The term “food desert” has been used in Public Health literature to describe areas of high poverty where healthy and sustainable food is limited. “Food deserts” are typically found in suburban and urban areas, many within areas of limited public transportation. However, the use of the term “food desert” is believed to be insufficient and does little to address the actual issues within these areas. The Baltimore City Health Department prefers the term “Health Food Priority Areas” (HFPA) as this term does not suggest there is a lack of food but rather an imbalance of healthy to unhealthy food. These areas are defined as areas where the distance to a supermarket is more than a quarter of a mile from a place of residence and the median household income is at or below the Federal Poverty Level.
In Baltimore, the Resident Food Equity Advisor program is working with their community to change the food landscape of their districts. Healthy food inequality affects certain Baltimore residents at much higher rates. Research shows that 34% of Black Baltimore residents live in HFPAs compared to 9% of their white counterparts. This isn't an accident. The same systems that have reinforced racial inequalities in housing create zoning policies, food system regulations, and pockets of concentrated poverty that detrimentally impact life outcomes for these communities. These factors drive supermarkets and health stores into wealthier areas and away from low-income neighborhoods, leaving behind corner stores and small shops. While these corner stores and small retailers offer residents low-cost and accessible food, their options are typically reduced to pre-packed, processed items. With limited options and limited income, many residents are forced to treat these small retailers as their main supplier of food, which has lasting consequences. Food insecurity for children in Baltimore is the highest in Maryland at 43.5%. Baltimore students of color have an 82 to 171% higher risk of food insecurity than their White peers, due in large part to where they live and the food options available to them.
The Resident Food Equity Advisors (RFEA) are seeking to change that. Created to work with the Baltimore Food Policy Initiative, these 16 advisors are selected from local applicants for their passion and commitment to serving their community. They represent residents of public housing projects in the Baltimore City Family Developments. The use of local advisors is essential to addressing HFPA and is essential to the success of the RFEA program because it builds community trust in the governmental entities working to address food inequity and provides these entities with a direct connection to community feedback. Each city and housing section will need unique solutions and without local input, governmental solutions simply become band-aids for systemic issues.
In their 2020 report “Visions for the Future'', the RFEA outlined four clear areas of improvement to address food inequality within their communities. The first area is transportation, which often presents a severe barrier to many residents accessing healthier grocery options. Typically, residents living in HFPAs are forced to take multiple modes of transportation to get to a supermarket which extends the length and cost of any grocery trip. Working closely with the Maryland Department of Transportation, the advisors issued several recommendations to ease the barriers in transportation, barriers which have forced many residents to shop only at their local small retailers and corner stores. A key recommendation is to make public transit more practical for food shopping. This could mean modifying bus routes to create more direct connections from the development communities to grocery stores that have healthy options, creating designated sections on buses that allow for grocery carts, and ensuring that drivers understand the rules allowing grocery carts and bags. The RFEA also suggested providing rideshare credits for Family Development residents and ensuring that the Taxicard program is better suited to serve the older adults in family developments.
Supermarkets were identified as the ideal source of food shopping due to their ability to provide higher quality meat, water, and perishable items as opposed to corner stores and local bodegas. However, these large brick-and-mortar supermarkets are largely inaccessible to residents of the Family Developments. Online ordering has been suggested but many residents find that the delivery fees are equal to their transportation costs to the supermarket and many want to be actively involved in choosing their food. Other proposed recommendations include making online grocery orders and online SNAP programs more viable options for residents by expanding the authorized Online SNAP retailers to include a wider variety of markets, improving technology training for older adults and those with disabilities, and prioritizing delivery windows for older adults. For future efforts of shaping the food environment for public housing redevelopment, advisors recommended that residents be co-developers in grocery planning and that there be more community-controlled retailers like cooperatives.
The last two recommendations focus on food acquisition and growing food within the community. Many residents feel that food quality is lacking across all developments. The advisors recommended hosting food pantries within the developments themselves to ensure the food provided is the best quality possible, developing resident-approved processes to allow for food distribution, and putting more effort into creating community gardens. The current Family Development rules don't allow for residents to use their lawns or outdoor spaces to grow food, however, many residents have expressed interest in growing food but are unsure of how to best manage these gardens. The advisors advocated for dedicating a community garden space in each family development, employing a lead gardener to coordinate the use and distribution, and enlisting partner organizations to provide residents with resources to maintain their food, herbs, or flower gardens.
Overall, the main mission of the Resident Food Equity Advisors is to keep the community needs at the center of all conversations shaping the food environment of public development housing in Baltimore. This program builds community strength and should serve as a model to address food security across the nation at the root.
Author
Phoebe Norman is currently finishing up her last year at the University of Vermont, where she is studying Public Health and Microbiology. Her dream job is to one day to combine health advocacy and epidemiology researching women's reproductive and sexual health internationally. In the meantime, she’s an avid rock climber and hiker, spending most of her free time outside exploring with friends.
Cover Photo: Photo by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash
Comments