added Value and Red Hook Community Farm.

 

Maybe it comes down to this. Is food just another commodity, like, say, an iPod, a car, or a dining table? Or is it a necessity like no other, and therefore, a basic human need to which everyone has a right? Easy as it might be to say, “Of course it’s a human right,” the U.S. government has long blocked efforts to declare it as such in international law, because to do so would create obligations that would force the restructuring of our current global food system. The fact that the nation that has always called itself the land of plenty, and that pays farmers, not to grow crops could fail to supply adequate nutritious food to a significant portion of its population, living not at a great distance from distribution centers, but virtually next door to them says something painfully embarrassing, even shameful about our priorities.

 

We’re not talking charity here. The residents of inner cities, many of whom work behind the scenes distributing the delicacies available to those uptown, pay hard‑earned wages for food that’s far from delectable. Do they, as some imagine, want to eat junk food and simply don’t know any better? Not so, say the residents themselves.

 

Then why don’t they just get in their cars and drive to the nearest supermarket? Many lack transportation. And when’s the last time you tried to take the bus with two large bagfuls of groceries?

 

But even if you believe in what might be called food fairness, it’s not easy to change our current food production system, to incentivize a more equitable distribution of basic nutritious goods. The market alone won’t do it, since grocers will naturally go where they can get the highest return on their investments. To change the system will require a society-wide commitment, based not only on a sense of fairness and human rights, but on public health, which ultimately affects all of us.

 

In America the bountiful, can healthy, nutritious food, the staples, if not the delicacies, be made available at affordable prices to all our citizens? When will we extend that right to those most vulnerable residents who live and work in the very heart of our great cities? I’m Mark Sommer, and this has been A World of Possibilities. Thanks for listening.

 

ANNOUNCER: You’ve been listening to A World of Possibilities. This program was produced and edited by Chuck Rogers, Tammy Rae Scott, and Kara Hochner, with administrative support from Ali Cook and Susan Semenov. Production engineer is “Tofu” Mike Schwartz. Support for this program is provided by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

 

Music is courtesy of Partners in Music, Putumayo World Music, Curb Records, Volcano Entertainment, and Atlantic Records. This program is distributed by the WFMT Radio Network. Thank you for listening.

 

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