From Industrial Garden to Food Desert

 

Food deserts again? Like I’ve stated before in a past blog post, food deserts will be a recurring topic in this class. This week’s article covers more on the history of food deserts and talks about how the city of Oakland transformed form being an industrial garden to a common food desert. It also covers how problems like demarcated desertification, racist mortgage lending, residential development, and industrial location lead to food deserts.

       The author goes in depth on how industrial location plays a role in forming food deserts. He mentions an idea we discussed before on how supermarkets are placed in areas of high poverty, but instead he describes them as “areas of low purchasing power.” We already know that solves nothing, but McClintock highlights other issues that attribute from these supermarkets being built. Over time, these markets begin to decline to the point of closing due to their location. The communities where those supermarkets reside are the main patrons of the organizations but can barely afford to buy their product. As business continued to decline, so did the number of supermarkets, then came the junk food jungle to capitalize on their retreat. Residential development was a problem in the article that stuck out to me a lot. The author mentions so many disadvantages’ people of color and in poverty had to face. It’s so foul how a brand-new future of housing can be introduced, and people are automatically excluded from taking part. Not only people were constantly declined subsidy loans and limited to “black only housing projects,” but there was an agenda being pushed saying urban and suburban workers (which were predominantly white) are loyal, cooperative, and productive workers opposed to the city workers. Not to mention redlining and the maps that literally degrading entire neighborhoods marking them as “Hazardous.”