Food Scarcity + The American Diet: Part I
Last week I was listening to the Joe Rogan podcast (don’t judge me...I like to listen to what everyone has to say… it makes me a well-rounded person!) and Donnell Rawlings and Dave Chapelle were guests. Donnell Rawlings said something very interesting that hit me a certain way. He said as a kid his mother used to get products from Publisher’s Clearinghouse and one of those things was a box of Betty Crocker recipes. He said that he would flip through the box of recipes and realized he had the recipes, but none of the ingredients to which Dave chimed in and said “that’s a good metaphor for a lot of things in life”.
Having the recipes and none of the ingredients is so fitting for so many things in life.
This metaphor can be used to describe food scarcity in low-income neighborhoods. It’s the equivalent of having the time, energy, and space, but not the resources. I have found that in so many marginalized communities there are a lot of people willing to do the work, whether that means protesting rezoning, building community gardens, or advocating for their neighbors, but there aren’t any real resources to make things happen. Usually, these kinds of communities have had a long history of surviving on a shoestring budget. I only know this because I’ve worked and witness this in these communities first hand.
Food deserts + food swamps aren’t anything new. The last few decades have shown an increase in food insecurity for people living in poorer zip codes. I remember reading a report from the NYC Health Dept. on a study they did on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The Upper East Side has a huge wealth discrepancy and it shows just by walking from 96th Street + up. The study showed how a few blocks changed the dynamics of how people were able to get fresh food. South of 96th street there are several supermarket options including a Whole Foods Market. North of 96th street the options become far + few between. The makeup of the population also changes as you go further north. There are more Black + Latinx populations, while below 96th street there are more White people. This is no surprise though. New York City may be one of the most diverse cities in the country, but the ingredients in the melting pot haven’t been stirred in decades.
Boroughs have stretches + pockets of people that live amongst each other, but not together. The next thing I will say will sound horrible + controversial but unfortunately rings true for the New York we live in. The only way to ensure that historically underserved neighborhoods get more healthy food options is for gentrification to happen. Do I want gentrification to happen? Absolutely not. Will continue to happen? Absolutely. Even in this Covid-19 era where it seems this city is “dead” + people are fleeing. They’ll be back.
It’s seen all the time. Communities + neighborhoods that were once considered undesirable are now repackaged to privileged gentrifiers as acronyms or catchy names. SoBro (South Bronx), Hudson Heights (Fort Washington), NoHa (North Harlem), you get the point. Once an area has the “it factor” Starbucks, artisanal shops, and other stores open in the area. If there’s just the right amount of White people then a Whole Foods Market will show up as in the case of central Harlem.
Why is it that low-income people of color are not seen as worthy of well-stocked supermarkets or places for fresh fruits + vegetable options? Again, with my own eyes, I witnessed this deep in the Bronx. I worked as a culinary educator in East Tremont and there were barely ANY supermarkets for me to get ingredients for my cooking classes. There was a Western Beef supermarket that was a trek to get to and most of the options weren’t that fresh. In the two years that I worked in that community, a huge new luxury apartment development was built on East Tremont Avenue. A brand new supermarket was built on the bottom of the building.
The main questions going forward for most communities that are rapidly being gentrified across the country are these: what are the ways that we can have the metaphorical recipes and ingredients to invest in our communities? How do disenfranchised people take their power back and build the necessary infrastructure for resources to be utilized for the good of the neighborhood? Personally, there really aren’t any immediate answers that come to mind but I know I can only hope to see some change in my lifetime.