Grocery Gaps

The number of people living in what health experts have called a ‘food desert’—an urban area with few supermarkets and, therefore, limited access to cheap, healthful food- is on the increase. I wrote about this last year when I experienced it myself during a vacation in Escondido, but normally living within a two mile round trip of a Stater Bros supermarket as we do, we are not in a ‘food desert’. Food deserts are caused by the increase in distances separating family homes from the sources of fresh groceries, the “grocery gap”. In any “food desert neighborhood” it is easier to buy beer or twinkies than tomatoes or lettuce.

What causes the grocery gap? Big grocery stores, with their aisles of fresh produce, relying on the volume of food they sell at razor thin profit margins locating each store to reach the maximum number of shoppers, are the cause. But these companies are not likely to change that tendency. They do not care that the grocery gap becomes a transportation gap too. The fact that their customers are forced to travel a distance from another part of town to get a head of lettuce, because their small local convenience store has no lettuce, is not relevant to their business goals!

So if the stores do not care, who does? The government?
In the annual survey of food security, ( a euphemistic term for hunger), the only questions are about anxiety that the household budget is inadequate to buy enough food; inadequacy in the quantity or quality of food eaten by adults and children in the household; and instances of reduced food intake or consequences of reduced food intake for adults and for children. The annual survey never mentions the grocery gap!

In February 2009, SNAP/Food Stamp participation was 32,554,795 people, the highest participation level on record.(more) and more than 36.2 million people in U.S. households face a constant struggle against hunger. (More data on hunger in the USA here)

Officialdom declares that “the mental and physical changes that accompany inadequate food intakes can have harmful effects on learning, development, productivity, physical and psychological health, and family life”. Authorities all over the world maintain that the ability to obtain enough food for an active, healthy life is the most basic of human needs. And having said that, authorities “have” to stop.

At Home-Grown Food Network we are creating a focus for people to come together and share their awareness of their ability to obtain enough food. Grocery gaps and institutional failures, including anti-poor city planning practices, starve people, not of food, but of the necessary resources and freedoms to grow their own food. These planning practices emerged at a time when hunger was not a national problem. Now that millions and millions are hungry, isn’t it about time we created zoning ordinances that allowed edible landscaping in cities and suburbs? Then, instead of playing victim to where giant supermarkets choose to build their stores, people will unleash their own innate ability to obtain enough food by growing it themselves as individuals,or as members of neighborhood gardening groups, or as participants in community wide gardening movements!

Peter Naughton, Manager, Home-Grown Food Network