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Food desert: An area with limited access to affordable and nutritious foods, particularly in a low income area. (USDA)
According to a 2009 study by the U.S. Department of Agriculture,
23.5 million people lack access to a supermarket within a mile of their home.
An estimated 3 million people in New York City live in a food desert.
It's really a travesty that in a city as rich as New York City, in a city with so much beauty and so much opulence and so much wealth
that there are whole swaths of the city that do not have healthy food within walking distance. That's unbelievable.
When you see that there might be only two supermarkets in a poor neighborhood and those supermarkets are overpriced because they don't have competition,
those things are never coincidence. There are people who make decisions - it's not just an organization that makes a decision
there are individuals that work in those organizations that make the decisions. And those decisions always affect people.
The access to food has a lot to do with money, and unfortunately, most of us - especially in New York City - who don't have money are either black or Hispanic.
African Americans are nearly four times as likely as whites to live in a food desert.
Predominantly white neighborhoods have about three times the number of chain supermarkets as predominantly Latino areas.
Well what happened was, there was actually a law that was passed in the books - I think it was 1984 in New York City -
and they were actually trying to get more jobs into these under-resourced neighborhoods that tend to be more black and brown.
It was unfortunate because what they did was they solved the short term solution but caused a long term problem.
They created tax and zoning incentives for fast food restaurants to move into these neighborhoods in order to bring more jobs into the neighborhoods.
Well, they brought a few more jobs, but it didn't bring health. It actually brought more diabetes and it also brought more cancer.
And it could have brought more jobs if they had included supermarkets in that law. But supermarkets were exempt and not able to take advantage of that law.
So what you have now lining streets like these, streets like the ones in Harlem and the South Bronx and Brooklyn is you have fast food restaurants that just line the streets
and increase the level of unhealth in the community. And you have a dearth of supermarkets.
Food is where all of these ideas intersect. It's where everything integrates, right. People come together on food and issues come together on food.
Even though we're not in a food desert, per se, because there's a supermarket over on Amsterdam, but they don't sell the freshest fruit and the freshest vegetables.
If I'm campaigning for my clients and coworkers to eat healthy then where do they go to buy food?
That's one of the main things about food justice - it's not just that people are getting food to eat, but that you're getting healthy food that not just fills you up, but nourishes you.
New York Faith and Justice, Faith Leaders for Environmental Justice, and the Riverside Church partnered to address concerns about food and health disparities in New York City.
So what New York City is doing right now, and what New York Faith and Justice is about right now, is actually helping to revitalize these areas.
Over 150 New Yorkers from all five boroughs convened at the Food, Faith, and Health Disparities Summit for a day of dialogue and prioritizing actions.
The Food, Faith, and Health Disparities Summit and initiative was a program of the Food Justice Working Group.
The process that we went through with the summit was really key because it gave the community, various aspects of the community,
more ownership of food justice and eliminating food and health disparities in New York City.
This whole summit was based on information that people from the neighborhoods told us. We didn't go in with a prerequisite, we didn't go in with answers to the questions already.
We were asking. And out of asking these questions arose these actions that the community itself wanted to take on.
If the city is going to become a greener and a better place, it's not going to happen just by government action alone.
Citizens have to - there's an active part of democracy that's beyond just a ballot, beyond just calling up your congressman. There's an active part where government should lead from behind, in a sense.
Identifying where local leaders are showing best practices and saying, ok, we support that and we support that.
And I think that's what we're looking at is saying, where are the best - where's the best practice in the city for doing things the most sustainable, the most efficient, and how can we support those efforts.
It is a process that moves towards change. It wants to move towards change. And in order to do that, you just have to get the whole community involved.
It's not enough just to get churches, it's not enough just to get advocates, it's not enough just to get government folks.
And usually, especially in New York City, these different groups are in their silos and they're working on the same things, just not talking to each other.
So it was important to us to make sure that this summit became a place where we could all talk to each other and move forward together.
Our group was composed of those people who experience the most significant health disparities: people of color, elderly people, and people who are living in poor communities.
That was our entire group - entire small group. And so the opinions there were not just statistics - they were personal stories and they were heartfelt in the group. So it was a good experience.
I believe one of the questions was like, what is one of your favorite foods, and I think that really resonated with people because some of them said healthy but most of them said unhealthy foods.
It really set the stage, I think, for a larger discussion on how food affects you and how food affects people in general here in the city of New York.
In 2007, Mayor Bloomberg launched PlaNYC - a 25-year plan to make New York City more sustainable.
To connect the community engagement process with policy change, community leaders sent a memorandum to the mayor's office to be incorporated into PlaNYC.
So after the summit, after the action forum where the recommendations were made from the community for how we can move forward and make New York City a more just and sustainable city with regard to food,
we took many of the recommendations from the summit and incorporated them into the memorandum that we sent to the mayor's office.
And as a result, the mayor then - the mayor's office reviewed it, they took every point very very seriously.
There's no question and no doubt that people across the city that are really concerned about these issues that came and represented their neighborhoods and their local issues
were definitely heard and those ideas were represented in PlaNYC.
After the summit, six action teams formed to address concerns about food and health.
Six months later, four of the action teams are still working to change policy and engage the community around these issues.
When the community is involved in the process from the beginning, then the community will carry it forward.
And it really is all about ownership. And so this dialogue-to-action process actually gives community members -
people who go to work every day, come home and feed their kids and go to sleep and get up the next day - an opportunity to be a part of changing their own neighborhoods.