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Food Equity Problem - Urban Food Deserts

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Food Equity Problem - Urban Food Deserts

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Too many Americans are overweight and eat unhealthy food.  This problem falls disproportionately on low-income citizens and racial minorities. In an urban setting, the main culprit is thought to be “food deserts", which are disadvantaged neighborhoods that are under-served by limited access to quality grocery stores, and where people’s nutritional options include a much higher proportion of cheaper, high-calorie food compared to nutritious food.

There is a large body of evidence out there showing that many low-income communities, communities of color, and people living in areas classified as food deserts do not have as much opportunity to buy healthy, affordable food. The consequences, are lower access to healthy food which lead to a higher amount diet-related diseases like obesity and diabetes than in higher-income neighborhoods where people have better access to healthy food, particularly fresh fruits and vegetables. (Treuhaft, 2012).

Many urban food deserts were created as a result of historical redlining. “Redlining is the systematic denial of various services by federal government agencies, local governments as well as the private sector, to residents of specific, most notably black, neighborhoods or communities, either by directly or through the selective raising of prices.” (Manchard, 2020) The legacy of redlining persists to this day. If you are of color and if you have low income, where you live determines whether you have access to healthy food, good schools, jobs in your neighborhood, and access to reliable transportation.

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Acaroglu, L. (2017). Disruptive design: a method for activating positive social change by design. Disrupt Design LLC.
*This is the method I used throughout the entire process for solving my food equity problem.

Alkon, A. H. (2019). Food and Justice. In J. Konefal & M. Hatanaka (Eds.), Twenty lessons in the sociology of food and agriculture (pp. 351). Oxford University Press.
* This page of our book gave me my very first introduction to redlining. I had not even heard the term before them. This ultimately gave way to the whole focus I took in solving inequity in food deserts.

Brones, A. (2018, May 15). Food apartheid: the root of the problem with America's groceries. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/may/15/food-apartheid-food-deserts-racism-inequality-america-karen-washington-interview
*This is the script of an interview with member of the community, giving valuable insight about food apartheid. This interview helped me understanding the relation between food apartheid and food deserts during the mining phase.

Clausen, C. K. (2020, January 9). [Lecture notes on sociological concepts]. School of Applied Science, Technology, and Education, Utah State University. https://login.usu.edu/cas/login?service=https%3A%2F%2Fusu.instructure.com%2Flogin%2Fcas
* These lecture notes helped me to make connections between sociological concepts and the problems we see as a result of redlining and food deserts. This knowledge helped me have a deeper understanding of the relationships during the mining process and informed me that “food desert” is actually “food apartheid”, because “food apartheid” looks at the whole food system, along with race, geography, faith, and economics. When understanding “food apartheid", you are getting to the root cause of some of the problems around the food system.

Dutko, P., Ploeg, & M.V., Farrigan, T. (2012, August). Characteristics and influential factors of food deserts. United States Department of Agriculture. https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/45014/30940_err140.pdf
*This report was very informative for me during the beginning phases of the mining process, after I had decided to research food deserts. It examines the characteristics associated with food deserts, such as income, vehicle availability, and access to public transportation.This helped me to add many nodes to my systems map during the landscaping phase.

Fisher, A., Burton, H., Joseph, H., & Pothukuchi, K. (2002, January). What's cooking in your food system? a guide to community food assessment. IssueLab. https://www.issuelab.org/resource/what-s-cooking-in-your-food-system-a-guide-to-community-food-assessment.html
* This guide is aimed at informing and supporting the development of Community Food Assessments as a tool for increasing community food security and creating positive change. This is a great tool to use to drive the prototyping process during the building phase.

Manchard, R., Blackwell, A.R., Wiliams, J., & Thevarajah, S. (2020). Redlining & health equity: how health systems can help dismantle structural racism [Webinar]. HealthBegins. https://register.gotowebinar.com/recording/viewRecording/3736671980173290763/3716594898312608518/hoking@slco.org?registrantKey=2802470826450765579&type=ABSENTEEEMAILRECORDINGLINKj
*This incredible webinar gave me a deeper understanding of redlining and the ways in which it still impacts people today. It suggests the need for a public policy frame and the ways we can take action to undo the damage it created. This helped me to confirm that the ideas I had to help change public policy were good ideas.

Martin, K., & Morales, T. (2015, November). Community food assessments. American Planning Association. http://planning-org-uploaded-media.s3.amazonaws.com/document/PASMEMO-2015-11-12.pdf
*This guide describes how a community food system assessment provides a clear picture of the food system resources, assets, challenges, and opportunities in a community. Part of that assessment is understanding the perceptions of community members and the implications that can have for making policy recommendations. This drove the building process of my project and helped spark my idea to begin with community assessments as a first step in solving my problem.

Treuhaft, S., & Karpyn, A. (2012, October 15). The grocery gap: who has access to healthy food and why it matters. Community_Wealth. https://community-wealth.org/content/grocery-gap-who-has-access-healthy-food-and-why-it-matters
* This booklet summarizes more than 132 studies, finding a large and consistent body of evidence supporting the observance that many low-income communities, communities of color, and sparsely populated areas do not have sufficient opportunities to buy healthy, affordable food. This evidence supported my mining process because it provides solid evidence that food deserts create inequity in disadvantaged populations.

Zhang, M., & Debarchana, G. (2016, February). Spatial supermarket redlining and neighborhood vulnerability: a case study of Hartford, Connecticut. NCBI. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4810442/
*This article presents the first evidence I saw directly linking redlining to food deserts. It maps and explores the spatial effects of potential supermarket redlining on food vulnerability in urban disadvantaged neighborhoods of Hartford, Connecticut.

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Defining the System
To break down a problem and see it from a clear perspective, you must look at an entire system, its subsystems, and all of its coordinating elements to fully understand how they all interplay and impact one another. There are many different systems in this world, and the issues you see in food equity are mostly a result of our social system. The Disruptive Design book defines social systems as "the intangible rules and structures, created by humans, that form and maintain societal norms, rituals, and behaviors". (Acaroglu, 2017).

Mapping the System
Laying out all the big parts first helped me to see the big picture. I am a visual thinker, and getting a broad view of everything that was at play helped me more easily see the parts I needed a deeper understanding of. Then, I moved back into the mining phase of those parts. After repeated rounds of this process, I eventually came to a clearer understanding of the things I could leverage and where I could make a change. Seeing this social system laid out on a map helped drive this process.

Tools and Techniques of System Thinking
The issues behind food deserts are very complex as there are so many elements at play that are quite interconnected. The tool I used for mapping was cluster mapping. Mapping out the big parts and breaking it down to the issues they caused, with coordinating solutions, really helped me to see it with a clearer lens. It was messy, but allowed me to dump everything I knew about food deserts into one space, and helped me make greater sense of the issue. I was able to look at the many different parts including the root cause of food deserts - federal programs and policies that created redlining. By exploring the cause, I was able to see some of the solutions such as as fixing dilapidated homes of those in poverty, increasing wages, incentivizing grocery stores to open up in these areas to make it worth their dollar, fixing the sidewalks to enable active transportation, and increasing availability of public transportation. These must be fought on a deep level and require policy change. Knowing this added another layer to my cluster map, including nodes such as policy, laws, advocacy, institutional capital and industrial influence, and affordable housing.

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Because redlining began from new policies, it will take policy to move us out of the situation. “We became a nation with these vast disparities that can be associated with race and ethnicity through public policy decisions.” (Manchard, 2020). Solutions such as improving transportation for greater food access, or perhaps putting mobile markets in food deserts provide only a temporary fix and do not work upstream to tackle the root issue. The goal should be to fix the deeper issues that caused this problem in the first place and come out with a more equitable system so we don’t have to keep fighting this issue over and over again.

I recently read a study that talked about how community groups, residents, researchers, and government agencies should work together to identify the areas lacking access to healthy food, prioritize those areas, create strategies for action, and then advocates need to demand the resources, programs, and policies to solve the access problem. The article pointed out that cities have many policy tools they can use to incentivize and promote healthy food retail such as land use planning, zoning, economic development and redevelopment, and nutrition assistance. (Treuhaft & Karpyn, 2012). This led me to the conclusion that we need to gather enough evidence to help guide policy decisions. A great way to do this is to start by talking to the community itself and a great place to start is through conducting community assessments and asking the community questions. This would provide an opportunity for community residents, businesses, and other stakeholders to share their perspectives so we can identify their goals that would best reach them (Martin, 2015).

A guide I found online said that a community food assessment is a practical tool that will develop recommendations and support for concrete actions to improve the food system and enhance community food security. “This is different from more conventional research conducted in universities or private firms, in which there are few direct links to specific actions. Actions supported by assessments may be targeted at public policy agencies, private firms, civil society organizations, or the community at large” (Fisher, 2002).

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The Disruptive Design book outlined 10 rules of ideation that helped me to come up with a creative solution to the complex problems that exists within food deserts. I have identified two of these rules as being helpful in my solution to food deserts.

Define a Function and Objective.
This rule entails recognizing the core function that guides the products creation. I viewed this perhaps a different way than was it was meant. I looked at the "core" being the root of the problem and the "products creation" being the problems it created, or the solutions that can be delivered.

To get to the core of this problem, I realized I needed to explore the original cause of many urban food (redlining) deserts. By doing this I was better able to set the framework through which I can explore ways to achieve a different delivery, or solution. This case, that meant changing policies.

Sift Through Ideas.
Sifting through ideas embraces the fact that all ideas have value, and we need to do this to find the best ones in our problem arena. The best ones will eventually rise to the top.

I have been sifted through a variety of ideas through this process and waiting for the best ones to surface. I originally thought my solution to healthy food access in food deserts what improving accessibility to public transit, but eventually, that idea sunk as I studied redlining, and involving public perception of the food landscape to influence policy change rose to the top.

Overall, the rules of ideation helped me because they allowed for complete flexibility, with no pressure to have the answers right away, allowing for patience needed to think, research, sift, and process all that was needed to come to the best solution.

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A webinar I watched about redlining discussed how to improve health from a societal level. A major goal in societal health is to improve public health and structural determinants of health equity through policy, laws, and formal & informal approaches to decision-making, community mobilization & accountability. It suggests that a way to do this is to support policies, laws & efforts that dismantle harmful structural determinants of health (e.g. by undoing redlining). (Manchard, 2020). “Smart public policies and programs should support communities in their efforts to develop, implement, and test strategies that increase healthy food access. Government agencies at the local, state, and federal level should prioritize the issue of inequitable food access in low-income, under-served areas. Programs and policies that are working should be expanded and new programs should be developed to bring more grocery stores and other fresh food retail outlets to neighborhoods without access to healthy foods. Transportation barriers to fresh food outlets should be addressed. Whenever possible, policies to address food deserts should link with comprehensive efforts to build strong regional food and farm systems. Residents of low-income communities and communities of color in urban and rural areas have suffered for too long from a lack of access to healthy food. With local and state programs showing enormous promise, now is the time for policymakers to enact policies that will catalyze the replication of local and state innovations and bring them to a national scale.” (Treuhaft & Karpyn, 2012).

When we are trying to address issue of inclusion, we are sometimes drawn to going to the easiest thing to go or going first to those people that already have shown that they are making progress. Then we are just putting off having to address the issue fundamentally. When we design strategies that focus on those that have historically been most excluded, we create opportunities for all.  “If you really want to solve an issue, you have to go to those that are most vulnerable”. (Manchard, 2020). This led me to the solution of conducting a community assessment, to see their perspective and leverage their input to drive solutions.
One crucial step in the process of policy change is to begin with individual action and prioritize the resident voice.

All of this information led me to deciding to prototype list of questions I would ask vulnerable populations during a community engagement studio so I could assess their perceptions of the food environment and understand their food needs. This information would later be taken to policy makers to drive the needed change.

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§  Cultural Capital: Communities of opportunity have more money, better education, and the best grocery stores, whereas people of lower class status (particularly lower income folks and people of color) are in areas of low opportunity with limited access to grocery stores, good schools, good jobs, reliable transportation, and economic mobility.

§  Equality/Inequality:  People in food deserts do not have an equal distribution of grocery stores in their neighborhoods, as compared to communities of opportunity.

§  Equity/Inequity: Low income communities, especially people of color, don’t have what they need to succeed, or to get ahead in society. Their social interactions/networks are more limited, and their opportunities for education are less, resulting in having a harder time obtaining a good job, and limiting their economic mobility.

§  Power: In 1933, faced with housing shortage, the federal government used their power to begin a program explicitly designed to increase, and segregate America’s housing stock. The federal government created maps of every metropolitan area in the country. Those maps were color-coded first by the Home Owners Loan Corp, then the Federal Housing Administrator (FHA) and then adopted by the Veterans Administration, and the private sector. (Manchard, 2020)

§  Structural Approach: This program created by the federal government changed the structure of the society by segregating communities and creating vast disparities that can be associated with race and ethnicity. On these redlining maps, anywhere where African Americans lived or were nearby was colored to red to indicate to appraisers that these neighborhoods were too risky to insure mortgages. Modern days map like these have been used by realtors to direct their clients into certain neighborhoods.

(Clausen, 2020)