The Boxcar Grocer has been operating now in Atlanta for a little over two years. The amount of experiential information and behavioral data we have assembled from standing in the store every day and ringing people up is amazing. We listen to people. We watch what is going on around us in the neighborhood. We engage in everyday conversations that are so eye opening. And people share because they know we want to contribute to helping the community.
It’s amazing how in conversations about getting healthy food to neighborhoods that lack a full service grocery store, the common misperception is that just getting vegetables and fruit to people will somehow restore balance and improve peoples’ lives virtually overnight.
Now, because a dramatic change has not taken place since initiatives were put in place less than 3 years ago to finance healthy food accessibility, a number of critics now want to use data (that is only a couple years old, mind you) to prove that providing healthy food to communities in need does not radically alter their lives and should therefore be discontinued.
The level of absurdity in this naïve argument involves a level of sustained disregard for a true understanding of what it is like to live in an urban area that is considered a food desert. The reality is that nearly every area of life is difficult every day.
Treating chronic disease, educating people about how to store and prepare healthy food, and changing peoples’ generationally entrenched behavior within an environment that is so barren of services and so short on hope cannot happen in wide swaths across the entire nation within only 3 years. That is a gross miscalculation based on the premise that people who live in so-called food deserts are operating on the same level playing field as those people who are comfortably writing reports from foundation offices, journalist desks, and ivory towers.
In response to the absurdity inherent in an argument that problems that took over a century to fester should be solved virtually overnight by disconnected approaches, many of which are not deeply rooted in the community, I have compiled a list of reasons why living in a food desert is like the new Seth MacFarlane movie, A Million Ways to Die in the West.
‘Everything out here that’s not you, wants to kill you.’
Fast food, gang activity, drug deals gone bad, illegal drugs themselves, dogs bred for fighting or security being let loose, overly aggressive police, STDs and AIDS, environmental pollution, needles on playgrounds, the list goes on….These things don’t spring up in a vacuum. In the absence of quality education, legitimate businesses, accessibility to banks or commercial credit, recreational facilities, healthy food, availability of affordable contraceptive devices, accessibility to preventative or alternative medical care, therapy, etcetera, etcetera, these things proliferate. Really, when you stop to think about it, you’re lucky if it’s only the food that’s killing you.
‘People die at the fair.’
Celebratory gunfire. Yeah, it’s a thing. Even during New Year’s celebrations, when people are genuinely excited to have made it through another year, folks get shot. Trying to have a good time at an otherwise festive event at the end of another grueling week? Don’t tell that to the guy/girl with –insert undiagnosed behavioral or post traumatic stress issue here __________ – who got drunk/angry and slapped the wrong person in a bar, or wasn’t let into the birthday, or got shot by the police while celebrating impending nuptials/riding BART/walking home/whatever. Yeah, people regularly die at what are supposed to be fun events.
‘She had a splinter doc, what the hell were you supposed to do?’
Aside from the fact that costs associated with preventative or alternative care are prohibitive and out of reach for many people, the fact that there are no gyms in food deserts, few playgrounds, the fact that in some places even running outside is dangerous (especially for women and young girls, hello…human sex trafficking abductions happen daily!), errrr…we also can’t forget that black men running outside is cause for suspicion and many times ends with police harassment or, you know, death. By the time people get sick enough to somehow make it to a hospital that’s not feared as a place where Black people are used as guinea pigs, it’s usually already too late.
‘Dude, you really shouldn’t drink and horse.’
Can’t hail a cab to drive you to or from your neighborhood? Can’t afford a cab? You can’t afford a data plan to keep Uber on speed dial? People drink and drive all the time. It is a fact of life in a place where waiting for the bus can be dangerous (if it even shows up at all or gets you to where you need to be). Drunk driving usually ends up with folks up in court who can’t afford an attorney to fight their revoked license, which means no way to get to that job that is all the way on the other side of town because there are no quality businesses that provide jobs in the neighborhood you live in, which means no way to pay your child support or school fees, and ends in vehicular accidents causing expensive property damage or, you know, death.
‘Can I interest you folks in a miracle cure?’
Human behavior. We all succumb at some time or another to the desire to believe in something that has very little track record of actually helping our situation. The less you have to lose, the more you want to believe. Think you can take a pill to lose weight overnight that won’t cause lasting heart damage? You think that guy selling food out the back of his car has any type of license or proof that it was cooked in a clean facility? You think that church down the block from our store that has rented out all the $1600 per month billboards in the area for the next 5 years cares about the actual people in this community after he collects his tithes, locks his doors back up, and rolls back out to the suburbs in his Mercedes? You want a butt/breast implant that makes you look like Nicki Minaj because you’ll make more money at the strip club where you work but can only pay $200 (or don’t even know any legitimate plastic surgeons) so you get injected with whatever? Yep, those women are dying now, too.
‘Maybe the frontier is not so bad after all.’
Oscar Grant. Anna Brown. Amadou Diallo. Carolyn Thomas. Nicholas Heyward Jr. Jennifer Hudson. Marissa Alexander. It’s a depressing list that could easily surpass the size of this post. Systematic oppression through the use of force, policy, limited mental and health services, and confinement continue to keep ‘food deserts’ functioning like the Wild West. Google contagious shooting, child sex trafficking in Atlanta, police brutality, post traumatic stress symptoms, dysfunctional relationships, long-term unemployment, food related illness, why prostitution sometimes feels like the only option for some women and you’ll see why making sure a child has an apple a day does make a difference, but it doesn’t change everything.
If only this type suffering weren’t happening in the 21st century, we might be able to make a comedy out of it.