The article by McClinktock shared a compelling view on how the food industry is being run in Oakland. The Californian flatland that was once an agricultural ground has turned into an ‘industrial hub’ with mainly fast food and corner stores instead of local food markets. Because of this change into a food desert, it has affected certain minority groups and low-income houses within the community. They are no longer able to get nutritious foods such as fresh produce due to the lack of agricultural practices in that area.
McClinktock goes on discussing how understanding the historical aspects of the urban landscape is vital to understand how to adapt to its current developments. He then states a connection that “the circulation of money and capital have to be constructed as ecological variables every bit as important as the circulation of air and water.” I completely agree with this statement I believe that money and capital play just as much as a role in our environment as natural resources do. And unfortunately, they do affect the health and well-being of these minority households. There is racial segregation that limits the resources on Black and Latio neighborhoods in Oakland. Because the economic situations worsened in these areas the supermarkets did not do well and relocated to other parts leaving behind a food desert.
I believe that it is a chain reaction what happened in Oakland. It first started when superstores took over the retail industry but only in locations that could be accessible by cars, as stated in the article. So, families that couldn’t afford it would resort to fast food and corner stores which began to be more popular because there was more demand. Of course prices went up and other services such as liquor stores started to make their stores more convenient. These trends inevitably led to rise in diabetes, obesity and alcohol abuse in the United States and continues to do it to this day. If more people don’t start to realize these trends in our nation’s food insecurity, then we will have more cities like Oakland that will be forced to travel outside of their town to obtain nutritional foods.
1 comment:
I like the way you phrased it as a sort of chain reaction, and it makes me think of dominos. People will look at the end result and say "Golly gosh, we need to fix this specific issue!", but to actually accomplish long-lasting and meaningful change, you need to fix the source of these problems. We need to step in and act when people are setting up the dominoes, not after they've all been lined up and the first one falls down. Trying to fix the problem by putting more dominoes at the end - in this case that'd look something like giving tax breaks to stores trying to open up a store in a food desert - is something that might work on a temporary, small scale, but isn't a reliable solution.
If you kept getting cut every time you walked out of your front door, would the solution be just to buy a bunch of band-aids? (The answer is no)
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