Fair Food

In all of Detroit, the 11^th largest city in the US, there are no grocery stores.  Nationally 57% of people who live in urban and low-income areas have limited access to a grocery store.

These areas are known as food deserts: regions or districts with little or no access to foods needed to maintain a healthy diet, but where there are often plenty of fast food restaurants.

Photo © Jan Mangan, Bioneers

Dr. Oran Hesterman, CEO of Fair food Network, an organization that promotes the ideal that access to fresh, local and sustainably grown food is a basic human right, does not see food deserts in inner cities as isolated problems, but rather as stark symptoms of a food system that is broken and out of control. 

In those communities the everyday ongoing stress of poverty, crime, trying to survive day-to-day and the extreme lack of access to healthy food exacerbates the problems of diet-related diseases like obesity and diabetes.

Fair Food’s work is focused in communities that have been historically excluded from the benefits a healthy sustainable food-system. 

• “Our belief at Fair Food Network is that in order to change the story around the issue of access to healthy and fresh food in inner-city communities, we need to figure out how to bring different cultures together.
  “The repair and rebuilding of a broken food system is only going to happen if we figure out how to bring very different steams together into a river of change. It’s my experience that art and music lead the way. We can’t always think ourselves into solutions but art and music can often help open us up to solutions that we haven’t imagined…
  “Urban farmers, all over the country- we see it in Detroit, New Orleans Chicago, Baltimore- are taking back land and growing good healthy food, changing the story of the food system.” ~ Oran Hesterman  

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  Photo © Jan Mangan, Bioneers

  “When the white people moved out of west Oakland to East Oakland the grocery store, Safeway, also moved and then Lucky store moved. So as a consequence what we had to eat is the food that has been sitting in the corner store for a few days or get a bus to get food.
  “But now in Oakland it looks like we have come full circle. I have a garden in my backyard planted by Dr. Hesterman and I have plenty of tomatoes, cabbage and squash that I give to my neighbors. We have Mandela Foods Coop, City Slickers, who will help you start a back yard garden; we have Fresh Approach, and we have a farmers market at some of the churches.” ~ James Ella James, faith-based activist. 

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  Photo © Jan Mangan, Bioneers

  “I’m from Brooklyn, New York. I’m from the neighborhood you see on TV, shoot ‘em up, gang things, yes. The situation that occurs with food in our neighborhoods, it doesn't matter if we are eating good food or not; it’s not promoted to us. We got more important things in our heads, in our world; we got more important things to be concerned with like is your light going to be on when you get home, is someone in your house going to rob you, do you have to duck down between any guns.
  “Poverty is the issue.  When you can’t afford certain foods and Mc Donald’s has a sale for 99 cents guess what you’re going to buy?
  “It's a different world. Your world is not the world we are living in, my world. I’m not living in that area any more because it was killing me.. There is a lot of self-doubt in that area. We don‘t feel like we are worth it. I want to make sure everyone understands that we all matter. It’s not that we are looking for hand outs; we will work, we will bust are ass for hours, but you can’t put so much pressure on a human being and expect nothing to break.” ~ Voo Doo Fe’, NYC clothing designer and hip-hop artist.