My little kitchen helper:
Several researchers have released new studies suggesting
that current concepts of the urban food desert may be inaccurate. One of the Times reporters said that
technically her town of Princeton, NJ would be considered a food desert. These new studies seem highly quantitative,
and I get the sense that the researchers do not take into consideration the
matrix of factors that make it hard to get decent food in a struggling city.
From the descriptions of these studies it seems like
the researchers are not considering some basic facts:
1. Shopping on foot for enough food to feed a family sucks. (Even the great food writer M. F. K. Fisher agrees with me. In her 1931 essay "The Measure of My Powers," she talks about how hard it was to adjust to shopping in the markets in Dijon, and how heavy a few pounds of food feels when you carry it for a distance.)
2. A mile may not seem far to travel if you are a researcher,
but if you are a carless Baltimorean it’s far.
Approximately 35% of Baltimore households reported not
having a car in the 2000 census (compare to the approximately 13% of households
in Princeton that do not have a car) and Badger and I are among them.
Our food options are actually pretty good for this area. We have
Local/natural Coop about ¾ mile away (but dangerous for
pedestrians, so we don’t take the baby)
Regular supermarket about 1.25 miles away (low quality
fruit, veg, and meat)
Farmers’ Market, about 1.5 miles away, Saturday mornings in
spring and summer
We spend a few hours each weekend procuring food and I sometimes
don’t buy everything we need because I can’t carry it all. So that’s all well and good until we need a
bunch of bananas and some milk midweek. We work a tight staggered work schedule
that just does not leave much time for a side trip to the store that takes a
minimum of an hour. No side trips
sometimes means no fresh fruit or a pizza instead of a homemade meal. Today it meant that Ladybug had cereal and avocado
for breakfast—she liked it. So for a
family of two adults and a toddler, shopping on foot is inconvenient and
involved limited choices, but it’s doable.
If we had a larger family, our present system would quickly
become unworkable. And if we worked
non-standard hours, our system would be harder.
If you are a woman in the suburbs with a car and another adult in the
house and you need to shop at night, I assume you can just wait until your kids
are in bed and drive to the store. Our
neighborhood is safe enough that I would feel okay walking to the store at
night, although I would prefer not to; however, I think that many women in
Baltimore would not want to be walking miles alone at night. Safety issues also mean that you can’t always
take the most direct route to the store since sticking to the most well lit and
heavily traveled streets easily adds a few blocks of walking.
It’s enough to make a lady say “Screw it, chicken boxes from
the corner store for all.”
Our fridge on Thursday evening. I guess it doesn't look that bare, but I've got some Mormon/survivalist thing going on when it comes to food storage.
Our fridge on Thursday evening. I guess it doesn't look that bare, but I've got some Mormon/survivalist thing going on when it comes to food storage.
My big shop for the week. It felt like a lot more food when I was carrying it. We also got milk, eggs, oats, nuts, bread, and tortillas at the "natural store."
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