Tue, Oct 25, 2022 page7

• Florida ‘food desert’ leaves lack of fresh food for poor

  ‘VERY TIRING’: The once-prosperous area lost access to healthy food when the last supermarket closed, and politicians do not seem to care, a resident said

  • AFP, JACKSONVILLE
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  Sitting outside her modest home in Jacksonville, Florida, on a street lined with nondescript buildings in faded shades of blue, a weary Brenda Jenkins expresses a simple wish — to be able to buy fresh fruit and produce in her own neighborhood.

  It sounds simple enough, but for people such as her, one of the 39 million Americans living in “food deserts” — most of them low-income urban dwellers, and predominantly people of color — fresh food is practically inaccessible.

  In a country with often poor mass transit and persistent pockets of poverty, getting to grocery stores that sell fresh food can be daunting.

  

  White Harvest Farms Community Garden volunteer Nicole Boone poses for a photograph in Jacksonville, Florida, on Oct. 14.

  Photo: AFP

  “It’s very tiring,” said the 26-year-old Jenkins, a mother of three.

  The phrase “food desert” is misleading. The problem is not so much that fresh food is unavailable, as that it can be hard to travel to where it is sold, in a country where many people cannot afford a car.

  There are no supermarkets in Jenkins’ neighborhood on Florida’s northern Atlantic coast.

  Service stations, fast food restaurants and corner grocery stores provide the only nearby food options.

  Their shelves bulge with candy, chips, soda and cookies, but the only fresh products are likely to be a few wan-looking apples or bruised bananas near the cash register.

  The poorest residents have no other option. The city’s mass transit system is skeletal, and the nearest supermarket is nearly an hour’s walk away.

  Jenkins has a car, and she often takes neighbors with her when she goes shopping

  However: “What if I decided to move or what if I had something to do?” she asked. “How can they get groceries?”

  When her car breaks down — an occasional occurrence — she has had no choice but to buy “processed foods” from a corner store.

  “It’s just not healthy, especially with children,” Jenkins said.

  With US midterm elections just weeks away — and the prospect of major change in the US Congress — Jenkins complained that she has seen no candidates in her neighborhood, and received no campaign leaflets.

  She thinks politicians ignore her area “because we’re considered low-income.”

  If the authorities really cared, “something would have been done” to address the food problem, Jenkins said.

  The once-prosperous neighborhood has progressively fallen on hard times over the decades, making it less and less profitable for the big supermarket chains to remain.

  When the last supermarket closed, “people lost access to healthy food,” said Mika Hardison-Carr, who manages a collective garden called White Harvest Farms.

  Over time, local residents simply got used to living in a food desert and getting by on “processed food, canned food [and] noodles,” she said while holding a freshly picked kumquat.

  “It is absolutely hard to change people’s way of life,” she said.

  The challenge now is not just to give people access to fresh foods, but to teach them how those foods can again become a part of their daily diet, Hardison-Carr said.

  Limited food options and poor eating habits are “contributing to all of these health issues that’s causing us to die earlier, to be sicker, to be fatter,” she said.

  “Access to fresh, healthy food should be a human right,” she added.

  Her urban farm, created by the Clara White Mission with the help of public funds, provides free produce to the volunteers who help with the garden, and a low-price option to others in the neighborhood who can pay with the federal food stamps that so many rely on.

  On this autumn day, with Florida’s normally stifling heat beginning to turn balmy, people are at work in the garden, a rare patch of green in the neighborhood’s gritty urban landscape.

  To attract buyers, the farm’s crops include vegetables, such as collard greens, that are essential to southern US and African-American cooking.

  “They’ve already been in here asking us when the greens are ready,” 43-year-old volunteer Nicole Boone noted with a laugh, adding, “we just seeded them!”

  She has been with the program since it began last year.

  Nearby, Sarah Salvatore, another garden manager, is planting flowers to attract insects to help avoid the need for pesticides.

  “Food deserts are very easy to eliminate,” she said, hunched over her plants.

  “We have to elect people that are putting their energy towards solving these issues,” Salvatore said, “because they’re solvable, they’re just underfunded.”
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