As an urban planning academic offering a course on food justice, I am aware that this difference is largely by design. Urban planning has been used for over a century as a tool to maintain the white supremacy that has divided American cities by race. And it has contributed to the development of so-called “food deserts” – areas with limited access to fair, healthy, culturally relevant food – and “food swamps” – with a predominance of shops selling ‘fast’ and ‘junk’. kos.
Both terms are controversial and are disputed because they ignore the historical roots and the deeply racial nature of access to food, making white communities more likely to be available enough for healthy, inexpensive products.
Instead, food scientist Ashanté M. Reese suggests the term “food apartheid”. According to Reese, food apartheid is “intimately linked to policies and practices, current and historical, that come from a place of anti-blackness.”
Whatever they are called, these areas exist with unfair access to food and limited options. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that 54.4 million Americans live in low-income areas with poor access to healthy food. For residents of the city, this means that they are more than a mile from the nearest supermarket.
More expensive, fewer options
The development of these areas with limited options for healthy food has a long history associated with urban planning and housing policy. Practices such as re-lines and yellow lines – in which the private sector and the government conspired to restrict mortgage lending to blacks and other minority home buyers – and racial ties restricting rental and sale property to white people only meant that areas of poverty were concentrated along racial lines.
In addition, homeowners’ associations that denied access to black people in particular and federal housing subsidies that went largely to white, wealthier Americans made it more difficult for people living in lower-income areas to extract wealth. It also leads to urban rust.
This is important when looking at access to food because retailers are less willing to go to poorer areas. A process of ‘rebranding the supermarket’ has resulted in larger grocery stores either refusing to relocate to lower-income areas, closing existing outlets or moving to affluent suburbs. The thinking behind this process is that as bags become poorer in a city, they become less profitable and more prone to crime.
There is also, according to scholars, a cultural bias among large retailers to sell stores in minority populated areas. U.S. Consumer City Commissioner Mark Green said of the question of why supermarkets fled the New York borough of Queens in the 1990s: “First, they may fear that they do not understand the minority market. But the second is their knee-jerk premise that Blacks are poor, and poor people are a weak market. ‘
In the absence of larger grocery stores, less healthy food options – often at a higher price – have taken over in low-income areas. Research among food suppliers in New Haven, Connecticut in 2008 found that a ‘poorer average quality of the products’ was in lower-income neighborhoods. Meanwhile, a 2001 study by New Orleans found that fast food density was higher in poorer areas, and that predominantly black neighborhoods had 2.5 fast food outlets for every square mile, compared to 1.5 in white areas.
‘Whole Foods and Whole Food Desert’
In 2009, geographer Nathan McClintock conducted a comprehensive study of the causes of Oakland’s food deserts. Although limited to one city in California, I believe it applies to most U.S. cities.
McClintock details how the development of racially segregated areas in the inter-war period and the reorientation of policy thereafter led to concentrated areas of poverty in Oakland. Meanwhile, decisions in the late 1950s by the then-overall Oakland City Council to build major highways that cut mainly through the city mainly isolated Black West Oakland from downtown Oakland.
The net effect was an outward flow of capital and white flight to the affluent Oakland Hills neighborhoods. Black and Latino neighborhoods were riddled with wealth.
This, coupled with the advent of local Oakland supermarkets that were accessible by car in the 1980s and 1990s, led to a shortage of fresh stores in predominantly Black districts such as West Oakland and Central East Oakland. What remains, McClintock concludes, is a “rough mosaic of parks and pollution, privilege and poverty, Whole Foods and entire food deserts.”
Urban planning as a solution
Differences in food in American cities have a cumulative effect on human health. Research has linked them to the excessively poor nutrition of black and Latino Americans, even after being adjusted for socio-economic status.
As much as urban planning was part of the problem, it can now be part of the solution. Some cities have started planning tools to increase food equity.
As part of its 2040 plan, Minneapolis, for example, aims to “establish a fair 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 allow and promote mobile food markets and mobile food pantries.
My hometown of Boston is undergoing a similar process. In 2010, the city began the process of establishing an urban agricultural coverage district in the predominantly Black and Latino area of Dorchester, by changing the zoning to enable commercial urban agriculture. This change has provided locals and food for local cooperatives, such as the Dorchester Food Coop, as well as restaurants in the area.
And that can only be the beginning. My students and I contributed to Boston Mayor Michelle Wu’s Food Justice Agenda. It contains provisions such as a formal process in which private developers must work with the community to ensure that there is room for diverse food retailers and commercial kitchens, and restrictions on licenses to discourage the distribution of fast food outlets in poorer neighborhoods. If Wu is elected and the plan is implemented, I think it will 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, and requires a clear understanding of how white supremacy has shaped our food systems” and that “nutritious, affordable and culturally relevant food is a universal human right.”
Julian Agyeman ia professor of urban and environmental policy and planning at Tufts University.
Disclosure Statement: Julian Agyeman does not work, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has not disclosed any applicable commitments outside of their academic appointment.
Replace with permission from The Conversation.
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