Monday, March 30, 2009
Restaurants At the Table: A Dining Oasis in a Food Desert
Posted by Carrington Fox on Mon, Mar 30, 2009 at 6:39 AM
When I joined Cassi Johnson of the Food Security Partners of Middle Tennessee and Marne Duke of the Nashville Farmers' Market (both pictured above) to discuss efforts to improve access to local, healthy food, you would never have known we were dining in the heart of one of Nashville's most egregious food deserts.
In our booth at At the Table restaurant, Cassi, Marne and I tucked into heaping servings of decadent home-cooked veggies, including mashed sweet potatoes, green beans and cabbage, as well as plump hot-water corn cakes. Robert Hudson's meat-and-three, which opened last year, seems to get better and better, and the lunch crowd is catching on. The clean, sunny room, adorned sparely with a steam table and a handful of booths and tables, was buzzing with a diverse crowd of folks who know how to find good Southern cooking.
But just outside the big plate-glass windows, the gritty strip of 12th Avenue between Wedgewood and The Gulch is a notoriously barren strip--nutritionally speaking--where it's easier to find a pack of cigarettes and a forty than a head of broccoli and an apple.
That's one of the problems the Food Security Partners are working to solve with a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. As Johnson and the other members of the organization embark on the ReStoring Nashville campaign, one of the first steps is to raise awareness of so-called food deserts and to elevate the issue to a matter of social justice.
If you've never thought about it before, consider this: If you're standing at the corner of Edgehill and 12th and you have no access to a car, where would you find ingredients for a healthy dinner? Harris Teeter on 21st Avenue? Kroger in Melrose? Either one is a long way away, and what if you have kids in tow? That's the dire situation for a lot of people in the neighborhood, where it's hard to make healthy choices when you can't get to them.
Over the next few months, Food Security Partners will roll out some initiatives related to ReStoring Nashville--which also focuses on neighborhoods in East and North Nashville--and we'll keep you posted. In the meantime, if you've got any ideas for improving access to nutritional food across Nashville, please share them here.
Comments (11)
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My mom lived near that corner, back when you were an urban pioneer if you ventured into that area. The Winn Dixie there was old and battered, and the manager told my mom when they had a big problem with theft. Still, I would think some of that is built into the pricing.
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I shop often at the Laotian-owned market on 8th Avenue, which has recognizable vegetables, plus a few western products on the shelves like chicken and beef, noodles, eggs, sugar, coffee, tomato sauce. I've wondered why I've never -- ever -- seen anyone from the neighborhood shopping there. The proprietor accepts food stamps even, and the shop is steps away from the Section 8 housing at 8th and Edgehill. My best guess is that it must be the off-putting selection of weirdly unrecognizable foodstuffs.
Let me play devil's advocate for a moment.
Some would say the discomfort of dealing with food deserts is good motivation to 'pull yourself self up by your boot straps' and move to a better neighborhood.
Tobin, people who think the solution to poverty is to kill poor people with malnutrition are not worth debating.
I have often wondered why poor people choose to live in the least affluent neighborhoods.
Well, Tobin, here's the problem. Even if we make the mighty big assumption that it is actually possible for all people to "pull themselves up by their bootstraps", we would still have to acknowledge that the first step in doing so usually comes through educational opportunities. Even if most of Nashville's public schools weren't as bad as they are, and even if the students in those neighborhoods actually found themselves every morning in an adequate setting, they would still find it almost impossible to learn without being adequately nourished. In order to work hard and learn well, you need a sound mind and a sound body, and nutrition is the keystone of decent health. This is not rocket science, it's plain old common sense. If you really want people to try to pull themselves up, then you should care about whether they actually have the bootstraps to do so.
If those living in poverty cannot access healthy foods (and are almost discouraged from doing so0, then their health will suffer which in turn will affect their ability to find and/or keep a job as well as care for their children. It also means they will likely rely on the state for their healthcare which is costly - much more so than the cost of the government giving grocery stores incentives to open shop in a food desert. Encouraging healthy lifestyles benefits all of us - whether we live in a food desert or not.
The Food Security Partners are doing great work in our community to address the inequities in our food system--and help create solutions that really are for the good of all.
Awareness of food deserts is a first step. Working with our local government to shape a vision and policy for our community is another.
Projects could include incentives for real grocery stores, working with existing convenience marts to bring in local farmers products or helping create a fresh veggie van that comes into neighborhoods like the ice cream man.
Having access to healthy foods should be a right.
when i was in nursing school we had to do some community nursing and i was assigned to visit an elderly woman in that high-rise on that exact corner. she was confined to a wheelchair, lived alone, could not drive, and did not have family nearby. her one-room apartment was infested with insects as she was unable to reach the foods left in cupboards, take out trash, or to clean any surfaces from her wheelchair. i asked her how she did her grocery shopping and she said that there was another lady in teh building who would walk down to the family dollar to buy her food for her. this would almost always include things like cereal, crackers, cookies, candy, and anything else you can think of that starts with Carb. she had about $20/month to spend on food, and the rest of her social security check went to rent and prescription medicines (hypertension, diabetes, asthma).
this discussion just brought a lot of these memories up, especially considering the location. i hope the majority of people realize that most people living in poverty do not have boots, let alone bootstraps. and a harris teeter wont cut it for these people. they need affordable, fresh, hopefully locally-grown food, and a way to get to it (or a way for it to get to them). they also need a lot of education about cooking methods, saturated fats, sodium intake, etc. it is going to be a BIG job. i cant wait to see what the FSP can do.
Lack of good public transportation ties in too, although I am seeing some improvements since last summer's high gas prices.
I worked in Boston the past two winters and the dependable bus system had me meeting many householders, children in tow, with their wire grocery totes on wheels loaded with groceries from stores like Whole Foods that were sometimes further from their neighborhoods, but just as accessible.
