Breaking Brooklyn’s Eco-Apartheid

 

An astounding 1.4 million New Yorkers live in households that have trouble putting food on the table.

 

In Brooklyn, Bushwick, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brownsville, Crown Heights, and East New York are home to the most food insecure households and, according to a number of studies, infamously lack access to affordable, healthy food.

 

In addition to the lack of access to fresh fruits and vegetables, many of these neighborhoods also suffer a proliferation of obesity. Residents of Central Brooklyn, for instance, are 50% more likely to qualify as obese than the average New Yorker. Stores in these areas provide residents with plenty of high-calorie food, but do not adequately provide access to fresh, nutritious food like produce.

 

Therefore some of these neighborhoods have been declared food deserts by policymakers, primarily because of a lack of supermarkets that offer cheaper prices and healthier variety than the main alternative: neighborhood bodegas. The City’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene recently found that 8 in 10 stores in Bushwick and Bedford-Stuyvesant were bodegas, of which only 30% carried fruit like apples, oranges and bananas. Another 30% offered customers low fat milk, and only 1 in 10 sold leafy greens. In contrast to this scarcity, 75% of local restaurants sell only take out food, and another 13% are national fast food chains.

 

Some argue that the high availability of junk food in low-income neighborhoods is due to pure preference; that given a free market, any area with a high demand for fruits and vegetables should be home to numerous vendors.

 

For instance, Robert Rector, Senior Research Fellow on poverty, entitlement programs and immigration at the Heritage Foundation said recently, “In reality, poor people are increasingly becoming overweight for the same reason that most Americans are becoming overweight: They eat too much and exercise too little…What is required is a very difficult effort to change food preferences.”

 

(The Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute both argue that food stamps cause participants to actually grow obese. The political right also argues against government efforts to address obesity and hunger because they oppose any expansion of the food stamp program.)

 

Meanwhile, other researchers, like Adam Drewnowski of the University of Washington, have pointed to a number of studies demonstrating that those with the least amount of money tend to choose cheap foods with a high-calorie content in order to maximize the number of calories they can purchase on a limited budget.

 

These arguments, among others, fail to fully address the food access issues I consider to be at the heart of the food paradox. Both of these arguments lack key evidence as a primary reason the poor suffer disproportionately from obesity. It seems people do not eat junk food because they suffer from a lack of calories, but because chips, soda, and pizza are cheap, tasty and readily available snacks. In my opinion, too many fast food joints are less a problem than lack of access to affordable fruits and vegetables.

 

As you might’ve guessed by now, I work as the volunteer coordinator at the Bed-Stuy Campaign Against Hunger – though the views expressed here are my own – which has developed a number of innovative initiatives to combat obesity and provide access to fresh produce. Under our Eat Well, Live Well program about a quarter of our clients qualify to pick up fresh fruits and vegetables once a week, in addition to the standard once-per-month trip to the general pantry. This program’s popularity is evidence of the intense demand for produce in low-income neighborhoods, and is a startling reminder that most people crave healthy, nutritious foods, but find them either poorly stocked or too expensive at their neighborhood food retailers. In addition, BSCAH operates two large urban "Victory" gardens aimed at providing organic and local produce to clients in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Ocean Hill and Brownsville.

 

As you can imagine, I was excited last February when Michelle Obama initiated a kitchen garden on the South Lawn of the White House, the first since Eleanor Roosevelt’s similar victory garden during World War II. The symbolic gesture, reminiscent of President Carter’s famed White House solar panels, signaled to the nation that this administration would take the benefits of nutritious, wholesome food seriously.

 

The First Lady’s Let’s Move campaign, aimed at tackling childhood obesity, has designated food access as one of the four pillars needed for raising a generation of healthy children, acknowledging that lack of access to healthy food is an inseparable part of the problem of obesity. By highlighting the 16 million American children who face hunger every year – including 400,000 right here in New York City – the First Lady’s initiative promises to spotlight childhood obesity and provide precious federal dollars to simultaneously end childhood hunger and obesity.

 

Locally growing and consuming fresh fruits and vegetables can bring cities one-step closer to food egalitarianism. By breaking what Van Jones, a community activist and former White House Special Advisor for Green Jobs, calls “the eco-apartheid,” a borough like Brooklyn can lead the country in producing and distributing healthy food in poor neighborhoods, eschewing the Whole Foods precept of high-quality at high-prices.

 

It is up to communities themselves to find and implement new solutions. Fortunately the City, New York State, and local nonprofits are mobilizing in a joint effort to provide more healthful foods to long-neglected neighborhoods. In the coming weeks I will introduce some of these solutions in a series called Breaking The Eco-Apartheid. I will devote space to everything from the latest conventional measures – bringing produce to the bodega and food stamp access at farmer’s markets – to more experimental, innovative, andprogressive solutions – cultivating large urban and vertical farms, and reshaping national policy on farm subsidies.

 

Some of these efforts are new and relatively untested on a large scale, but in the end I believe that as New Yorkers, we hold the conviction that if we can grow it here, we can grow it anywhere. New Yorkers have never had much trouble mustering that kind of faith.