How To Fix Food Deserts

With some superficial justification, advocates of sustainable, organic, and local food are sometimes charged with
"elitism" because they purport to tell poor folks how to eat. But look closer and it's clear that most of those advocates—your Michael Pollans and your Alice Waterses—understand the struggles of people with low incomes. They still think it would be a good thing if all of us, including the poor, would eat better.

Often, the trouble isn't that people in low income neighborhoods—urban and rural—don't want to eat better. It's that they live in "food deserts." They have to travel, often quite far, to find a decent grocery store. So they're stuck with fast food or the pricey, substandard fare at the corner store.

The public-radio program Living on Earth took a look at food deserts this past weekend. Mark Winne, author of Closing the Food Gap, says the problem started in the '60s, when supermarket chains "began to walk away from urban America." For the most part, they haven't walked back.

Living on Earth examined some solutions, most of them in their nascent stages: urban gardens, farmers markets, and efforts like New York City's Healthy Bodegas Initiative.

For more on food deserts, see Parke Wilde's U.S. Food Policy blog.