Why Supermarkets Can’t Solve The ‘Food Desert’ Problem

By Johanna Barr

Mayor Bill de Blasio soared to victory in November on the strength of his message about the “Tale of Two Cities,” and the ever-widening gap between the rich and poor in New York.

Nowhere is that gap more apparent than in the kitchen, as some New Yorkers find themselves with plenty of fresh food to eat and others are forced to do without.

One in six of the city’s residents faced food insecurity between 2010 and 2012, according to the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, which published its latest annual survey just after the election. Between 1.3 and 1.4 million New Yorkers lacked sufficient food at home during that time period, including one out of every five children.

The term food deserts is often used to describe underserved, low-income neighborhoods that don’t have access to fresh, healthy food. These neighborhoods can be found throughout the five boroughs, from Brooklyn to the South Bronx.

On the other side of the spectrum are areas that can only be called food oases. Manhattan neighborhoods like the Upper West Side, Chelsea, the Upper East Side and Union Square all boast multiple full-service markets, including major grocery stores and smaller specialty shops. They routinely open within blocks of each other and are usually packed with eager customers.

The wealth of options in these neighborhoods enables New Yorkers to shop like Europeans, going to one store after another to find exactly what they want.

On a recent Thursday evening, Rachel Epstein carefully made her way down the cheese aisle of the Fairway Market that opened a few years ago on 86th Street between Second and Third avenues. She does most of her shopping there and at a nearby Gristedes, both of which are located just blocks from her Upper East Side apartment.

“It depends on what exactly I’m looking for,” she said. “Sometimes there’s more of one thing in one place than the other.”

Told that a new Whole Foods would soon open around the corner from Fairway, on 87th Street and Third Avenue, Epstein said she’ll likely shop there as well.

“Whole Foods is a totally different environment,” she said. “I wouldn’t go there for the things I come here for, and I wouldn’t come here for the things I go there for.”

In the push to eradicate food deserts, well-meaning reformers often suggest building full-service supermarkets like these in needy neighborhoods, believing that their presence alone will solve the accessibility issues low-income New Yorkers face.

A growing number of advocates say it’s not that simple. For one thing, most poor people can’t afford to shop at Whole Foods, Fairway, or even Trader Joe’s, which carries less fresh produce than the others but also offers lower prices.

“This is a multi-faceted problem that needs a multi-faceted approach,” said Joel Berg, the executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger. “I think more choices are good for everybody, but if it’s unaffordable to many people in the neighborhood, it’s not going to change their lives very much.”

There are other issues at play, as well. Advocates say there’s a need to educate people about healthy food options. And instead of calling for more supermarkets, whose profits go to big corporations, they support smaller programs designed to create local jobs and retain profits within the communities.

“I think the real question for policy is, what are the best ways to get healthy food into these neighborhoods in a way that can provide benefits beyond just the availability of produce, like education, empowerment and sustainability,” said Nevin Cohen, an assistant professor of environmental studies at The New School who focuses on urban food policy.

The markets, for their part, aren’t exactly rushing to open in the outer boroughs. There is one Whole Foods in Brooklyn and seven in Manhattan, with two more Manhattan stores set to open in the next two years: In addition to the planned Upper East Side location, Whole Foods is slated to open up next year on one of the most gentrified corners in Harlem, 125th Street and Lenox Avenue. It’s the same block where chef Marcus Samuelsson opened his hit restaurant, Red Rooster, in 2010.

Michael Sinatra, a spokesman for Whole Foods’ Northeast region, says he recognizes the challenges of opening in needy neighborhoods, and said the company has moved to address them. He pointed to newly opened stores in low-income sections of Detroit and New Orleans that have educational programs and do community outreach. Similar locations are planned for Newark, N.J., and Chicago’s South Side, and Sinatra said they could potentially work in parts of New York.

“Just because you drop a grocery store in the middle of someplace doesn’t mean that people are going to buy the right things, eat nutritiously and actually solve some of the health issues in these neighborhoods,” Sinatra said. “We want to come in and set up partnerships, where we can teach people how to cook and shop healthy and play a little bit more of a role in helping solve the issues, rather than just capitalizing on the opportunity for sales.”

In the meantime, there are plenty of other ways to approach the problem. Berg pointed to Community Supported Agriculture, or CSAs, as a way to provide low-income people with fresh, organic, local produce at a relatively low cost. The Coalition Against Hunger operates CSAs in West Harlem, Central Brooklyn and the Bronx, connecting residents with local farms and providing them with a wide variety of fruits and vegetables. They follow a mixed-income model, meaning the cost to join varies depending on a person’s income, and they accept food stamps.

“There’s a widespread assumption, and it has underlying class and racial biases, that the reason people aren’t eating healthier is there’s something culturally wrong with them, or they’re lazy, or they just don’t know,” Berg said. “If you make healthy food more affordable and accessible, low-income people will get it. Our work has proven that if you build it, they will come.”

Cohen said that food cooperatives are useful because they engage residents, ensuring “that the mix of food is not just healthy, but also culturally appropriate food items that the community really wants.” What’s more, profits stay with the community — they’re either reinvested back into the co-op itself or shared among members.

Other programs operate with varying levels of success.  The city established the Green Carts program in 2008, licensing up to 1,000 pushcarts to sell fruits and vegetables all across the city. The Bronx Mobile Market, which began in January, has been using a converted school bus to distribute fresh produce throughout the South Bronx. Harvest Home Farmer’s Market organizes greenmarkets specifically for low-income neighborhoods, and the farmers adjust their prices accordingly. There are currently 18 markets, in every borough except Staten Island, that serve a total of 200,000 shoppers each season.

And the New York City Housing Authority is partnering with small farms to open greenhouses on the roofs of affordable housing projects. Arbor House, a building in the Morrisania section of the South Bronx, boasts a hydroponic greenhouse on its roof, operated by a company called Sky Vegetables. The greenhouse has a preferential hiring policy for the building’s residents, and has committed to sell most of its produce in the neighborhood through CSAs, farmers markets and local retailers.

These types of programs “improve nutrition, the diversity of people’s diets, and increase food sovereignty as well as food justice by giving people an opportunity to have a say in the kind of food that’s distributed in their neighborhoods,” Cohen said.

One farmshare, called the Corbin Hill Food Project, “has seen community members ask for vegetables that they’ve tried because they got them from the farmers, and they have really incorporated them into the meals that they feed their families,” Cohen said. “Everything from green onions to kohlrabi, that communities may not have been familiar with but have come to enjoy.”

While all of these programs are promising, one of the biggest challenges in the fight against hunger is getting the various stakeholders to collaborate and agree on a strategy. “There are different agencies doing really innovative things,” Cohen said. “The challenge for the city would be to do this in a planned way, and make sure the agencies are talking to each other and that neighborhoods are being invested in.”

De Blasio’s office didn’t respond to requests for comment for this article. But Berg seems convinced that the new mayor will do more to tackle hunger than his predecessor. He has had extensive conversations with members of the administration about Food Secure 2018, his group’s plan to combat hunger, and he noted that de Blasio worked to increase food security as a councilman and as public advocate.

“He’s intimately familiar with these issues,” Berg said of de Blasio, “and he’s committed to doing something about it.”

Tags: bill de blasio, food deserts, hunger, nyc hunger, whole foods